the developers hoped their game would be cancelled, they knew that

With its Metacritic rating of 59% (an average achieved on all press tests around the world) and a “user score” of 3.5/10, Redfall is undoubtedly one of the big failures of 2023, but also of Microsoft, of which it is one of the rare exclusivities. Beyond the bad ratings, Redfall also represents the defeat of Microsoft in its ambitions and this ability to try to be at the level of Sony or Microsoft, despite the numerous takeovers of studios. Six years after starting to acquire talent from all walks of life to promote the Xbox brand in the world, the situation in 2023 is quite alarming. But what exactly happened to cause Redfall to crash so much, artistically speaking? In an article posted on Bloomberg, the journalist Jason Schreier went to his little investigation, with testimonies from anonymous developers who had a lot on the potato. The observation of this artistic and commercial failure is probably a combination of managerial incompetence and a choice to make a multiplayer game that is already very controversial internally.

Schreier’s investigation indeed sheds light on the confusion that reigned within the studio, not really thrilled to go on a multiplayer-sounding game, while Arkane is a studio that is used to working on solo titles. Worse still, during the early drafts and years of development, Redfall was intended to be a multiplayer game, based on a micro-transaction business model. So admittedly, upon release, the game didn’t feature an in-game item shop, but it did prepare for future elements of the over-the-air shopping service, including two new classes that are sold separately. Very quickly, theEmployees were frustrated by the frequent changes in the direction of the game, sometimes Borderlands-style, then eyeing Far Cry. The development was chaotic, to the point that many people preferred to flee the project. “Throughout development, the core tension of choosing between making a single-player or multiplayer game was never resolved,” claims a member of the team who preferred to remain anonymous.

The understaffing on Arkane’s team compounded this confusion, especially since it was studio veterans who left the studio in droves, as they weren’t interested in developing a multiplayer game. Morally, it was hard for the teams. Worse, Arkane couldn’t post specific job openings for Redfall, lest it reveal the nature of his secret project – which would have led staff members to have other expectations for their jobs. According to Jason Schreir’s report and the sources who decided to testify, around 70% of the studio that had worked on Arkane Austin’s famous Prey left the company during the development of Redfall. Worse still, during the takeover of Bethesda by Microsoft for the tidy sum of 8 billion, at Arkane Austin, we very much hoped that the game would be canceled by Microsoft, which would have noted the internal disaster, but the American manufacturer obviously did not to detect the bad potential of the game, leaving the production to fester. What better to understand the rout and the poor quality of a game that will never hype anyone. For Microsoft and Bethesda, the pressure is even more important for Starfield, which will have to prove that Microsoft still has the capacity to manage real interesting and exclusive projects for its consoles.