“That was a game that did not come together, and we never should have been working on a games-as-a-service game, to be honest,” says Harvey Smith, former creative director at Arkane Austin, now CEO of Black Pony Immersive. He is, of course, talking to us about Redfall—a rare black mark on Arkane’s otherwise impressive record.
Redfall is a bit of a tragedy. Some of the most impressive game designers around, the masters of immersive sims, ended up working on a vampire-themed open-world multiplayer shooter. It was poorly received, and a year later Microsoft shut down Arkane Austin. Almost 100 people lost their jobs as a result. At the time, the team was still working hard to salvage it. Development then ceased, for the most part.
The developers “begged” Microsoft to let them come back and finish 1.4, and it actually happened. Despite being laid off, the devs briefly returned and finished the final update.
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“There were highlights, and if you play the fully patched version, 1.4, some people get something out of it,” Smith adds. “And I believe that little section was written by [co-director Ricardo Bare] for somebody he loves and cares about, and so it was simultaneously Ricardo switching gears and being a writer, and also thinking about what is the nature of love and community, and what separates a human from a vampire in the metaphorical sense.”
Redfall also fell foul of the console war—a PS5 version was planned, but Microsoft cancelled it after it acquired Bethesda. Sony fans were then able to weaponise its less-than-glowing critical reception, wielding it as an example of Xbox’s failures.
“It’s fair for people to have their reactions based on all those factors,” says Smith, “and you learn what you can from it and you shelter your team as much as possible, and then you hopefully try to get back to the thing that you really love, which is what we’re doing with Black Pony.”
Black Pony executive producer Ben Horne also worked on Redfall and tells us that “there were many things that seemed to converge all at once when Redfall was releasing”. There was the $70 price, for instance, and the initial absence of a performance mode for Xbox at launch. “We held [it] back because we had noticed it maintained a good framerate, but there were dips that were noticeable, and we thought, ‘Let’s hold this to make this better,’ which turned into a huge thing that people came and said, ‘Oh, how come this isn’t 60 FPS at launch?'”
Horne acknowledges that the biggest issue, however, was the team was “working on something that was just outside of our expertise”. These were imsim experts working on a live service shooter. It was always going to be a challenge. “Getting back to what we do best was the number one priority, for Harvey and myself, for the folks at Arkane and now at Black Pony, this is what our focus is.”
Black Pony hasn’t revealed its first game yet, but you can be certain it will be an immersive sim.
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