After watching one of the only Xbox exclusives of the year be torn to shreds online, Microsoft has decided to offset the blow by releasing yet another game before it's finished.
Coming in to this year, Xbox's 2023 exclusive release calendar was already looking shallow. Bethesda appeared ready to prop the entire lineup on its own shoulders with Redfall and Starfield, against Sony's endless plethora of upcoming AAA titles of pedigree; not that there was much choice in the matter.
Many presumed that an upcoming game from Arkane — a prolific developer responsible for modern classics such as Prey, Deathloop and Dishonored — would be a home run. Unfortunately their latest, Redfall, has found itself infected with the Xbox Game Studios plague. Released early and clearly unfinished, filled with design flaws and dated features that extra time wouldn't fix anyway, yet another release from the house green has been rightfully fed to the wolves, and Redmond is panicking.
"We get it. We bought a huge publisher (Bethesda) this generation and somehow, their highest rated game (Deathloop) released exclusively on another platform. At least we provided literal scraps that no one else wanted. Not even Arkane."
"However we have some goodwill coming. Hi-Fi Rush is objectively a good video game that recently launched exclusively. But it wasn't just Tango Softworks' latest: Halo Infinite is a gamepass staple beloved by even the most hardcore of fans. The upcoming Forza 8 has learnt everything it could from the latest Gran Turismo. There's an upcoming Gears that will be chasing that Fortnite cash cow aesthetic. You'll feel every single frame of Ghostwire Tokyo as it chugs heavier than the PS5 version ever could. I'd go on if I had any other content to spin."
"I'd like to state on the record that I'm so confident that Bethesda's latest behemoth, Starfield, wont be a complete, janky fuckstick of bugs, outdated ideas and geometry (just like Redfall) when it launches later this year, that we're also shadow dropping the Perfect Dark reboot today on gamepass to fill a non-existent void that shareholders seem to have a hard-on for pointing out."
"That's right. Another game going through development hell under the Microsoft umbrella is being prematurely launched into the wild. Please continue talking about this latest shitshow while somehow continuing to ignore my blatantly subpar performance as executive of the brand. I'm doing a great job!"
Faces blurred to avoid embarrassment from participants involved.
"You'll find Perfect Dark 2023 shares many similarities to the recent Goldeneye re-release, in that we scrapped a superior unreleased remaster and tacked the N64 rom into a substandard shell and called it a day. Oh, you thought we were completely re-imagining the original Perfect Dark with a new vision in a third person perspective and ignoring absolutely everything from Zero? This is Microsoft Xbox!"
Writing this unlocked PTSD from Perfect Dark Zero's launch on Xbox 360. Gamepass sure is becoming a service filled with games to pass.
