Redfall devs reportedly wanted the game to be cancelled
Redfall only launched last month, but already, it feels that it has died a pretty sad death.
The stake through the heart of the Vampire shooter title from Arkane wasn’t literal but was rather a critical lambasting, and a launch that saw bugs, glitches, and broken textures like the AAA market hasn’t seen since Cyberpunk 2077. Fans figured they could trust Arkane given their track record, but Redfall failed spectacularly.
And now, a new report has suggested that the team saw it coming.
New report illuminates internal problems on Redfall development
Click to enlargeA new report from Bloomberg has revealed that the development of Redfall was perhaps as messy as its launch, as its team were even hoping that it’d be canned or restarted by Xbox.
The game supposedly suffered from a lack of clear direction, insignificant resources and a high level of staff turnover. After starting development in 2018, the game reportedly suffered from understaffing, with Arkane Austin having less than 100 devs on deck.
A wealth of developers uninterested in multiplayer games jumped ship, and with meagre salaries, Arkane struggled to fill the holes they left, and even as the team cancelled its massive microtransaction plans after the Xbox Zenimax buyout, staff secretly hoped that Microsoft would see the damage being done to Redfall and reboot it as a single-player game. Those hopes came to nothing, and we have the Redfall that we see today.
Microsoft takes the blame for Redfall’s failure
Shortly after the launch of the game, Xbox boss Phil Spencer appeared on the Kinda Funny Games podcast to discuss the project - and he, along with Xbox at large, take the hit for the miss that was Redfall.
“We didn’t do a good job early on in engaging Arkane Austin to really help them understand what it meant to be part of Xbox and part of first-party, and use some of our internal resources to help them move along that journey even faster,” he says.
“But when [head of Xbox Game Studios] Matt Booty and [ZeniMax president] Jamie Leder sit down, I think we can engage earlier with our different studios. And I do think there’s a difference when we come in when the creative is already set on a game – and that’s not washing our hands, every game we ship from our teams is an Xbox game, so we take full responsibility for it”.
It’s certainly not a good look for Arkane to have suffered so much even through the complaints of its development team, and this example goes to show that perhaps, devs truly do know best. You’ll get ‘em next time, guys.