ArkaneAustin staff reportedly hoped thatMicrosoftmight cancelRedfallor reboot it into a single-player game after ZeniMax was acquired by Microsoft in late 2020.
So far, 2023 has been a killer year for games thanksTears of the Kingdom,Street Fighter 6,Resident Evil 4 Remake,Hi-Fi Rush… the list could thankfully go on. However, there have also been a few notable disappointments likeLord of the Rings: Gollum,Atomic Heart, andForspoken. Without a doubt, the biggest disappointment of them all so far has been Redfall, Arkane Austin’s multiplayer vampire game that currently sits as one of the worst-reviewed games of the year.
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According to a recent report from Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, this didn’t come as much of a surprise to the team working on the game, as the project suffered from “unclear direction, frequent attrition, and a perennial lack of staff”, according to more than a dozen anonymous sources who worked on the game.
Redfall’s troubled development began in 2018 as ZeniMax, who was looking to sell itself around that time, was reportedly “strongly urging” its development studios to implement microtransactions into its games and push for more GAAS content. Because of Prey’s low sales (you tasteless fools), Arkane’s leaders were aiming to make something more “broadly appealing”, which is how Redfall and its confusing identity as a “multiplayer Arkane game” came to be.
Although Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare were seemingly excited about the project, Bloomberg’s report suggests that developers working on the game were confused about what game they were even making, as there were several different games referenced throughout the development, such as Borderlands and Far Cry. The project was already understaffed during its development, at least for a multiplayer title, but things got worse as veteran developers uninterested in making a multiplayer game left the studio. According to Bloomberg, roughly 70 percent of Arkane Austin’s staff who worked on Prey had left the company during Redfall’s development.
According to the report, morale was so low at Arkane Austin that several staff members hoped that Microsoft’s acquisition of ZeniMax and Bethesda would lead to the game either being completed cancelled or, “better yet”, rebooted into a single-player game, something that obviously didn’t end up happening. The only thing that ended up being cancelled was a PlayStation port of Redfall,something that Microsoft claimed was untrue closer to the game’s launch.
Microsoft has been shockingly upfront about Redfall’s failings since the rough launch, but Bloomberg’s reports suggest that there’s been dishonesty about the game’s overall development. Harvey Smith reportedly claimed that he pushed back against microtransactions and an in-game store during development, but staff who worked on the game said that there was a “significant microtransaction plan in place”, something that was only removed in 2021 and could even be seen in leaked beta footage following the game’s original announcement.
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