2023 has been both a great year for gaming and a reminder of what happens when developers don’t take the time to do things right and release a game when it’s actually good to play. Many AAA titles from respected developers have had everything from buggy launches to downright terrible releases, and it’s enough to make gamers furious that we’re having such issues still despite all the lessons of the past we can lean on. One of the best examples of this is Redfall from Arkane Studios. Their vampire title had the potential to be great, but it was a mess at launch in all the ways that mattered.
The game was dull, didn’t work properly at points, and didn’t make it feel necessary to play with friends despite it being a co-op title. The game got scathing reviews from both fans and critics, which was shocking because Arkane had made Game of the Year quality titles in the recent past.
Enter Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty, who talked with IGN recently about Redfall and noted some key things about its release and development. He, alongside others from Xbox like Phil Spencer, admitted that the game shouldn’t have been released when it did because it wasn’t ready.
But then, he took a turn and put the blame on the team at Arkane versus the new oversight team from Microsoft:
“Sometimes, a team can just get a little bit of tunnel vision around their game, and sometimes management can have the opposite problem where maybe they’re zoomed a little too far out,” he said. “And it was a case of us having indicators that the game was going to perform a certain way … we had people play the game, we had reviews, we do mock reviews, we just had indicators that it was going to perform better than it did. And I think the team was so committed to what they were building that they just had a little bit of tunnel vision.”
That’s fascinating to hear for various reasons. Mainly because after the failed launch of the title, reports came out about how the game was basically “doomed from the start” and that Arkane didn’t want to make the game in the first place but was asked to by Zenimax.
Furthermore, when Xbox bought Zenimax, they hoped that Xbox would cancel the game straight-up, but that didn’t happen because “they trusted Arkane to make it work.”
So clearly, there is fault on all sides here, but hopefully, this leads to something like this never happens again.
