I mean Baldur's Gate could review better and possibly take the Best RPG 2023 win from Starfield no matter when it releases this year, regardless of whether it release a week later or months later. There is already going to be stiff competition for the best RPG category no matter what way you look at it, as we also have FF16 and Diablo 4 releasing this year.

• Diablo 4 so far seems like a better game in every possible way than Diablo 3, and Diablo 3 got an 88 meta. It has deeper RPG systems including a proper skill tree, more gear stats, and better character customization. It has a bigger focus on the story telling and dialogue compared to Diablo 3. It has better graphics and better art design (they wanted to go back to a darker more Diablo 2 like art design as many thought Diablo 3 looked too cartoony). It has a much larger, more open, and reactive world, complete with weather systems and day/night cycle. 2 fan favorite classes missing from 3 are returning in 4, Druid and Sorcerer/Sorceress. No auction house breaking the gear progression like there was in Diablo 3 at launch. It has a larger campaign, estimated by Blizzard to take 45-50 hours to beat, compared to 25-30 for Diablo 3. The camera now zooms in on conversations complete with character animations during dialogue, instead of the dialogue taking place with text boxes from the typical isometric viewpoint. Balancing PvP was a major focus rather than an afterthought like it was in Diablo 3 at release. I won't be surprised at all if Diablo 4 is a 90+ meta game.
• Final Fantasy 16 has so far seen alot of praise from critics who are happy about the more DMC-like gameplay and the high degree of difficulty customization. FF16 will likely be a high 80's, maybe even 90+ game.
• Baldur's Gate 3 has so far seen very good user scores on Steam early access, 87% positive reviews with an average score of 9/10, and Larian's last game, Divinity Original Sin 2, got a 93 meta on it's lead platform, so it stands to reason that Baldur's Gate 3 will likely get at least a low 90's average from critics on release.

While the competition for best RPG this year is stiff, we definitely should not rule out a possible win for Starfield. Not only has Bethesda proven to be capable of 90+ reviews on 3 of their last 4 singleplayer RPG's, but the main thing that held them back in the past was a lack of polish. However, that shouldn't be the case with Starfield, the game left pre-production and entered actual development back in late 2015, and the full team moved to Starfield after Fallout 76 released in 2018. That means that as a September 2023 release, it will have had almost 5 years of development with the full dev team, plus an additional 3 years before that with the smaller team. Compare that to Fallout 4, their lowest reviewed singleplayer RPG of the last 4, which had 2.5 years of development with a partial dev team and only 1.5 years with the full dev team, that is a substantial difference, plus the dev team is larger now too, as a result of opening the Bethesda satellite studios since Fallout 4 released, so the overall increase in man-hours compared to Fallout 4 is huge. On top of that, we heard from a former Bethesda dev last August that the game was nearly content complete at that point, which means that pretty much September 2022-September 2023 will be nothing but bug fixes and optimization, a full year dedicated to bug fixes and optimization.

The 2nd biggest thing that held them back on Fallout 4 was the dated Creation engine, so they rebuilt large portions of the engine for Starfield and TES 6, so much is rebuilt that they are calling it Creation Engine 2. A greater focus was put into improving the shooter mechanics and gun handling compared to Fallout 4 as well. 

Starfield has a strong chance of 90+ average from critics imo, maybe it could even go as high as Skyrim did.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to nuke Starfield from orbit with its meta but that’s fine, Starfield will outsell it, I’ll be playing both, everything is great.

But we're talking about said rogue AI rendering him unconscious and torturing him via dreams/nightmares.  They can highlight the neural link and its importance, but it's just pure fantasy shit to me.  I doubt the average Halo fan would guess this was the logical extent of an AI's abilities.  

I don't really see anything at all which is unbelievable about an AI being able to put someone to sleep if it has direct access to their brain (which it does), it just needs to manipulate the hypothalamus. AI's which aren't crazy already manipulate parts of the brain to enable Spartans to have extreme reflexes and have done since the OG trilogy.

Torturing him via his nightmares? I think the only far fetched part there is the AI being in with the nightmare with him and seeing it as well. These are actual events that happened to him so I don't think it's that crazy that the AI could trigger a bad memory in him while he's asleep, the only fantasy part is the AI seeing what that memory was without Dinh telling him, Imo.

But this is Halo, Lol. I'd say Halo is in the middle ground of Sci-Fi/Fantasy and an AI fucking with someone's mind is no more fantasy than The Flood, Halo Rings, Shield Worlds, etc. Almost everything about the Forerunners is fantasy. FTL is not possible under our current understanding of Science and those tiny UNSC ships won't produce the energy needed and Wormholes are just an unproven theory. Slipspace in Halo is Space Magic.

Weapons are mostly realistic. Shields that cover an entire person and protect against all types of attacks, physical, plasma, kinetic, etc, aren't really Scientific. Even something as simple as the Needler in Halo's own lore has no explanation (Halsey couldn't explain how it works, Lol). The Weapon aspect of a Halo Ring is literally made up Science, Neural Physics (which is how Halo Rings work) is literally Space Magic.

Ancient Aliens...Prehistoric Humans...Artificial Gravity in the way that Halo does it...Etc. Are all Soft Sci-Fi. - The way in which Halo does Artificial Gravity is more magic than Sci-Fi. UNSC used to use rotating hull sections or acceleration but Covenant straight up "create" gravity with machines which can be turned on/off and UNSC reverse engineered it, point is, that isn't backed by science either.

So like, if we compare Halo to our current real life understanding, a lot of it is straight up fantasy, unproven science or made up science, if we compare it to Star Wars, it's more grounded, but Halo has never been a hard Sci-Fi IP like something like Starfield looks to be so I'd just say don't look too much into these things, Lol. I've not really seen any complaints about an AI emotionally screwing a Spartan.

Halo is a Militaristic Sci-Fi but that doesn't mean "realistic"

Didn't have much interest in Exoprimal but I'll give it a try at some point through Game Pass.

I Likely would not have tried this game without this, I’m actually surprised since this game revealed at a Sony State of play.

Same, I didn't really plan to give Exoprimal the time of day before this, but since it'll be on Gamepass I will probably try it out.

Strategic would be 

March direct, early april Release, would have been perfect cause not much going on + consoles are selling but they aren't Xbox consoles. (Jim Ryan must be happy when he heard about the delay).

September release is always hard, you have a ton of sport games and other heavy hitters releasing around that time frame...

Playstation does not matter?   I would not be surprised with this headline =>   UK physical sales are in for the 10th of september.  BG 3 physical sales for PS5 fw were highter than Starfield Xbox physical sales fw. It would especially hurt if the xbox version got delayed and starfield did critically not so well.


I am also dismayed about the delay because it could potentianlly mean they pushed other games further but June will tell us more... Only thing I can say that makes me glad is that it has his own direct/show and don't waste time in the normal show.

If you were to only look at strategy maybe but for that you have to overlook polishing almost completely. What if they judged June would be the earliest they could do than it would make total sense to wait until September giving extra polish and kickstart the last third of the year directly with the back to school seasons instead of releasing a game in the dead season of summer.