Redfall development suffered from unclear direction and understaffing

Arkane Studios games are not always commercial successes, but they are highly valued by critics and the public. However, with Redfall, his latest project, he failed on all fronts. What happened during the development of Redfall? This same question was asked by Jason Schreier, and the answer given to us by his research published in Bloomberg It can be summed up as follows: unclear management and understaffing.

Schreier assures in his article that the mediocre reception of Redfall, whose average score is 58 out of 100 in OpenCriticIt didn’t come as a surprise to developers Arkane Studios, as acknowledged by a dozen or so people who worked on the project. The title went live in 2018, around a time when ZeniMax, the parent of Bethesda Softworks and owner of Arkane Studios, began moving to find a buyer. From the direction of the company, it was encouraged, but not forced, to develop games that could generate income beyond the initial launch, that is, create games as a service.

Arkane Austin came up with the idea to develop Redfall, which was described as a cooperative multiplayer title with a cosmetic item shop. Leading the project were Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, two industry veterans. The title was pitched to the studio as “a multiplayer Arkane game,” a confusing concept considering the team is known for immersive single-player sims like Dishonored and Prey. Adding to the bewilderment is an unclear direction throughout development and a tension between single-player and multiplayer design that was never resolved.

Arkane also suffered from understaffing. Schreier assures that the Austin studio had a staff of less than 100 people, which is not enough for a multiplayer of Redfall’s characteristics. As a result, morale at the studio dropped, and according to Bloomberg sources about 70% of the staff who had worked at Prey left the company. Filling the vacancies was challenging because of the salary and conservative Texas social policies.

To all this we must add that Redfall had not yet been announced, so Arkane could not offer many details to those who were interested in the work. The studio wanted people with experience in shooter multiplayer, but due to Arkane’s fame for developing immersive simulators, those interested wanted to work on this type of project.

In September 2020, when Microsoft bought Zenimax for $7.5 billion, some Arkane employees were excited about the possibility that the technology company would let them restart the project to transform it into a single-player title. However, Microsoft stood by and let the company continue to operate autonomously. His only order was to cancel the PlayStation 5 version of Redfall. On the other hand, the idea to remove monetization from Redfall came in 2021, when games as a service started to generate some controversy among the gaming community.

During the final months of Redfall’s development, Arkane was overwhelmed and the release was delayed. Management was confident that the title would improve and that “Arkane magic” would come into play. However, none of this happened and Redfall did not convince. The failure of this title adds pressure to the rest of the ZeniMax projects, which on September 6 will put Starfield on sale, a new intellectual property and what is possibly its most important game in many years. On the other hand, it remains to be seen what Microsoft has learned from all this.