Looking for some sliver of good news in the delay announcement today: Though both were listed as first half 2023, I find it very unlikely that both Redfall and Starfield would end up being Q2, one of the two must be a Q1 release. So that is some good news at least, it might not be a super long delay on one of them, just a few months.

However, there is also the bad news that I didn't even think about originally, the fact that Redfall and Starfield slipping to 1st half 2023 could have an effect on Xbox's originally planned 1st half 2023 games. Starfield and Redfall moving to 1st half 2023 could cause a snowball affect of games like Avowed, Contraband, and Project Belfry being delayed from their leaked 1st half 2023 releases into 2nd half 2023, which could further snowball with originally planned 2nd half 2023 games like Hellblade 2 and Fable getting delated as well. This delay could cause of a snowball affect of other delays for years to come.

I was thinking this, it has put a damper on the showcase, I wonder if it wouldn't have been better to do as you said, show the game first, hopefully it impresses and then Todd comes out and announces the delay, explain that they need a little more time, etc. People may be more understanding if they saw how great the game looks first and see Todd explain the delay.

Good lord I made the awful mistake of opening Twitter

If Bethesda were still independent, of course many would still be disappointed by the announcement but much more understanding than now. Because Bethesda is now directly connected to Xbox, the absolute hate and trolling I read on Tweets

I do think if those RPGs were actually scheduled to release around the time Starfield is now releasing then yeah, it's going to screw up their RPG line-up schedules but if it's a different genre then I don't think Microsoft will care about releasing different genres near each other. Microsoft has a lot of RPGs in development though and I want them all...

I was always a bit unsure of Fable in 23 though, Horizon Zero Dawn took 6 years, Fable by 23 will be about 5-6 years too but Fable will likely be a much bigger 'RPG' than Horizon is, as in, more deeper RPG elements, they also had to set up a studio/team from scratch whilst Horizon used the already established Killzone team, Playground is also using a new engine like Guerrilla did except this engine was made for racers and Playground contended with Covid too, the only thing in Playground's favour is Fable isn't a new IP but it's almost certainly a reboot and will be essentially, development wise, a new IP, when everything has to be made from scratch and likely having to put their own spin on certain designs, I only use Horizon as a comparison because I know its development time was reported on, they're both ARPGs and both going through a similar process of a studio on one genre switching to a completely different one.

Starfield delay does not bother me, not sure why people hype it up anyway.

It's Bethesda's next big single player open world RPG. That's really all that needs to be said because there's literally no other games out there that are like Bethesda's RPG's. Prior to the Xbox purchase, Bethesda was one of the few 3rd party studios whose games you would consider to be a "system seller"

And with Starfield being Bethesda's first new IP in decades, a sci-fi one at that, that only adds to the excitement. 

This is a pretty big marketing screw up too, I wonder if the delay would be as bad if they didn't set a date on it and were so specific, not only that, talking as if its release was definite, Lol. Someone has got to revoke Todd's ability to set a date on things, I said before that setting a date a year in advanced was risky when you consider all the recent world events, it's risky even without that stuff!

It's funny that IIRC, Phil was against the date being set but Todd insisted, usually Xbox's marketing is the one that has these stumbles, Bethesda usually meets their dates. Bethesda operates separate from XGS though and does their own thing so it's hard to lay much blame at Xbox's feet, it's how they promised them things would run before acquiring them, I hope they learn from this and don't repeat it in the future unless there's 100% certainty.