Bethesda apparently hopes to keep working on Redfall for years, so it can also earn a comeback narrative.
When Redfall launched earlier this year, it was a mitigated disaster. It had numerous bugs and issues, but many reviewers also decided that the game design was fundamentally faulty. For these reasons, Redfall earned an abysmal 56 Metacritic score.
As shared by Idle Sloth on Twitter, Jez Corden of Windows Central was literally eavesdropping on some Bethesda staffers at what he describes as a ‘not E3 event’ in LA this year. Presumably, he is alluding to Summer Games Fest 2023, which was held in LA.
This was where Jez heard that Bethesda wanted to keep working on Redfall. To paraphrase Jez, they were talking about sticking with the game for years, so that they could give it a redemption arc.
Jez then points out that player numbers for Redfall remain slow, but it was interesting that word spread around far and wide that it would be getting a major patch before it was officially announced and released.
The redemption arc, or the comeback narrative, is a relatively new development for video games. While there have been many cases where games that were initially released with issues came out much better in a port, or a special edition years later, this is a bit different.
The deal with the comeback narrative is that they are happening at a time where the success of a particular title depends a lot on the public perception of said game. These are games with big budgets, made by large companies, and get promoted heavily, to raise those expectations.
The big examples of these games that we have covered here at GameRanx are CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077, and Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky. In the case of both games, it can definitely be said, that they received backlash upon release for releasing in a broken state. They also failed to live up to the expectations that the developers created for them.
In both these cases, it was the determination of the studio heads that would see them get through that comeback narrative, and make their games popular again. In both cases, the games’ reputations were redeemed, and gamers came back to buy and play the game.
But this just isn’t a healthy way to make games, and it should not become the new normal of the industry. It also doubles the investment of making these games, as the developers have to keep pumping money into development after they failed in the market.
Now some will say the prudent thing to do would be to delay as much as possible. But not everyone can afford to hold onto a game, like Nintendo did with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The game turned out more polished, but Nintendo faced a few months of droughts because of this decision.
The real solution should be obvious at the outset, and that would be to setting realistic boundaries and limits for games at the start of development. Let’s hope that the industry heeds these lessons in the future.
