All The Major Games Only Coming Out On Next-Gen Consoles

Precious little is known about Everwild, the forthcoming adventure game from Rare, other than the fact that it’s very, very pretty and is currently plagued by development woes (which now suggest it might not come out until 2024). When it eventually comes to consoles, it’ll only do so on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s console debut, currently planned for December, won’t happen on older consoles. Rendering the irradiated wastes of Chornobyl just seems like too much strain for the poor Xbox One. Based on remarks made by Xbox’s Matt Booty, it seemed Xbox games would release across generations for the first year or two after the release of the Series X and S. But, speaking to Kotaku, Xbox boss Phil Spencer couched that a bit, saying, “I think we’re going to take it on a case by case basis … we’re just trying to be transparent with people about the roadmap of games that would be coming for last gen.”

Skyrim In Space is not a-go on Xbox One. It also won’t come to PS4 or PS5, for that matter. Pete Hines is so very sorry about that. Though the space-exploration RPG was initially planned for a November 11, 2022, release, developer Bethesda has since delayed it to the first half of 2023.

Despite a $7.5 billion allowance from Microsoft, Bethesda published two immersive sims—Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo—as “console exclusives” on PS5. But Microsoft isn’t letting PlayStation nab all of the Bethesda-published exclusives. Arkane’s Redfall—a vampire game that caused everyone to summarily lose their marbles following its reveal at Microsoft’s E3 2021 event—will only come out on Xbox Series X/S. Initially planned for summer 2022, it was recently delayed to the first half of 2023.

The original Outer Worlds came out in 2019 on both PS4 and Xbox One, and made waves as an effective Fallout-like, albeit closer in spirit to the true-to-form role-playing of Fallout: New Vegas than the more action-focused Fallout 4. Obsidian, now under Xbox’s umbrella, won’t release the sequel on PlayStation. It’s currently planned as a next-gen Xbox exclusive.

Avowed, Obsidian’s other big RPG in the pipeline, is also planned as an Xbox Series X/S-exclusive. It’s fantasy-themed, set in a fictional world called Eora, but details remain otherwise scant.

Good news: Fable’s coming back! Bad news: When the fantasy-RPG does return, it won’t come to Xbox One. And it might be a while until it does, as the developer, Playground Games, was recently full throttle on last November’s Forza Horizon 5, one of the biggest marquee games to hit Xbox in the past year.

Thanks to a release calendar that shifts more than a Grand Prix driver, Square Enix’s Forspoken, née Project Athia, is now one of the fall’s big games. It’s now slated for PS5 on October 11, 2022. In 2020, Sony said it’ll be console-exclusive to PS5 for “at least 24 months.”

A Plague Tale: Requiem, Asobo Studios’ eye-popping followup to A Plague Tale: Innocence, is planned for next-gen consoles—and, per publisher Focus Home Interactive, the Switch. That last one’s curious. Rumors have long swirled about a Switch model with 4K capabilities, to the point where the thing’s all but confirmed, though Nintendo hasn’t officially unveiled it. Requiem comes out this year.

Most Ubisoft games come out on as many platforms as possible. (Profits!) Not so with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The first-person action game set in James Cameron’s reductive yet lushly beautiful world is planned for next-gen consoles some time before Ubisoft’s fiscal year ends, in March 2023. The next film in the series hits theaters in December.

Read More: Ubisoft’s Avatar Game Will Actually Flex Your PS5 And Xbox Series X

Capcom’s Pragmata—a game, based on its pre-release marketing, about hating Times Square so much you go to the moon—is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2023, having been pushed out of its initial 2022 release window. It stars a cat.

Not much is known about the Dead Space remake, first revealed at EA’s July 2021 digital showcase, other than the fact that it’s a redux of Visceral’s venerable sci-fi horror game. It’s coming to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC on January 27, 2023, and is guaranteed to give me, specifically, nightmares for the rest of forever. C’mon, the Necromorphs were scary enough two console generations ago! Graphics have only grown more realistic in the interim.

It’s a long—seriously, a looong—ways off, but Alan Wake is finally getting a proper sequel. When it comes out, it’ll skip last-gen consoles. Fair warning too: Developer Remedy intends for it to be a full-blown survival horror game, a deviation from the more investigative nature of the original. Eek!

Gotham Knights, an open-world action RPG based on characters from DC comics, was planned as a cross-generation release. Earlier this month, developer WB Games Montreal announced it had officially scrapped the PS4 and Xbox One versions. Next-gen versions drop on October 25, when it will also come out on PC. Sorry to disappoint, but early gameplay footage does not indicate a game bearing any similarity to the excellent Arkham games of last-gen.

Read More: Now Would Have Been A Good Time For Another Batman Arkham Game

Rocksteady, the studio responsible for most of those Arkham games, intended to release Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League in 2022. Less than two months into the year, the studio bumped the action game to spring 2023.

Insomniac has already released one PS5 exclusive (2021’s riotous, ridiculously gorgeous Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart) but has two more in the hopper. One is Marvel’s Wolverine, which does not have a release date and has only been seen in a brief cinematic trailer, first aired in September 2021. Details are scant, but Insomniac has sure proven itself as an effective purveyor of luxuriously produced, and fun-to-play, superhero games.

The second of Insomniac’s two PS5 exclusives is a proper sequel to Marvel’s Spider-Man, first released for the PS4 in 2018. The sequel folds in Miles Morales, who frontlined a spin-off in 2022, and is set after the events of that game. Fingers crossed for some co-op! Hey, if Sunset Overdrive could do it…

Update, 12:30 p.m. ET, May 24, 2022: We cut Shredders, Gran Turismo 7, Deathloop, and Ghostwire—since they’re already out—and added info about Wolverine, Spider-Man 2, Suicide Squad, Gotham Knights, and Alan Wake II.

Update, 2:25 p.m. ET, July 22, 2021: Added info about the Dead Space remake.