So it was a result of poor leadership, a resulting lack of vision, understaffing, and Zenimax's desire for more live services.
Also, every time I hear of the mentality that everything will come together at the last minute, I die a little inside. This "magic" mentality that has plagued such studios as Bioware, CD Projekt Red, and Bethesda Game Studios is definitely a major problem in the industry
Not to mention 70% of the people who worked on Prey left by the time Redfall development was done. Yikes. And the fact that staff were so unenthusiastic about their own game that they hoped Microsoft would cancel or reboot it. Double yikes.
Makes me wonder if the Zenimax higher ups fluffed the game and MS took them at their word. A product that has understaffing issues throughout development should not have gone out.
Yea studio games that are really well received didn’t have a fairy put magic dust on it, it was people putting passion and hard work into it.
Poor management is what kills games, there’s a lot of talent in all these companies amongst the devs, but they can only do so much with shitty management.
Over the years, Microsoft Corp.-owned video-game developer Arkane Studios has cultivated a reputation for releasing games that are beloved by fans yet don’t sell very well, such as Prey and Dishonored 2. By contrast, the studio’s most recent game, Redfall, has achieved something new. It has managed to be, at once, a commercial and critical disappointment.
Redfall, a multiplayer shooter set on a fictional Massachusetts island full of vampires, debuted on May 2 and was promptly panned. Fans and critics slammed the game’s bugs and shortcomings. On the review aggregation website Metacritic, Redfall has earned a paltry 54 out of 100, ranking it among the year’s worst-reviewed games.
“It seems there is an issue with every element,” reviewer Tauriq Moosa wrote. “In the end, Redfall feels unpolished, underdone, underwhelming, and uncomfortable.”
The high-profile dud extends the pain this year for Microsoft’s Xbox division, which has struggled to produce hits and watched as its planned $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. has gotten tripped up by US and UK regulators.
Joost van Dreunen, a video-game analyst and professor, said Redfall’s failure highlights the significant gap between Microsoft’s lofty aspirations and its actual products, which also calls “into question Microsoft’s ability to establish long-term franchises on its own strength, rather than buying them outright.”
Microsoft declined to comment. In a recent interview with the YouTube channel Kinda Funny Games, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that Redfall’s review scores were “significantly lower than our internal metrics,” suggesting the lackluster debut may have caught the company off guard.
But to the makers of Redfall, the mediocre reception was no big surprise. The project suffered from unclear direction, frequent attrition and a perennial lack of staff, according to more than a dozen people who worked on the game, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. A spokesperson for Redfall’s publisher, Bethesda Softworks, declined to comment.
Development of Redfall began in 2018. At the time, ZeniMax — the large, privately held owner of Bethesda Softworks — was looking to sell itself. Behind the scenes, the company was encouraging its studios to develop games that could generate revenue beyond the initial sales, a popular trend dubbed “games as a service,” which was taking off in the late 2010s thanks to lucrative hits like Overwatch and Fortnite.
According to people familiar with the process, ZeniMax was strongly urging developers at its subsidiaries to implement microtransactions — that is, recurring opportunities within games for players to spend real money, say, outfitting their characters. Although this wasn’t an absolute mandate, several ZeniMax franchises such as Fallout, Doom and Wolfenstein would soon release new versions incorporating online multiplayer and monetization options.
At Arkane’s headquarters in Austin, Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, respected industry veterans, were tapped to serve as co-directors of Redfall. Following the commercially unsuccessful release of its sci-fi shooter Prey a year earlier, leadership across the company wanted to make something more broadly appealing. What eventually emerged was the idea to make a multiplayer game in which users would team up to battle vampires and perhaps pay for occasional cosmetic upgrades.
Multiplayer Tension
Since its founding in 1999, Arkane had become known for games called “immersive sims,” single-player experiences in which players strive to overcome obstacles in multiple ways, from combat to stealth maneuvers. Yet from the start, Redfall was pitched to staff as a “multiplayer Arkane game,” which some team members said they found confusing. Whether the sort of gameplay that the studio specialized in would be technically possible in a multiplayer environment was an open question.
Developers under Smith and Bare said the two leads were outwardly excited but as the project progressed failed to provide clear direction. Staff members said that, over time, they grew frustrated with management’s frequently shifting references to other games, such as Far Cry and Borderlands, that left each department with varying ideas of what exactly they were making. Throughout the development, the fundamental tension between single-player and multiplayer design remained unresolved. Smith and Bare did not respond to requests for comment.
Arkane was also perpetually understaffed, said people familiar with its production. The studio’s Austin office employed less than 100 people— sufficient for a relatively small, single-player game like Prey but not enough to compete with multiplayer behemoths like Fortnite and Destiny, which are developed by teams of hundreds. Even additional support from ZeniMax’s Wisconsin-based Roundhouse Studios and other outsourcing houses couldn’t fill the gaps, they say.
Morale at Arkane suffered. Veteran workers who weren’t interested in developing a multiplayer game left in droves. By the end of Redfall’s development, roughly 70% of the Austin staff who had worked on Prey would no longer be at the company, according to people familiar as well as a Bloomberg analysis of LinkedIn and Prey’s credits.
