Kind of felt like they were just gonna send this out to die after the previews got out, the backlash, and their silence on it. Sometimes you have to pick and choose but man, it really isn't good for MS's optics to have sacrificed RedFall as they have. From a business POV I get it; delaying the game again would have costed more money and expected returns might not have justified it. But at the end of the day it's just a bad look.
Although I don't know what Arkane Lyon's next game has to do with RedFall being a dud. Arkane Austin made RedFall IIRC; do the Austin and Lyon teams share project members? Maybe that's why it's mentioned, I dunno.
Either way if Starfield releases in a state even somewhat similar to RedFall, it's going to be an absolute disaster and I genuinely think that will pretty much mark MS's end as a platform holder, effectively. Sure they can stick around but no one outside of the most hardcore are going to care about their releases after that and it would take them years to build back up enough credibility for others to take an actual look or interest at their software again. So Starfield has to at least be a very solid and good game that meets expectations of modern AAA gaming (in terms of production values, scale, complexity etc.).
And it cannot be a buggy mess at launch. I don't think game reviewers will be very kind of Starfield if it's really janky TBH; especially after RedFall, I think even a lot of them are reaching a breaking point in how much they can cap for unpolished 1P releases from Microsoft. Halo Infinite making a lot of those reviewers look like clowns isn't helping, either, and they probably haven't forgotten about it.
