Starfield gameplay premiere resembles “No Man’s Skyrim,” leads Xbox showcase

Enlarge / Starfield will emerge from outer space and land on Xbox consoles and Windows PCs by June 2023. (credit: Xbox / Bethesda)

Microsoft's bow in the annual flurry of early June game announcements, streamed on YouTube on Sunday, came with a surprising asterisk: a focus on "games you can play over the next 12 months." But while the company had a lot to announce for Xbox Game Pass subscribers in 2022, the biggest Xbox console exclusives shown on Sunday appear to skip 2022 altogether.

Bethesda Game Studios tempered fans' expectations last month by confirming that both of its biggest previously announced "Xbox console exclusive" games, Starfield and Redfall, had been delayed to 2023, and now we know that both should arrive by June of next year. After reviewing Starfield's Sunday gameplay reveal, we honestly wonder whether that time window will be sufficient for Bethesda to finish the game, because Starfield looks massive.

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  Many celestial bodies in a system.

At the end of his presentation, Bethesda veteran Todd Howard gestured to a map of one of Starfield's major star systems, Alpha Centauri, which appears to include four "major" planets around its sun and an additional eight or nine moon-like celestial bodies. Then the "galaxy map" zoomed out to reveal six named solar systems, along with dots for an additional dozen, and Howard said the full game map includes "over 1,000 planets for you to explore."