Arkane Staff Reportedly Hoped Microsoft Would Cancel Redfall

thegamer.com:

Arkane Austin staff reportedly hoped that Microsoft might cancel Redfall or reboot it into a single-player game after ZeniMax was acquired by Microsoft in late 2020.

So far, 2023 has been a killer year for games thanks Tears of the Kingdom, Street Fighter 6, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Hi-Fi Rush... the list could thankfully go on. However, there have also been a few notable disappointments like Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Atomic Heart, and Forspoken. Without a doubt, the biggest disappointment of them all so far has been Redfall, Arkane Austin's multiplayer vampire game that currently sits as one of the worst-reviewed games of the year.

Related: You're All Sleeping On Redfall's Gunplay

According to a recent report from Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, this didn't come as much of a surprise to the team working on the game, as the project suffered from "unclear direction, frequent attrition, and a perennial lack of staff", according to more than a dozen anonymous sources who worked on the game.

Redfall's troubled development began in 2018 as ZeniMax, who was looking to sell itself around that time, was reportedly "strongly urging" its development studios to implement microtransactions into its games and push for more GAAS content. Because of Prey's low sales (you tasteless fools), Arkane's leaders were aiming to make something more "broadly appealing", which is how Redfall and its confusing identity as a "multiplayer Arkane game" came to be.

Although Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare were seemingly excited about the project, Bloomberg's report suggests that developers working on the game were confused about what game they were even making, as there were several different games referenced throughout the development, such as