We know it’s been a tough year for Xbox fans, especially when you look at everything PS5 players have been able to enjoy over the last 12 months, but 2024 is looking bright and it sounds like you’re in for a treat when The Game Awards rolls around in December. Microsoft is teasing some major announcements for Xbox at The Game Awards and – even though it’s being expectedly vague with this teaser – we think Starfield fans will want to make sure they’re tuning in.
Despite only getting one The Game Awards nomination, Bethesda’s Starfield is one of the best Xbox RPG games out there right now and easily one of the best Xbox Game Pass games available with an active subscription. Sure, it’s not the perfect game, but it’s one that offers players over 1,000 Starfield planets to explore, hundreds of Starfield characters to meet and greet, and hours upon hours of content to enjoy. It’s also a game that Bethesda is far from done with and The Game Awards is the perfect place for Xbox to tell us what’s next when it comes to Starfield.
If you’re a regular reader of the weekly Xbox Newsletter, you may have already stumbled across this, but Xbox is specifically recommending its fans “celebrate the best games of the year and the big winners live at The Game Awards” – which is on December 7 at 16:30 PST / 19:30 EST and December 8 at 00:30 GMT – to see some “important announcements and other Xbox news that you don’t want to miss” during the show. As content creator Colt Eastwood highlights, the last time a comment like this was made, Xbox unveiled the Xbox Series X console – among other things, of course.
While we don’t think anything quite so major will be announced at The Game Awards this year, we do think more information on the upcoming Starfield DLC is a safe bet – and we’ve even done the maths to prove it.
Bethesda confirmed Starfield would be getting DLC with the Premium Edition of the RPG, so before the Starfield release date even arrived, and it’s now been 12 whole weeks without any information whatsoever about the post-launch content. All we know is that this DLC will be the first story expansion and titled “Shattered Space” – sounds dramatic, right?
You may think it’s a little early to be learning about Starfield DLC, it has only been a handful of months after all, but Bethesda doesn’t actually wait all that long to release DLC for its games – anymore, anyway.
For context, the first bit of post-launch DLC for Skyrim, the Dawnguard story expansion, dropped a whopping 229 days after the game itself came out. That’s a seven-month gap between Skyrim’s release date of November 11, 2011, and the Dawnguard DLC’s release date of June 26, 2012. However, when you look at the post-launch content released for the more-recent Fallout 4, the time between this game’s release and the first bit of DLC is much shorter; in fact, it’s been cut in half. Fallout 4 released on November 10, 2015, and the Automatron DLC released on March 22, 2016 – that’s just 134 days, or around 19 weeks, after.
We don’t think it’s likely that Bethesda is going to ‘shadow drop’ any Starfield DLC in December and cut that time down even more, but we do think it’s plausible that Starfield’s DLC release schedule will follow more closely to Fallout 4’s DLC release schedule than Skyrim’s DLC release schedule. So, if the timings are the same, we should see the first bit of Starfield DLC drop mid-to-late January 2024; 19 weeks from Starfield’s initial release date is January 17, to be exact.
Some sort of teaser trailer for Starfield’s upcoming DLC six-or-so weeks before it drops (if we’re looking at this using Fallout’s DLC release schedule) would be a little surprising, but it’s not unheard of. When you think about everything else Xbox has in the pipeline, too, Starfield DLC is one of only a handful of Xbox exclusives (we know, we’re using the term ‘games’ a little loosely here) on the way.
We do know that we’re getting a trailer confirming the Baldur’s Gate 3 Xbox release date at some point during The Game Awards, and we’re still waiting for more information on things like the Perfect Dark release date, the Avowed release date, and the Ark 2 release date. However, almost all of the other new Xbox games on the way are also technically new PS5 games and we just don’t think Xbox would tease “Xbox news” that also applies to PS5 players and the PlayStation platform.
So, while this locked pile of poo is sort of everything wrong with Starfield at the moment, and post-launch DLC isn’t going to change that, we’re due some information on the Shattered Space expansion and a ‘World Premiere’ at The Game Awards is the perfect place to provide it.