Arkane employees hoped that Microsoft would cancel the game – Jason Schreyer published an investigation into Redfall development
Arkane Austin employees hoped that Microsoft would cancel Redfall or restart it in the form of a single -user game after Zenimax was purchased by Microsoft at the end of 2020.
Until now, 2023 was murderous for games thanks to Tears of the Kingdom, Street Fighter 6, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Hi-Fi Rush. The list can be continued. However, there were several noticeable disappointments, such as Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Forspoken. Undoubtedly, the biggest disappointment today is Redfall, a multiplayer vampire game from Arkane Austin, which is currently one of the worst games of the year according to reviews.
According to the recent material of Jason Schreyer from Bloomberg, this was not a surprise to the team working on the game, since the project suffered from "obscure direction, frequent dismissals and constant lack of personnel", According to several anonymous sources working on the game.
The problematic development of Redfall began in 2018, when Zenimax, which sought to sell itself, according to reports, "I strongly recommended" their developers to introduce microtransactions into their games and promote more games as a service. Due to the low sales of PREY, the ARKane leadership sought to do something more "Widely attractive", And this is how Redfall appeared and her confusing identity as "ARKANE multiplayer game".
Although Harvi Smith and Ricardo Bar seemed to be delighted with the project, the Bloomberg report assumes that the developers who worked on the game were confused about what kind of game they made at all, since several different games were mentioned during the development, such as Borderlands and Far Cry. The project was already unimportant during the development, at least for a multiplayer game, but the situation worsened, since the developers-veterans who were not interested in creating a multiplayer game left the studio. According to Bloomberg, about 70 percent of Arkane Austin employees who worked on Prey left the company during the development of Redfall.
According to the report, the morale of the Arkane Austin was so low that some employees hoped that the acquisition of Zenimax and Bethesda by Microsoft will lead to either canceled or that the game would be canceled "better", rebooted into a single -user game, which, obviously, did not happen. The only thing that was in the end was canceled is the Redfall port for PlayStation, which became known closer to launching the game.
Closer to the end of the development of Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bar reassured employees that the game will become much better when final strokes will be made and bugs were fixed. Many developers who saw Redfall in 2021 were shocked by the fact that it has not changed in any way for the final version
Microsoft has been shocking frankly against Redfall failures from the moment of rude launch, but Bloomberg reports indicate dishonesty regarding the overall development of the game. Harvi Smith claims that during the development he opposed microtransactions and an intra -game store, but the employees who worked on the game say that there was "A significant plan of microtransactions", which was deleted only in 2021, and it could even be seen on leaked beta cadres after the initial announcement of the game.