Redfall has received a heavy amount of backlash over the last month for its troubling PC performance problems according to TheGamer. Among these issues included: stupid AI, very buggy performance, and a lack of matchmaking in a co-op game among many other issues. It appears as though players were not the only ones who were concerned for the game’s success, as Arkane lost 70% of Prey’s (the studio’s previous game) development team over the course of Redfall’s development according to Gamespot.
Going a bit more in-depth about the issue, a recent report has shown that many of Arkane’s studio staff members were uneasy about the game and felt that it was going to fail. This affected the game heavily as the studio had a very difficult time replacing the talent that they were losing.
A Bloomberg article on the issue goes in-depth on some of the more direct issues involved with the game’s development, starting with the lack of direction. The game was developed under Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare but seemingly did not provide clear direction to the team, which caused a lot of miscommunication on what the game was supposed to look like in the end.
The biggest example of this is with the single and multiplayer implementation, which players found to be disjointed and confused. This was reflected in the way the game was developed, as the two aspects of the game had a confused development without a clear vision of what it should look like. With the staff of Arkane already being less than 100 people, it hurts to lose 70% of that staff when trying to create a big game like Redfall.
With all of this internal confusion, the game ended up coming out as, what many people consider, an incomplete product. Many fans are hoping that the next project by Bethesda, Starfield will make up for the blunder that Redfall was. Unfortunately, fans will have to wait until September 6, 2023, to find out how Starfield will perform.