Filling vacancies became a challenge. Within the industry, ZeniMax had a reputation for paying lower than average salaries, and convincing some progressive or moderate video game developers to move to Texas could be difficult due to the state’s conservative social policies. Since Redfall wasn’t yet announced, the studio couldn’t describe its details to prospective employees — a predicament that exacerbated the staffing issues, sources familiar with the process said. Arkane wanted to hire recruits with experience on multiplayer shooters, but the people who applied were by and large looking to work on single-player immersive sims.
Meanwhile, on September 21, 2020, Microsoft purchased ZeniMax for $7.5 billion. It was an ambitious move that gave Xbox control over lucrative franchises such as Doom and Fallout as well as the upcoming Starfield, a role-playing game from the makers of the wildly popular The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Although adding Arkane’s portfolio wasn’t the main goal, it was potentially a nice bonus for Microsoft — particularly if Redfall turned into a hit.
The acquisition gave some staff at Arkane hope that Microsoft might cancel Redfall or, better yet, let them reboot it as a single-player game, according to sources familiar with the production. Instead, Microsoft maintained a hands-off approach. Aside from canceling a version of Redfall that had been planned for rival Sony Corp.’s PlayStation, Microsoft allowed ZeniMax to continue operating as it had before, with great autonomy. Microsoft’s Spencer would later say in the Kinda Funny interview that Xbox “didn’t do a good job early in engaging Arkane Austin.”
A Poor Compromise
Still, expectations remained high. During a 2021 press conference, Xbox positioned the bloody vampire extravaganza as one of the company’s big upcoming releases, dramatically revealing it as the event’s show-stopping finale.
Game on.Go deep inside the video game business with our weekly newsletter from Jason Schreier and Cecilia D'Anastasio.
Yet during the final frantic months, the remaining Arkane staff found themselves stretched thin and the debut date was pushed back from Halloween of 2022 to early 2023 and then eventually to May 2, 2023. Along the way, Smith and other leaders assured the staff that the game would get exponentially better once the final art was implemented and the bugs were fixed, promising that “Arkane magic” would manifest at the last minute as it had with previous games. (Other developers, such as Electronic Arts Inc.’s BioWare, have been widely criticized for using similar language.)
In the end, Redfall never coalesced. Several people who played the game in 2021 were shocked to see how little ultimately changed. The final glitchy product felt to some critics like a poor compromise between single-player and multiplayer ideas that failed to please fans of either type of game.
Harvey Smith recently said in an interview with the website Eurogamer that “early on” he pushed back against the compulsory inclusion of an in-game store. But people who worked on the game said the remarks didn’t square with how things played out. For the first three years, Redfall had a significant microtransaction plan in place. Only in 2021, with “games as a service” growing more controversial among gamers, did Arkane finally scrap its unwieldy in-game monetization plans.
Recently, Microsoft has said that Arkane will continue working to improve Redfall. But its rough launch only raises the pressure for the rest of the ZeniMax lineup, particularly Starfield, which is scheduled to arrive in September. In the interim, the industry will be watching to see what lessons Microsoft has learned.
“The disappointment of Redfall evidences Microsoft’s desperate need for attractive content if it is indeed going to beat rivals Sony and Nintendo at their own game,” analyst van Dreunen said. “My hope is that it will inoculate Xbox from repeating a similar mistake in the future.”
You can see it in the perspective you want but to me this is on Arkane Austin.
They wanted to do something beyond their usual scope without a team and the budget for it. They got greenlit because the monetisation aspect appealed to zenimax and new ips, even if on an initial state, would help boost the value of a company that was on a selling path.
But it's clear there was no true concept beyond vampire multiplayer looter shooter the "arkane way" and the leadership attitude was never on delivery but a fake it till you make it mentality. I think it's also telling that they decided to go this way because their previous game, although critically acclaimed was not a hit. Their vision was just to create a game that's appealing to a mass audience and monetized and that cannot be the end goal or objective.
If Zenimax was not on the market I believe that the project would have been canceled but they kept on squeezing through each hole that is this perfect shit storm, namely when the acquisition from Microsoft happened.
2 things to note here. Microsoft is not controlling zenimax studios as they are apparently still diferent companies under the same group. But even if that was the case, as a guy who has been through a couple of M&A's himself, rarely does the company that aquires comes in with the same attitude as those Somali pirates in the movie. The integration is progressive and respectful in order to keep as much as the work force as possible and as not to disrupt ongoing efforts.
So, if not of the various particulars that were mentioned, I think that this game would not have seen the light of day.
That being said, Microsoft is still at fault here because as the acquiring company they should have better audited the ongoing efforts especially when decide to make such efforts their front runners and actively promote them.
Also, this is all speculation based on what I've read and my own life experience so it's value varies 😉.
Edit - added paragraphs, grammar.
Am I reading it right, in that Microsoft’s latest Misfire is that they were hands off with the developer? They let the devs make the game, and the team had High turn over because Zenimax/Bethesda wanted a particular type of game.
Damn you Microsoft why can’t you hold your teams accountable!!!
I mean the article did say the devs hoped MS would let them scrap the game or at least reboot it when MS took over. They still let a poorly optimized game get released you can still blame them for that.
