You're getting a bit silly now. One of these games has individual, dense, but ultimately small scale levels that you load into one at a time. The other, is an open world game, and while it's probably still smaller than most open worlds these days, it's still by far the biggest that Arkane has ever done. Given the care that they usually put into their level design, assuming they've done the same here, that's A LOT of work. Everything doesn't always have to push the graphics envelope to new heights. The game looks good.

Whenever that showcase happen, I believe that game will release within the week of it.  That is my prediction.

Also, I think a shadow drop for Starfield, however likely (or unlikely) it may be, would be a totally reasonable strategy. Sure, because it's the biggest game that MS has coming out all year, and probably for some time, you would naturally assume that it will get the biggest marketing build up ever, but the simple truth of the matter is that's not necessary. These days, in the social media landscape we live in, a game that captures people's attention, which Starfield is by default, and ESPECIALLY with the combination of GP, which reduces the barrier to entry to almost nothing, a game release can turn into a wildfire real quick. If MS dropped Starfield tomorrow, it would be trending on twitter for the next week, and it would cost MS exactly nothing.

I doubt they'll go that route with it, cus MS tends to mostly do things by the book, but I'm just saying...you don't need a multimillion dollar marketing campaign for a game like that.

Yes, one is smaller denser levels and the other is open world, but there is also a whole generation tech difference between the two, Dishonored 2 only needed to run on the 1.3 tflop, Jaguar CPU Xbox One, while Redfall only needs to be able to run on the 4 tflop, Zen 2 CPU Xbox Series S. It's never a good look when a studio's 6 years older game looks better graphically than their new game does. If a pretty Xbox fan like me is noticing and calling out these things, you can imagine the field day that the Sony ponies are having with this right now, especially since they have open world games that look like Horizon: Forbidden West to compare it too. It doesn't help matters that Xbox has long had a reputation for not pushing graphics as hard on their exclusives as Sony does on theirs (for instance State of Decay 2 vs Days Gone, or Halo Infinite vs TLOU 2). That is a reputation Xbox is going to need to start working to get past in the future imo, Sony will always have more wow factor on their AAA reveals as long as they continue to have better graphics on them, and wow factor is important for building up a larger fanbase.

I do fully acknowledge that Forza Motorsport smokes Gran Turismo 7 on graphics though, good job on Turn 10 there. Heck, even Forza Motorsport 7, which released 4 years before GT7, looks better on PC ultra settings than GT7 looks on PS5, in spite of the PC requirements needed to hit ultra settings being lower than PS5's specs I believe. Turn 10 are graphics gods for Xbox, as are The Coalition and Ninja Theory. I just wish some of Xbox's other AAA studios would start making graphics as big of a focus as those 3 do.

I do agree that it is unlikely but I'd make note that "Microsoft's by the book" likely doesn't apply to Bethesda, as we have all of that stuff about limited integration, them not being under XGS, they're a subsidiary of Microsoft and in charge of themselves. I strongly doubt that we'll see a "next day" shadow drop sort of thing but I think if Bethesda wanted to do a "announce a release date a few weeks before release" thing then Bethesda will do it.

Remember it was Bethesda's idea to set a date on Starfield as well, which Phil wasn't sure about and we now know it was entirely Bethesda's idea to shadow drop Hi-Fi Rush as well. It's not likely but Bethesda's marketing is unpredictable, sometimes it's great, sometimes it's awful, sometimes it's wild in a good way (like now, Lol).

I find it a little amusing that Hi-Fi Rush is Xbox's first Bethesda exclusive in the soon-to-be 2 years since the acquisition was finalized lol. Great start though!

I think Bethesda proved with Fallout 4 that you don't need some huge, long marketing campaign for a game to be a success. Fallout 4 was announced in May 2015 and released just 6 months later, which at the time was pretty rare for a AAA games with pretty much only yearly series like CoD, AC, and Forza doing 6 month announce to release windows. They proved that a AAA doesn't need to be announced 2 to 5 years in advance of release, with a long pre-release marketing campaign. 

Sadly, Bethesda turned right around and announced both Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 at E3 2018, and here it is January 2023 and we are still waiting for Starfield to release which TES 6 hasn't gotten a single new trailer since it's announce and may not release until 2026 or even later. I hope that in the future Bethesda will go back to a more Fallout 5 like marketing structure.

I definitely agree that Starfield could drop tomorrow and be played by 15m+ players in the first week most likely thanks to free social media marketing and Gamepass, and even more players if Xbox had a big TV and internet marketing campaign and review embargo ready to drop on the day of the surprise launch. But I also agree that Xbox isn't likely to go that route.

More? Not including the Starfield one?

Hell yeah! I'm guessing for additional titles that will be announced at E3? Maybe around September or so right before Xbox's big holiday push.