It will not have escaped the video game world that Redfall was a failure. A critical and commercial disappointment that is a challenge for the biggest Xbox game of the first half, even though fans have been waiting for large-scale and quality games for a while. Today we have some clarification on what may have happened within the studio.
Redfall was designed to integrate microtransactions
It is Jason Schreier, journalist at Bloomberg, who gives us today important details on the development of Redfall which make it possible to understand why the game was able to be released in this form.
With a Metacritic average of 54/100, Redfall is a disappointment, and Xbox boss Phil Spencer reacted shortly after the release saying he was angry with himself. Not only did Redfall come out with bugs that shouldn’t have passed, but it was judged by many to be a flavorless game with unconvincing AI.
Phil Spencer said that Redfall’s score on release was lower than Microsoft expected, but according to more than a dozen people who worked on the game, the project suffered from “fuzzy direction, attrition frequent and a permanent lack of personnel”, the failure was therefore not a big surprise for them.
Bloomberg reports that Redfall’s development began in 2018, at a time when ZeniMax, private owner of Bethesda Softworks, was looking to sell itself. The company then encouraged its studios to develop games that could generate revenue beyond sales. day-onein other words to move towards “games as a service” of which Fortnite was the best example.
According to the same sources, ZeniMax, without forcing them, therefore encouraged studios to implement microtransactions in their games, which Arkane Austin initially imagined for Redfall.
Solo or multiplayer? Navigation between two waters
Getting into a multiplayer game when you are used to creating so-called “immersive sims” solo games (immersive simulations) is the bet that Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, co-directors of Redfall, wanted to try.
But internally, several voices were already raised and doubted this choice. Bloomberg reports that the members ultimately grew frustrated with the direction’s often shifting references to other games, such as Far Cry and Borderlands, which left each department with different ideas of what exactly they were doing. .
It emerges that the development of Redfall was never really able to be cleared up and that the fundamental tension between the design of a single-player game and that of a multiplayer game had never been resolved.
A lack of means for an ambitious game
Achieving a single or multiplayer game does not require the same skills and if a team of 100 people was enough to create a game like the excellent Prey, it was not enough for Redfall who wanted to play in the big leagues, including with additional support from ZeniMax’s Roundhouse Studios, and other contracting companies.
- It’s picturesque, at first sight
According to Bloomberg research, about 70% of the Austin staff who had worked on Prey were no longer with the company when Redfall’s development ended, and the studio was having difficulty recruiting. Not only because the wages were reputed to be lower than elsewhere, but also because Texas, renowned for its conservative social policies, was not really seen as a very pleasant welcoming land.
And when Microsoft bought out Zenimax, and thus Bethesda, some members of Arkane’s team hoped that Microsoft would cancel Redfall or, better yet, let them reboot it as a single-player game. But none of this happened since Microsoft wanted to let the teams run their projects, a hands-off policy often touted by company executives.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, it wasn’t until 2021, when gaming as a service became increasingly controversial, that Arkane finally abandoned its in-game monetization plans.
Redfall was introduced by Microsoft as one of the spearheads of the new console generation; the game was incidentally the closing surprise of the Xbox & Bethesda E3 2021 conference. Now, all eyes are on Bethesda’s next big game, Starfield, which is slated for release on September 6, 2023.