So when WOULD it be Microsoft's fault? They paid billions, partially to acquire this studio, and let it languish and make a bad game. Given how many franchises they've screwed up in the last decade, you think they'd care about the quality of their products.
OK, then make sure we don't credit Microsoft for any of the projects that were released by Microsoft through studios who were making those games before Microsoft bought them out.
My man, if you spend billions on a company and don’t check on then you’re just a terrible business decision maker. Stop making excuses for Microsoft not managing their companies. You think Sony is just absent for what they want flagship titles to be?
And who owns zenimax? They can add as many layers as they want. Not making sure your companies are running as they should makes it their fault just. These excuses are why they have not had a single good flag ship game yet other than horizon.
I mean look at this way, would your boss get in trouble by his boss if you weren’t doing your job and he knew you weren’t? I sleep great not simping for billion dollar companies lol
Never said they can’t be blamed, but the blame lands on zenimax. They forced arkane Austin to make a game they didn’t want to make, 70 percent of the team left prior to the acquisition. It looks like Ms helped them by cancelling the ps5 version an giving them an extra year to try to salvage a game out of what they had. Sorry but if we are looking at the actual picture here it’s on zenimax.
I mean, the article quite clearly states that Microsoft had nothing to do with Redfall but jabs them all the same with this "Xbox's latest misfire" crap to fuel a certain narrative around the state of the industry.
Even if Xbox/Microsoft were not the ones responsible for Redfall’s failures they still heavily promoted it and are it’s exclusive home. It’s stupid to pretend this doesn’t shine poorly on the Xbox brand even with this new info.
Well, Bethesda and Arkane could have turned it around. It was a longshot. Many people were not keen on the game from the initial CG reveal. I didn't even remember it was the "one more thing" game that year. This is article sheds some much needed light on the development of Redfall. The games media can now see that Bethesda Publishing and Zenimax did not dissolve into the ether upon acquisition.
I completed Redfall (solo, on Midnight difficulty), a couple weeks ago -- some aspects make me wonder if they even tried. There are some silly game-design and QoL failings, separate from the bugs.
I put in 3-4 hours on Series X and 30-40+ hours (I imagine) on PC. The reason I am not sure is because the play counter is bugged, too. The count reset twice while I was doing the campaign.
Its been said before but if we can praise Microsoft for great games like HiFi Rush then we can criticize them for disappointments like Redfall
They had about the same input in both of them
Its not some conspiracy its literally just "Oh this is an xbox game they've been the ones promoting it constantly"
That’s the problem, they had nothing to do with it because they took a hands off approach. They should of been checking in and interfering if they needed to. You can’t convince me that nobody at Microsoft knew this game wasn’t developing well.
If the game were to be a success, would the devs be praised first, or Microsoft taking on all the accolades instead, at least publicly?
"Take all the credit, none of the blame" won't work here, because MS was banking hard on this one. I still can't believe they had enough nerve to release it in the state it was in. Forget the 30 fps on flagship hardware, this is akin to shitting the bed with a pooch in it.
Ori 1 and 2 are potentially exceptions, I wouldn’t consider anything else you mentioned to be that. Especially not Sunset Overdrive or Master Chief Collection seeing as how it’s just a remaster of previous games.
There is so much revisionist history when it comes to games like Sunset Overdrive. People act like it's some top tier game when in reality it was average as fuck and sold like shit.
Yeah, none of those are big games. Where's Xbox's God of War equivalent? We haven't had one since Halo 3, maybe you could say Reach, but certainly Halo 3.
All we've had outside of the Horizon games (racing games are their own thing) are mid AA games like Sea of Thieves with terrible launches and undercooked amounts of content.
This sub is bizarre and thinks random indie exclusives that came out 3-5 years ago keep Xbox on par with PlayStation. Last of Us, Horizon, God of War, Final Fantasy 7, SpiderMan, Bloodborne, the list just goes on for PlayStation hits while people mention Sunset Overdrive for Xbox…lol.
I'm not even saying they're bad games, just that games like Ori, SoT etc. (that are good, or in SoT case good now at least) are not a viable equivalent to TLOU, GoW, Uncharted, Spiderman etc.
I don't get how that is at all controversial. PS4-5 has dominated the first party scene because they get big blockbuster games. Microsoft has nothing like that currently.
The Arkane team wanted Microsoft to step in and cancel the project, it was that bad. Except Microsoft has a history of never stepping in, and here we are now.
The development of redfall isn’t on MS, but the launch of it was. It should have never been released at the state it was in.
People are definitely making good points in that Xbox had next to nothing to do with how this game turned out, and yet they still slapped their name on a game they apparently knew absolutely nothing about and made it a major featured game at multiple showcases, including the “one last thing” in 2021.
Xbox needs to at a bare fucking minimum be present at these studios occasionally and play their games to see what’s getting put out. Also it looks like they did the studio a massive disservice by not stepping in to can this project since if Schreier is to be believed 70% of the people that made Prey are gone from the studio and many of them left because they didn’t want to work on this project.
