The journalist Jason Schreier reveals new aspects of the development of Redfall, after speaking with twelve anonymous people who worked at Arkane Studios.
It’s been less than a month since Redfall was released, and the vampire shooter from Arkane Austin and Microsoft is hardly being talked about anymore. It had everything to become one of the most fun games of the year, but things didn’t go well.
Actually, Redfall It is by no means a bad game. We particularly enjoy it, as it has good ideas, entertaining gunplay, and little touches of genius.
Nevertheless, Redfall is far from the quality of other Arkane games, such as Dishonored, Prey or Deathloop, they showed previously. Despite this, it was one of the most played on Xbox Game Pass in its first weeks.
On the other hand, the title accumulates a large number of negative reviews on Steam, and most players consider it an absolute disappointment. What actually happened during development?
To clarify, Redfall is not a “Microsoft thing”. Its development began years before the Redmond company’s acquisition of ZeniMax, and in fact they barely got involved in the game.
Answers to the question Redfall
After his departure from Kotaku, Jason Schreier (one of the great journalists in the video game industry) joined Bloomberg. On this occasion, brings inside information on the development of RedfallArkane Austin’s vampire game.
Phil Spencer himself apologized for the title’s disastrous launch, promising that many improvements (such as 60 FPS performance mode) would come in the coming months.
A lot of attention to the report that Jason Schreier has shared through Bloomberg, after interviewing twelve people who participated in the development of Redfall.
First of all, these former Arkane developers claim that Redfall’s failure is no surprise. The development was marked by “an unclear direction, frequent abandonment and a complete lack of personnel.”
A fact that exemplifies this is the following: apparently, 70% of Arkane workers who worked on Prey were not part of the final stretch of development for Redfall.
As has already been pointed out above, Redfall started its development in 2018, long before Microsoft acquired Bethesda. Prey was a great game, but commercially it didn’t do very well… which led ZeniMax to make a key decision.
Schreier’s report mentions that ZeniMax was already seeking a sale of the company in 2018, so they started working on multiplayer titles (Fallout 76, The Elder Scrolls Online), as well as incorporating cosmetic elements into their games (DOOM Eternal, Wolfenstein: Youngblood).
Redfall was part of this plan. Although directors Harvey Smith and Ricardo were happy with the plan, little by little they began to see that creative freedom hardly existed.
”Staff members said that, over time, they grew frustrated with management’s frequent references to other games, such as Far Cry and Borderlands, which left each department with different ideas of exactly what they were doing,” quote the report.
Far Cry, Borderlands… a good handful of shooters, which, according to this information, were thoroughly investigated by Bethesda and Arkane, in order to recycle many concepts for Redfall.
Another problem was that many workers left the project, so Arkane was limited to about 100 developers. The veterans left, and support from studios like Roundhouse Studios wasn’t enough.
In short, Redfall was developed by employees with little experience in multiplayer titles, disenchanted people who they were hired for 100% Arkane gamesand above all with a total lack of direction in the project, according to the Bloomberg report.
Perhaps all this explains the failure of Redfall, a good vampire game that aimed to be one of the best in the Xbox catalog. Now the objective is to raise the title based on work, something that can still be achieved. You can play it on Xbox Series X | S, Windows, Steam and Game Pass.
