After getting the nod for GOTY at The Game Awards 2021 for Deathloop, fans are looking forward to Arkane Studios’ next project. Redfall, which was one of the many surprise game announcements at E3 2021, was scheduled to be released sometime in the summer later this year. But, if we believe the recent reports, fans might not get a chance to play Arkane’s upcoming co-op shooter until the holiday season.
According to MrMattyPlays and Lord Cognito, the hosts of the Defining Duke podcast, Microsoft might have pushed back Redfall’s release date by half a year.
Of course, neither source is from Microsoft nor Arkane Studios, so it’s best to take what they said in the podcast with a grain of salt. But, if we take their claims as truth, then Xbox owners have one less exclusive to play for the first half of 2022 after GSC Game World already delayed STALKER 2: Heart of Chernobyl. Although seeing a top-heavy release date for Xbox later this year is good news, Xbox owners aren’t exactly out of the woods just yet.
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Even if STALKER 2 isn’t a first-party Xbox game, the survival shooter is still exclusive to the Xbox Series S/X. Not to mention, Microsoft reserved the holiday season for Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi RPG, Starfield, which will be released on November 11. Releasing Redfall within the same season as Starfield risks pulling attention away from each other, which wouldn’t be ideal. We reckon Microsoft would prefer to stagger its first-party exclusives.
Then again, Microsoft did release Halo Infinite just weeks after Forza Horizon 5, the latter of which set a new Xbox Game Studios record, so who knows?
At the end of the day, this is all just speculation. We’re still waiting for confirmation of Redfall’s delay and whether or not it’s going to come with other bad news. Even if that happens, we know that Microsoft will find a way to make it up to disappointed Xbox owners. Case in point, January is already a big month for Xbox Game Pass owners with Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Rainbow Six Extraction, and Hitman Trilogy, all headed to Game Pass on day one.
In other Xbox news, we just found out that the creator of the OG Xbox thought that the Xbox One launch would kill the brand for good. While this did not happen, it appears that Microsoft has effectively killed the Xbox One. According to a recent report, Microsoft has now stopped manufacturing Xbox One units since last year, paving the way for the Xbox Series X and its more cost-effective sibling, the Xbox Series S.