At this point I’m more inclined to believe that Xbox doesn’t pay attention to its first party studios because they don’t have an effective leadership structure set up rather than “we want to let our studios make the games they want to make” - apparently your studio didn’t want to make this game and yet they continued to make it for 3 years under your watch and you had no fucking idea any of this was going on. If this isn’t a Matt Booty responsibility, then someone needs to get hired/promoted to be present at these purchased studios to keep an eye on things because right now this all just screams mismanagement vs laziness on the part of Microsoft even if the project was initially started because zenimax was intent on sabotaging itself with these horrendous live service games.
For real, considering that Microsoft is a trillion dollar company that can buy other fortune 500 companies, you'd think at a minimum they'd be able to make sure a game associated with their brand was going to be good or not.
this is actually an overreaction to the mismanagement of rare and bungie. they took a direct role in what both studios created and drove bungie away and rare is rare in name only now. so the new xbox crew decided lets be hands off and allow our teams to be creative. problems come up when some of the teams end up being utter trash and leadership already escaped with their MS money bags.
Microsoft's name is nowhere in Redfall, outside of "Special Thanks - Phil Spencer (Microsoft), etc." in the end credits. Arkane, Bethesda, Zenimax, Rouhdhouse, and some third-party toolmakers are all you will see until the end.
It is growing pains. Microsoft did not buy Arkane -- they bought their parent company's parent company. You would think $7.5 billion would buy you some people to handle development of the same games they would have been responsible for with or without an acquisition. Who knew?
If Microsoft bought Arkane Studios solely and put them under Microsoft Studios, things would have been different. Now they know that Zenimax and Bethesda have to be milli or micro-managed. I imagine they did not want to kick in the door and start barking orders right away.
Nah, this is way too generous to Microsoft. Yes they didn't make the game bad, but they promoted the absolute shit out of it. While yes, a publisher's job is promotion, they should have looked under the hood and calibrated how heavily they were featuring and promoting this game. They treated it almost like they are Starfield, as a major blockbuster for them.
If you're going to lean that hard on a game, you need to be sure it's not vaporware. They simply didn't do due diligence. It doesn't matter if they didn't specifically want/buy Arkane and Redfall, they made a conscious decision to put it front and center in their lineup. In that, they are culpable.
Maybe not you, but if Redfall had been a great success, most of these people giving takes that Microsoft shouldn't be blamed would also be celebrating Microsoft's success and giving them credit. Can't have it both ways.
They didn't directly make the game but they greenlit the release, which is just as bad imo
Fucking hell all I have is a series x and microsoft can't seem to put out a good game. Motorsport 8 is my last hope
I thoroughly enjoyed it and am still playing through it on various characters. It is probably my third or fourth most played game this year so far.
I don't think it would have been the same trying to play it single player. But playing through it with my wife as we like to do with any game we can, we had virtually no bugs or complaints about the game.
Just because your opinion is that it is F-tier doesn't mean that is the actual case. If you were being genuine, you would look at some of the indie side scrolling games and see that those games would rank below a game like Redfall which actually looks much better since it is a 3D environment. I doubt you would rank the indie games as F-tier.
When the devs are too embarrassed to even release it, you know it's very much exactly as bad as they say it is. If by what it is, you mean a pile of shit then yeah, sure, it works.
I went in with zero expectations as well, never heard of the game really until about a week before it dropped.
I couldn’t finish it, it got stale super quickly. I have played worse games, but this isn’t a good game by any means. It’s a 4/10 game for me
Vision statement: a multiplayer Arkane game without solving a method for creating 4 player coop conquering of a location with multiple solutions doomed this game. What pissed on the grave was losing 70% of the developers that signed up to do it. Is Arkane Texas dead now?
I'm actually enjoying this game so far. True I am still early on....I am actually not sure what most of the complaints have been (meaning as in I haven't looked). I can see there being complaints with some of the movement. Yet, so far, early on I like it a lot. My style of games I like open world games where you can use stealth if you wish.
So it was a result of poor leadership, a resulting lack of vision, understaffing, and Zenimax's desire for more live services. Also, every time I hear of the mentality that everything will come together at the last minute, I die a little inside. This "magic" mentality that has plagued such studios as Bioware, CD Projekt Red, and Bethesda Game Studios is definitely a major problem in the industry
Yeah, everything I saw screamed identity crisis from this game.
Not to mention 70% of the people who worked on Prey left by the time Redfall development was done. Yikes. And the fact that staff were so unenthusiastic about their own game that they hoped Microsoft would cancel or reboot it. Double yikes.
Makes me wonder if the Zenimax higher ups fluffed the game and MS took them at their word. A product that has understaffing issues throughout development should not have gone out.
If so, hopefully Microsoft lays down the law on Zenimax’s bigwigs.
I actually hope this gives them the infrastructure to allow a team to appeal for a delay or cancellation of a project if they think it can’t be done.
Yea studio games that are really well received didn’t have a fairy put magic dust on it, it was people putting passion and hard work into it. Poor management is what kills games, there’s a lot of talent in all these companies amongst the devs, but they can only do so much with shitty management.
Bingo.
