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Redfall: The Inside Story of a Disastrous Vampire Shooter Game by Arkane Studio

One of this year’s biggest titles, but also failures, is the vampire shooter Redfall from studio Arkane. Disappointment with the game was expressed by players, reviews and not long after by Xbox and Microsoft management, but even before that by the developers themselves, although they didn’t brag. Journalist Jason Schreier decided to track down and learn more about how the game gradually went down the drain. He’s now shared the results of his investigation, which includes interviews with many developers, and it’s certainly not a pleasant read. So what went wrong and why did it turn out the way it did?

According to Schreier, the failure of the game and the problematic development are to blame for a number of factors that gradually completely sunk the result. At the same time, Redfall was supposed to be a big and exclusive title for Microsoft, in addition, Arkane studio has a good reputation thanks to the Dishonored series, for example. However, Redfall is the work of Arkane Austin’s branch, responsible for 2017’s Prey, which was not a huge commercial success. It was because of this that the next title should have been aimed at attracting a larger number of players, which should have been the task of Redfall, whose conceptual work had already started in 2018. However, by that time, the company Zenimax, which owned Bethesda and Arkane, was already looking for a buyer, which in in 2020 it finally became Microsoft. Even before that, however, Zenimax should have pushed developers to implement as many microtransactions as possible into the game to generate additional revenue. It was also intended for a long time to be a live service game. However, according to the interviewed involved developers, this was only the beginning.

Studio Arkane has generally focused on single-player games in the past, so Redfall was their first experience with multiplayer. Despite this, it was decided that it would be a multiplayer game that would involve fighting vampires. Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, who were already at Dishonored, became the leaders of this new project. However, over time, they should have started to hesitate about the concept itself and were not sure whether they wanted singleplayer or multiplayer, which brought the first confusion during development and splits in the team. Another problem was that not enough developers were involved in the development to efficiently develop such a large title. Reportedly, there were less than 100 developers involved in the project, and the work was complicated by numerous departures. That’s when the first emergency brake was pulled and development was suspended. Most of the studio hoped that Microsoft would cancel the game in this state, or at least restart its development and work on it as a single-player game, but that did not happen.

However, in the end, Microsoft did not get involved in any way, that is, with the exception of immediately canceling the PlayStation version and rechristening Redfall as an exclusive, which was then announced. Everything was to continue on the same track, as Microsoft left Zenimax a lot of autonomy. This was a big mistake with Redfall and it’s surprising that Microsoft took such a careless approach, especially when it was supposed to be their big exclusivity. After all, this was later admitted by Phil Spencer, that is, that they did not do a good job in their (non) involvement. The result of this is before us – it has collected negative reviews, lost most of its players and is not doing well in the Game Pass of which it is a part. In addition, more than 70% of the original developers should have left the studio long ago, although it turns out that there will be blame somewhere elsewhere…


2023-06-01 16:36:42
#Arkane #hoping #cancel #restart #Redfall #Vortex

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