Redfall had a rough launch - it facedpoor to middling reviewsandlost thousands of players in just three days. Currently,it’s one of Steam’s most poorly-rated gamesdue toextremely buggy performance,incredibly stupid AI,lack of matchmaking(in a co-op game!), and a whole other host of issues. Some have taken to blamingArkane Studiosfor the bad state of things, and obviously the developers can’t be absolved of responsibility, but people are doing the curious thing of saying this happened because Arkane ventured out of its comfort zone.
Arkane is best known for making excellent single-player games, usually immersive sims, and has garnered praise for its environmental storytelling, innovative combat, and well-written stories likeDishonored,PreyandDeathloop’s. In a move that confused critics and players alike, Arkane decided to depart from what made it stand out amongst its peers and develop Redfall, a cooperative, multiplayer looter-shooter.
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As my colleague Andrew King wrote, Arkane isn’t the onlystudio known for outstanding single-player games that has made a hard pivot towards multiplayer games. Just within the last five years, Bethesda released Fallout 76, BioWare released Anthem, Crystal Dynamics launched Marvel’s Avengers, and Rocksteady announced Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League. All received negative reception, including Suicide Squad, which hasn’t even come out yet, butreceived such huge backlash for its live-service elements that it got delayed into 2024.
Redfall, unfortunately, is yet another mediocre multiplayer game coming from a big studio that got unceremoniously rejected by gamers. As Eric Switzer wrote whilecomparing Redfall to Anthem, Redfall was clearly Arkane’s attempt to serve a wider audience with a title that it wouldn’t normally have made. It’s hard to say if Bethesda pushed Arkane to make Redfall or if Arkane itself wanted to make something with more mainstream appeal, but either way, it failed.
This alone isn’t an indicator that studios should never leave their comfort zones. Many depart from what’s expected of them with great success - Hi-Fi Rush was, after all, created by the same team behind The Evil Within games and Ghostwire: Tokyo, which are very different. Phil Spencer himself, in his interview with Kinda Funny, said that he would not “push against creative aspirations of our teams” and that he was “not a believer” that developers good at one kind of game should be “forced” to only make those kinds of games. I agree, but people on Twitter don’t. Plenty are saying Arkane should have “stayed in its lane” and made a single-player immersive sim instead of a co-op multiplayer game.
It’s a very silly mindset. Arkane deciding to make a multiplayer shooter wasn’t the issue.As Stacey Henley writes, the actual problem is that Redfall was conceived to follow a trend of live-service shooters that focused more on min-maxing stats than actual gameplay. Nobody wants games like that anymore, but games cost so much money nowadays that by the time a trend ends, it’s too late to stop a project already in motion. The core idea was uninspired and made for commercial appeal, and it fell flat on its face.
Of course, that alone can’t explain all of Redfall’s flaws, but right now, we simply don’t have the full picture of what led to this rough release. Whatever the case, these games cost a hell of a lot of money to make, and studios don’t make decisions lightly. Some of this game is still very intentionally made and has the Arkane lifeblood in it, like itscommentary on capitalismandenvironmental storytelling. Redfall may have been a blunder, or itmay have been launched so Arkane could cut its losses, but it shouldn’t be the end of Arkane. Developers shouldn’t be chasing trends when the development cycle is this long, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t swing for the fences in entirely new directions. After all, innovation doesn’t come from a five percent improvement in graphical photorealism, it comes from creative people trying new things because they have the resources and experience to. I’ll still be waiting to see what’s next from them and if it’ll be more inspired than Redfall. I really hope it will.
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