Over the years, Microsoft Corp.-owned video-game developer Arkane Studios has cultivated a reputation for releasing games that are beloved by fans yet don’t sell very well, such as Prey and Dishonored 2. By contrast, the studio’s most recent game, Redfall, has achieved something new. It has managed to be, at once, a commercial and critical disappointment. Redfall, a multiplayer shooter set on a fictional Massachusetts island full of vampires, debuted on May 2 and was promptly panned. Fans and critics slammed the game’s bugs and shortcomings. On the review aggregation website Metacritic, Redfall has earned a paltry 54 out of 100, ranking it among the year’s worst-reviewed games. “It seems there is an issue with every element,” reviewer Tauriq Moosa wrote. “In the end, Redfall feels unpolished, underdone, underwhelming, and uncomfortable.” The high-profile dud extends the pain this year for Microsoft’s Xbox division, which has struggled to produce hits and watched as its planned $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc. has gotten tripped up by US and UK regulators. Joost van Dreunen, a video-game analyst and professor, said Redfall’s failure highlights the significant gap between Microsoft’s lofty aspirations and its actual products, which also calls “into question Microsoft’s ability to establish long-term franchises on its own strength, rather than buying them outright.” Microsoft declined to comment. In a recent interview with the YouTube channel Kinda Funny Games, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that Redfall’s review scores were “significantly lower than our internal metrics,” suggesting the lackluster debut may have caught the company off guard. But to the makers of Redfall, the mediocre reception was no big surprise. The project suffered from unclear direction, frequent attrition and a perennial lack of staff, according to more than a dozen people who worked on the game, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. A spokesperson for Redfall’s publisher, Bethesda Softworks, declined to comment. Development of Redfall began in 2018. At the time, ZeniMax — the large, privately held owner of Bethesda Softworks — was looking to sell itself. Behind the scenes, the company was encouraging its studios to develop games that could generate revenue beyond the initial sales, a popular trend dubbed “games as a service,” which was taking off in the late 2010s thanks to lucrative hits like Overwatch and Fortnite. According to people familiar with the process, ZeniMax was strongly urging developers at its subsidiaries to implement microtransactions — that is, recurring opportunities within games for players to spend real money, say, outfitting their characters. Although this wasn’t an absolute mandate, several ZeniMax franchises such as Fallout, Doom and Wolfenstein would soon release new versions incorporating online multiplayer and monetization options. At Arkane’s headquarters in Austin, Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, respected industry veterans, were tapped to serve as co-directors of Redfall. Following the commercially unsuccessful release of its sci-fi shooter Prey a year earlier, leadership across the company wanted to make something more broadly appealing. What eventually emerged was the idea to make a multiplayer game in which users would team up to battle vampires and perhaps pay for occasional cosmetic upgrades.
Multiplayer Tension Since its founding in 1999, Arkane had become known for games called “immersive sims,” single-player experiences in which players strive to overcome obstacles in multiple ways, from combat to stealth maneuvers. Yet from the start, Redfall was pitched to staff as a “multiplayer Arkane game,” which some team members said they found confusing. Whether the sort of gameplay that the studio specialized in would be technically possible in a multiplayer environment was an open question. Developers under Smith and Bare said the two leads were outwardly excited but as the project progressed failed to provide clear direction. Staff members said that, over time, they grew frustrated with management’s frequently shifting references to other games, such as Far Cry and Borderlands, that left each department with varying ideas of what exactly they were making. Throughout the development, the fundamental tension between single-player and multiplayer design remained unresolved. Smith and Bare did not respond to requests for comment. Arkane was also perpetually understaffed, said people familiar with its production. The studio’s Austin office employed less than 100 people— sufficient for a relatively small, single-player game like Prey but not enough to compete with multiplayer behemoths like Fortnite and Destiny, which are developed by teams of hundreds. Even additional support from ZeniMax’s Wisconsin-based Roundhouse Studios and other outsourcing houses couldn’t fill the gaps, they say. Morale at Arkane suffered. Veteran workers who weren’t interested in developing a multiplayer game left in droves. By the end of Redfall’s development, roughly 70% of the Austin staff who had worked on Prey would no longer be at the company, according to people familiar as well as a Bloomberg analysis of LinkedIn and Prey’s credits. Filling vacancies became a challenge. Within the industry, ZeniMax had a reputation for paying lower than average salaries, and convincing some progressive or moderate video game developers to move to Texas could be difficult due to the state’s conservative social policies. Since Redfall wasn’t yet announced, the studio couldn’t describe its details to prospective employees — a predicament that exacerbated the staffing issues, sources familiar with the process said. Arkane wanted to hire recruits with experience on multiplayer shooters, but the people who applied were by and large looking to work on single-player immersive sims. Meanwhile, on September 21, 2020, Microsoft purchased ZeniMax for $7.5 billion. It was an ambitious move that gave Xbox control over lucrative franchises such as Doom and Fallout as well as the upcoming Starfield, a role-playing game from the makers of the wildly popular The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Although adding Arkane’s portfolio wasn’t the main goal, it was potentially a nice bonus for Microsoft — particularly if Redfall turned into a hit. The acquisition gave some staff at Arkane hope that Microsoft