A new Starfield claim online says that while it will be at E3 2021 for a release date reveal, Starfield won't arrive until late 2022. Rumors and claims have been coming out of the woodwork in recent weeks, especially as E3 nears its all-digital summer return. A Starfield gameplay trailer and an official release date announcement have been highly anticipated to come during the gaming event in June, with some Bethesda fans hoping that the Xbox studio will throw a curveball and drop the game a few months later, but that's now looking less than likely.
In the past, Bethesda Game Studios has released a few games immediately following a big game reveal. Both Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 were released this way, with the games dropping only a few months after their announcements. However, Fallout 76 was a huge disappointment that wasn't fully ready to release when it did, and Fallout 4 wasn't without its own launch issues. Bethesda might be changing its reveal and release strategies to better meet player and critic expectations, and its rumored that Starfield has been delayed to 2022 in order to fully prepare and polish it. Of course, there's also a strong chance it was always scheduled to skip 2021.
In a tweet by Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, he explained that while rumors have claimed Starfield is releasing sometime in 2021, the game is "nowhere near done" and won’t be arriving until a good while after. In a follow-up tweet, Schreier specifically states that while it is "Bethesda's plan to tease a release date for Starfield at [E3 2021]," that launch reveal will reportedly be set for late 2022. Schreier confirms past news that Starfield will be at E3 in a joint conference held by both Xbox and Bethesda, but the game’s reveal won’t closely precede its release this year.
Schreier's Twitter reports are intended to curb fan expectations and prevent widespread disappointment if Starfield’s release date isn’t as close as previously thought. In a separate reply to the initial tweet, Schreier explained that Bethesda Game Studios was using the bulk of its development resources and labor to develop Fallout 76, only beginning to expand the Starfield team after Fallout 76's fateful launch. Until then, the team was very small, meaning the game has only been in full development since 2018 at the earliest, which matches up with leaked screenshots from a 2018 Starfield build.
The claim is bold and not what many want to hear, and it hasn’t yet been confirmed by any major sources connected with the game. Until Xbox and Bethesda’s presentation during E3 2021 is over and done with, fans will have no idea what to believed about Starfield. Even if its release date is farther away than some hoped, fans can at least take solace in the knowledge that Starfield may be less likely to be as glitch-ridden as Fallout 76 at launch.
Source: Jason Schreier