Redfall was a failure. When it was first announced as a multiplayer loot shooter, there was a sliver of hope among the faithful, despite its departure from the studio’s normal output. A faint glimmer remained that it would still be ripe with Arkane magic. Even as hands-on previews trickled out to a largely negative reception, small deposits of optimism could be found in the comparisons to Dishonored and how, when you weren’t fighting hordes of bland vampires, there would be an opportunity to explore the world and piece together your own narrative.
Fans hoped, based on this magic alone, that levels would be far more than generic battlefields, or suburban households and abandoned piers would hold rotting corpses with distinct stories to tell, ones that perhaps the heroes could provide a nuanced perspective on our minds could never have even considered. All of these charming qualities are what made experiences like Prey and Deathloop so special. A shared DNA was omnipresent, as if few restrictions were placed on Arkane to fulfil its creative vision. Now, this magic is no more.
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier recently published a report which explores the commercial and critical failure of Redfall. In speaking to developers on the project or close to it Schreier pieces together a messy picture of the game’s troubled development. It was understaffed due to the failure of Prey and the majority of staff not being interested in creating a multiplayer title, and publisher Zenimax was allegedly pushing the inclusion of microtransactions and creation of more ambitious live-service games capable of bringing in more revenue. This, by definition, goes against everything Arkane stands for, while a hands-off approach by Xbox following its acquisition of Bethesda meant little interference was had and the course never corrected.
The report touches on the idea of ‘Arkane Magic’ and how the term was used by co-directors Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, suggesting the game would all of a sudden be significantly better once final art was
implemented and the team had a chance to see how Redfall would look, play, and feel in the hands of consumers. It’s almost like a magic wand was going to be waved and all would be fixed, as if the development pedigree Arkane had built up for decades would revive a project which for its entire production had ignored those tenets completely.
Leadership that promises a struggling team their hard work will turn around without tough decisions or brutal honesty is no leadership at all, and played a role in the game’s downfall. Phil Spencer told Kinda Funny Games that internal mock reviews for Redfall were far more positive than the reality, while Bloomberg’s report actively refutes this. Arkane was well aware of the dire state of affairs, some even hoping the project would be canned when the acquisition took effect. This didn’t happen, and now the studio’s reputation is tarnished.
All thanks to a belief that everything would be fixed through the power of magic, or foolishly believing that everything would get better with time instead of actively addressing the flaws at the centre of Redfall’s broken design. This sort of belief isn’t uncommon, and has become a regular trend amongst developers who have created so many good games in the past, that they couldn’t possibly bring forth a stinker. It’s possible though, and often caused by developers venturing too far outside their regular wheelhouse or bowing to the whims of capitalism forced upon them by greedy executives. I’m sorry to say, but magic doesn’t exist.
Bethesda, BioWare, CD Projekt Red, and Rocksteady are all developers who in the past we could see doing no wrong. Everything they touched turned to gold, each game pushing the medium forward with visual, narrative, and mechanical benchmarks others studios would struggle to match. This is still the case in some instances, but all of the aforementioned names are known for toxic crunch culture, high staff turnover, failed ideas that fell victim to a cycle of overhyped marketing, or experimental titles that never once fit their identities. Even as we saw the cracks begin to form in games like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League or Cyberpunk 2077 there was a blissful ignorance from both eager players and public faces.
False promises and little white lies resulted in broken launches or huge disappointments that would soon be dissected in reports much like Bloomberg’s, where the frustrations across the development of games we love to hate are laid bare for all to see. Video games are capable of making us form emotional connections and lifelong memories, either through mechanics that change the landscape forever or stellar narrative and characters we can’t help falling in love with. None of these are achieved through magic, as poetic a term it might be.
They are concerted efforts of teams big and small spread across countless creative roles and disciplines which combine to achieve the impossible, and to demean all of that effort down to little more than a collective magic belonging to a single name is dangerous. You might be tempted to view your favourite media with an almost blissful ignorance towards its inception, when the reality often falls down to long lines of code, extensive meetings, and crunching nights away in the hope a masterpiece is born. Magic isn’t responsible here, and even if it was, there isn’t enough of it in the world to fix a game like Redfall.