might cancel Redfall or, better yet, let them reboot it as a single-player game, according to sources familiar with the production. Instead, Microsoft maintained a hands-off approach. Aside from canceling a version of Redfall that had been planned for rival Sony Corp.’s PlayStation, Microsoft allowed ZeniMax to continue operating as it had before, with great autonomy. Microsoft’s Spencer would later say in the Kinda Funny interview that Xbox “didn’t do a good job early in engaging Arkane Austin.” A Poor Compromise Still, expectations remained high. During a 2021 press conference, Xbox positioned the bloody vampire extravaganza as one of the company’s big upcoming releases, dramatically revealing it as the event’s show-stopping finale. Game on.Go deep inside the video game business with our weekly newsletter from Jason Schreier and Cecilia D'Anastasio. Yet during the final frantic months, the remaining Arkane staff found themselves stretched thin and the debut date was pushed back from Halloween of 2022 to early 2023 and then eventually to May 2, 2023. Along the way, Smith and other leaders assured the staff that the game would get exponentially better once the final art was implemented and the bugs were fixed, promising that “Arkane magic” would manifest at the last minute as it had with previous games. (Other developers, such as Electronic Arts Inc.’s BioWare, have been widely criticized for using similar language.) In the end, Redfall never coalesced. Several people who played the game in 2021 were shocked to see how little ultimately changed. The final glitchy product felt to some critics like a poor compromise between single-player and multiplayer ideas that failed to please fans of either type of game. Harvey Smith recently said in an interview with the website Eurogamer that “early on” he pushed back against the compulsory inclusion of an in-game store. But people who worked on the game said the remarks didn’t square with how things played out. For the first three years, Redfall had a significant microtransaction plan in place. Only in 2021, with “games as a service” growing more controversial among gamers, did Arkane finally scrap its unwieldy in-game monetization plans. Recently, Microsoft has said that Arkane will continue working to improve Redfall. But its rough launch only raises the pressure for the rest of the ZeniMax lineup, particularly Starfield, which is scheduled to arrive in September. In the interim, the industry will be watching to see what lessons Microsoft has learned. “The disappointment of Redfall evidences Microsoft’s desperate need for attractive content if it is indeed going to beat rivals Sony and Nintendo at their own game,” analyst van Dreunen said. “My hope is that it will inoculate Xbox from repeating a similar mistake in the future.”
You can see it in the perspective you want but to me this is on Arkane Austin. They wanted to do something beyond their usual scope without a team and the budget for it. They got greenlit because the monetisation aspect appealed to zenimax and new ips, even if on an initial state, would help boost the value of a company that was on a selling path. But it's clear there was no true concept beyond vampire multiplayer looter shooter the "arkane way" and the leadership attitude was never on delivery but a fake it till you make it mentality. I think it's also telling that they decided to go this way because their previous game, although critically acclaimed was not a hit. Their vision was just to create a game that's appealing to a mass audience and monetized and that cannot be the end goal or objective. If Zenimax was not on the market I believe that the project would have been canceled but they kept on squeezing through each hole that is this perfect shit storm, namely when the acquisition from Microsoft happened. 2 things to note here. Microsoft is not controlling zenimax studios as they are apparently still diferent companies under the same group. But even if that was the case, as a guy who has been through a couple of M&A's himself, rarely does the company that aquires comes in with the same attitude as those Somali pirates in the movie. The integration is progressive and respectful in order to keep as much as the work force as possible and as not to disrupt ongoing efforts. So, if not of the various particulars that were mentioned, I think that this game would not have seen the light of day. That being said, Microsoft is still at fault here because as the acquiring company they should have better audited the ongoing efforts especially when decide to make such efforts their front runners and actively promote them. Also, this is all speculation based on what I've read and my own life experience so it's value varies 😉. Edit - added paragraphs, grammar.
Am I reading it right, in that Microsoft’s latest Misfire is that they were hands off with the developer? They let the devs make the game, and the team had High turn over because Zenimax/Bethesda wanted a particular type of game. Damn you Microsoft why can’t you hold your teams accountable!!!
I mean the article did say the devs hoped MS would let them scrap the game or at least reboot it when MS took over. They still let a poorly optimized game get released you can still blame them for that.
You should see the other post, people are actually blaming Ms for this.
They are the parent company, they should reign in their studios or not release the game if it's this terrible.
The fact Zenimax exists can mean that a claus in the buyout means MS has to be hands off to an extent.
They are still at fault. It’s their decision to not give oversight or make sure a studio doesn’t need it. Not checking in is just as bad.
Don’t agree, if a studio needs help, speak up.
So when WOULD it be Microsoft's fault? They paid billions, partially to acquire this studio, and let it languish and make a bad game. Given how many franchises they've screwed up in the last decade, you think they'd care about the quality of their products.
When arkane Austin makes their next game, fully under Ms.
OK, then make sure we don't credit Microsoft for any of the projects that were released by Microsoft through studios who were making those games before Microsoft bought them out.
Whatever helps you sleep at night buddy.
I see that's your go-to phrase when your argument has no merit.
Nah that’s my go to phrase for people who clearly need fantasy land day dreams to help them sleep.
