A new report from Jason Schreier uncovers the chaos during Redfall’s development.
Redfall, the new from Arkane Studios, has been one of the biggest flops of the year Not only because of its poor technical launch state, which has been repeated this year in games like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor or The Last of Us Part 1 on PC, the game from the creators of Dishonored and Prey drags a multitude of questionable creative decisions what do they do with this Xbox’s most controversial launch of the last years. According to a new report about the game’s launch, Arkane expected that Microsoft had canceled or restarted Redfall long ago.
A new report from the always controversial and incisive Bloomberg journalist, Jason Schreier, who tipped off The Last of Us multiplayer issues last week, reveals new details about the development of Redfall after speaking to dozens of those involved anonymously, and it seems that the tragedy was cooking in the Arkane offices for quite some time now.
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According to Jason Schreier, the failure of Redfall is due to leadership problems, a not too clear creative line and the march of veteran developers who worked on Prey before, up to 70% of the original team. But it doesn’t end there, Redfall’s state was so bad when Microsoft took over Bethesda that the team was waiting for it to be canceled or restarted immediately, something that did not happen and for which Phil Spencer himself, now vice president of Gaming at Microsoft, is personally blamed.
When Redfall was first shown at E3 2021, the team was already “on the edge”says the journalist, and finally the game had to be delayed to 2023 compared to its original plans for Halloween 2022. He talks about co-director Harvey Smith and other leaders of the project saying that things were going to improve “exponentially once we the final art will be implemented and the errors will be corrected“. He even used the term “magic arkane“, which presumably “would manifest itself at the last minute as it had with previous games.”
Continues Schreier collecting the “surprising” reaction of those who played Redfall in 2021 to see what “little had changed” in the final version. There is also talk that the game was going to have a “significant microtransaction plan”but Smith fought to remove the store from the game following the controversy surrounding games as a service around 2021.
At the moment it is not known what will become of Redfall, but it is hoped that the game will continue to receive updates to correct part of its errors and later it will begin to have post-launch content, although there are still no concrete plans in this regard. As for Microsoft, next week it has the opportunity to make up for itself by showing news in the Xbox Games Showcasewhere the appearance of Fable is expected.