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Redfall is one of the biggest industry disasters in recent memory—coming from Arkane Austin, a studio known for an all-time classic in Prey, the game was panned both critically and commercially. Even we, at PC Gamer, dubbed it the “first Arkane game we don’t like“.
It also served as the death knell for the studio as, one year later, studio owner Microsoft announced it’d be shutting Arkane Austin down. The narrative paints itself, especially given Microsoft’s utterly brutal behaviour in following years. The big bad M forced Arkane Austin, king of the immersive sim, to make a crummy live-service glob.
And that’s sort of the truth—it is, after all, why the studio founder left—but it’s not entirely Microsoft’s fault. The studio director at the time, Harvey Smith, tells The Game Business in a recent interview that it wasn’t just corporate which became swept up by the live service fugue.
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“Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there’s always more mouths to feed. And it’s great when you can reach a wider audience. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us.”
Smith describes a sort of naive optimism that Arkane could nail the same live service successes elsewhere in the industry: “We can do this. Let’s take what we love, and mix it with [games-as-a-service]. And do different mechanics by day and night. And have character classes.
“Then in the middle of all that, Covid happened. We also had the great resignation where everybody went remote and started changing jobs.” Later in the chat, Smith describes a deeply chaotic development cycle, plagued by all sorts of baffling occurrences: “There were fires. The government announced aliens at some point. There was a swarm of murder hornets coming toward Texas. We had an ice storm that put power and water out for like two weeks for some people. It was crazy. That development cycle.”
And, listen—I think it’s clear in hindsight that Smith was wrong to be optimistic, but it’s also clear that he did genuinely care about Redfall, even if it came out a mess. So much so, in fact, that Smith reveals he pleaded with Microsoft to allow himself and other employees to come back into the office and finish the game’s 1.4 patch.
“We finished the game and it was very poorly received. We then worked on it for a year. We patched thousands of bugs. We then got laid off, but we had in the pipe version 1.4. It was the one that fixed tons of stuff. So, we went to Microsoft and said, ‘I know we don’t work here anymore, but can we please release this?’
“And to their credit, they did not say no. They let six or seven of us sign forms that we could come back in the building. After being fired, we released 1.4, which I think if we had that on day one, it wouldn’t have set the world on fire, but it was a much, much better game.”
Ben Horne, who was the production director at the time, chimes in: “It feels like an achievement unlocked for me in my career, to release something after I’ve been fired and the studio closed down.”
Patch 1.4 wouldn’t necessarily save Redfall from obscurity. PC Contributor Rick Lane went back to it, writing: “still isn’t the game it needs to be, or the one Arkane Austin could have made. Nonetheless, I think the update shows that Arkane could have redeemed it in the long run.” The tragedy, I suppose, is that we’ll never know whether 1.5, 1.6, or 1.7 would’ve finally turned it into Smith and Horne’s vision.