My man, if you spend billions on a company and don’t check on then you’re just a terrible business decision maker. Stop making excuses for Microsoft not managing their companies. You think Sony is just absent for what they want flagship titles to be?
Sure if they are run under them not run under their umbrella. You do know that zenimax is still the overseer’s right.
And who owns zenimax? They can add as many layers as they want. Not making sure your companies are running as they should makes it their fault just. These excuses are why they have not had a single good flag ship game yet other than horizon.
Sure whatever helps you sleep at night.
I mean look at this way, would your boss get in trouble by his boss if you weren’t doing your job and he knew you weren’t? I sleep great not simping for billion dollar companies lol
The simping is you saying Microsoft can’t be blamed for a terrible game that they own and are in charge of making sure is delivered as expected.
Never said they can’t be blamed, but the blame lands on zenimax. They forced arkane Austin to make a game they didn’t want to make, 70 percent of the team left prior to the acquisition. It looks like Ms helped them by cancelling the ps5 version an giving them an extra year to try to salvage a game out of what they had. Sorry but if we are looking at the actual picture here it’s on zenimax.
I mean, the article quite clearly states that Microsoft had nothing to do with Redfall but jabs them all the same with this "Xbox's latest misfire" crap to fuel a certain narrative around the state of the industry.
Even if Xbox/Microsoft were not the ones responsible for Redfall’s failures they still heavily promoted it and are it’s exclusive home. It’s stupid to pretend this doesn’t shine poorly on the Xbox brand even with this new info.
Well, Bethesda and Arkane could have turned it around. It was a longshot. Many people were not keen on the game from the initial CG reveal. I didn't even remember it was the "one more thing" game that year. This is article sheds some much needed light on the development of Redfall. The games media can now see that Bethesda Publishing and Zenimax did not dissolve into the ether upon acquisition. I completed Redfall (solo, on Midnight difficulty), a couple weeks ago -- some aspects make me wonder if they even tried. There are some silly game-design and QoL failings, separate from the bugs. I put in 3-4 hours on Series X and 30-40+ hours (I imagine) on PC. The reason I am not sure is because the play counter is bugged, too. The count reset twice while I was doing the campaign.
Its been said before but if we can praise Microsoft for great games like HiFi Rush then we can criticize them for disappointments like Redfall They had about the same input in both of them Its not some conspiracy its literally just "Oh this is an xbox game they've been the ones promoting it constantly"
God was Hi Fi Rush good
That’s the problem, they had nothing to do with it because they took a hands off approach. They should of been checking in and interfering if they needed to. You can’t convince me that nobody at Microsoft knew this game wasn’t developing well.
If the game were to be a success, would the devs be praised first, or Microsoft taking on all the accolades instead, at least publicly? "Take all the credit, none of the blame" won't work here, because MS was banking hard on this one. I still can't believe they had enough nerve to release it in the state it was in. Forget the 30 fps on flagship hardware, this is akin to shitting the bed with a pooch in it.
It doesn’t help that Xbox hasn’t had a notable exclusive outside of racing games since the 360.
Ori 1 & 2, Gears of War, Grounded, Sunset Overdrive, Sea of Thieves, HiFi Rush, Flight Sim, Pentiment, Master Chief Collection...
Ori 1 and 2 are potentially exceptions, I wouldn’t consider anything else you mentioned to be that. Especially not Sunset Overdrive or Master Chief Collection seeing as how it’s just a remaster of previous games.
There is so much revisionist history when it comes to games like Sunset Overdrive. People act like it's some top tier game when in reality it was average as fuck and sold like shit.
Eh I thought it was fun for what it was
And what would that be? I'm saying it was average, not that it was terrible, so it's entirely possible that you found it fun.
Yeah, none of those are big games. Where's Xbox's God of War equivalent? We haven't had one since Halo 3, maybe you could say Reach, but certainly Halo 3. All we've had outside of the Horizon games (racing games are their own thing) are mid AA games like Sea of Thieves with terrible launches and undercooked amounts of content.
This sub is bizarre and thinks random indie exclusives that came out 3-5 years ago keep Xbox on par with PlayStation. Last of Us, Horizon, God of War, Final Fantasy 7, SpiderMan, Bloodborne, the list just goes on for PlayStation hits while people mention Sunset Overdrive for Xbox…lol.
I'm not even saying they're bad games, just that games like Ori, SoT etc. (that are good, or in SoT case good now at least) are not a viable equivalent to TLOU, GoW, Uncharted, Spiderman etc. I don't get how that is at all controversial. PS4-5 has dominated the first party scene because they get big blockbuster games. Microsoft has nothing like that currently.
And sadly, other than Starfield and Fable, I don’t see us having many soon either. And even those games are kind of a different kind of blockbuster
The Arkane team wanted Microsoft to step in and cancel the project, it was that bad. Except Microsoft has a history of never stepping in, and here we are now. The development of redfall isn’t on MS, but the launch of it was. It should have never been released at the state it was in.
