As much as I want this in the first half, May/June gets really packed with Zelda and Final Fantasy. I probably wouldn't be heartbroken if it was pushed just a little farther back lol.
I think the chances of it getting pushed back are
extremely high. Like, even ignoring the competitive environment of the other huge games dropping in May and June, Microsoft
themselves are already going to be publishing a lot in Q2, including another big new IP from Bethesda they don’t want to bury.
That they announced a Developer_Direct focused on games they’re releasing in the first half of the year and they’re explicitly pre-confirming Starfield will not be at that event is the clearest indication possible that Starfield isn’t going to make Q2. I really don’t understand the people who are still going “they don’t really need to market it all that much, they can still announce in February that it’s coming in April!”
at all.
Like, sure, they
could do that, in the sense that it’s not illegal, but why on Earth would they
want to? They’ll have console bundles and a (likely very expensive!) collector’s edition to try to sell, I don’t see why they wouldn’t give this game a full ~6 month pre-release marketing wind-up.
If there wasn’t that “before E3” commitment from last year,
no one would be saying “yeah, this game’s release is imminent, they’ll probably announce a release date in February and do a super short two month cycle before it ships!” We’d all be expecting it to be a big November game, like Fallout 4 and Skyrim were. Games get delayed
all the time. Especially big ambitious open world RPGs. If the only reason a 1H release makes any sense at all is because they committed to that a year ago, it’s time to let that dream go.