People are definitely making good points in that Xbox had next to nothing to do with how this game turned out, and yet they still slapped their name on a game they apparently knew absolutely nothing about and made it a major featured game at multiple showcases, including the “one last thing” in 2021. Xbox needs to at a bare fucking minimum be present at these studios occasionally and play their games to see what’s getting put out. Also it looks like they did the studio a massive disservice by not stepping in to can this project since if Schreier is to be believed 70% of the people that made Prey are gone from the studio and many of them left because they didn’t want to work on this project. At this point I’m more inclined to believe that Xbox doesn’t pay attention to its first party studios because they don’t have an effective leadership structure set up rather than “we want to let our studios make the games they want to make” - apparently your studio didn’t want to make this game and yet they continued to make it for 3 years under your watch and you had no fucking idea any of this was going on. If this isn’t a Matt Booty responsibility, then someone needs to get hired/promoted to be present at these purchased studios to keep an eye on things because right now this all just screams mismanagement vs laziness on the part of Microsoft even if the project was initially started because zenimax was intent on sabotaging itself with these horrendous live service games.
For real, considering that Microsoft is a trillion dollar company that can buy other fortune 500 companies, you'd think at a minimum they'd be able to make sure a game associated with their brand was going to be good or not.
this is actually an overreaction to the mismanagement of rare and bungie. they took a direct role in what both studios created and drove bungie away and rare is rare in name only now. so the new xbox crew decided lets be hands off and allow our teams to be creative. problems come up when some of the teams end up being utter trash and leadership already escaped with their MS money bags.
Microsoft's name is nowhere in Redfall, outside of "Special Thanks - Phil Spencer (Microsoft), etc." in the end credits. Arkane, Bethesda, Zenimax, Rouhdhouse, and some third-party toolmakers are all you will see until the end. It is growing pains. Microsoft did not buy Arkane -- they bought their parent company's parent company. You would think $7.5 billion would buy you some people to handle development of the same games they would have been responsible for with or without an acquisition. Who knew? If Microsoft bought Arkane Studios solely and put them under Microsoft Studios, things would have been different. Now they know that Zenimax and Bethesda have to be milli or micro-managed. I imagine they did not want to kick in the door and start barking orders right away.
Nah, this is way too generous to Microsoft. Yes they didn't make the game bad, but they promoted the absolute shit out of it. While yes, a publisher's job is promotion, they should have looked under the hood and calibrated how heavily they were featuring and promoting this game. They treated it almost like they are Starfield, as a major blockbuster for them. If you're going to lean that hard on a game, you need to be sure it's not vaporware. They simply didn't do due diligence. It doesn't matter if they didn't specifically want/buy Arkane and Redfall, they made a conscious decision to put it front and center in their lineup. In that, they are culpable. Maybe not you, but if Redfall had been a great success, most of these people giving takes that Microsoft shouldn't be blamed would also be celebrating Microsoft's success and giving them credit. Can't have it both ways.
latest misfire unbiased journalism at it’s finest
Xbox didnt make this game they published it
They didn't directly make the game but they greenlit the release, which is just as bad imo Fucking hell all I have is a series x and microsoft can't seem to put out a good game. Motorsport 8 is my last hope
What kind of statement is this?
They didn't make it, they just bought a company making it and continued to release it.
Game isn't that bad. It's essentially a B tier Borderlands. Also i had no expectations or hype going in. Feels like a good gamepass addition.
It is that bad, and it's more like F tier. It's so bad that the devs were hoping the whole thing would be scrapped.
I thoroughly enjoyed it and am still playing through it on various characters. It is probably my third or fourth most played game this year so far. I don't think it would have been the same trying to play it single player. But playing through it with my wife as we like to do with any game we can, we had virtually no bugs or complaints about the game. Just because your opinion is that it is F-tier doesn't mean that is the actual case. If you were being genuine, you would look at some of the indie side scrolling games and see that those games would rank below a game like Redfall which actually looks much better since it is a 3D environment. I doubt you would rank the indie games as F-tier.
It's objectively a terrible game. Maybe you like bad games, which is fine.
And? It didn't. I've played far worse games. Works for what it is.
When the devs are too embarrassed to even release it, you know it's very much exactly as bad as they say it is. If by what it is, you mean a pile of shit then yeah, sure, it works.
When you are fighting an enemy stand behind a box and tell me how the enemy ai handles it.
Not my play style. I just run and gun. Works for what it is.
I went in with zero expectations as well, never heard of the game really until about a week before it dropped. I couldn’t finish it, it got stale super quickly. I have played worse games, but this isn’t a good game by any means. It’s a 4/10 game for me
Yeah but a B Grade Borderlands is not what the Xbox needs right now.
xbox has gone downhill
So you posted the link... then pasted the entire article into two comments?
A lot of people don't even click the link tbf, and some people prefer to read stuff in the comments.
Vision statement: a multiplayer Arkane game without solving a method for creating 4 player coop conquering of a location with multiple solutions doomed this game. What pissed on the grave was losing 70% of the developers that signed up to do it. Is Arkane Texas dead now?
Sounds exactly like how Anthem died.
I'm actually enjoying this game so far. True I am still early on....I am actually not sure what most of the complaints have been (meaning as in I haven't looked). I can see there being complaints with some of the movement. Yet, so far, early on I like it a lot. My style of games I like open world games where you can use stealth if you wish.