The past few years, we have seen a litany of “redemption” stories in the video game realm. Some view these as a symptom of corporate execs rushing unfinished games, others believe them to be inspirational stories of dev hard work. Or you know, both.
This is happened with Fallout 76, No Man’s Sky and most recently, Cyberpunk 2077, games with horrific launches that spent years fixing and adding to their games to make them stellar. The most famous example of all is Final Fantasy XIV, which effectively deleted itself and came back as one of the best MMOs on the market, even finding a lore reason to do so.
Now, there’s some talk about whether Xbox’s Redfall may follow this same path. Redfall was indeed very much meant to be a live co-op game with future missions and characters and so forth. But instead it released as one of the lowest rated AAA games of the year, a bizarre fall for the normally stellar Arkane.
There’s a report from Jez Corden that says the following about the concept of a redemption arc:
“I spoke to some Bethesda people, and well I say I spoke to but I eavesdropped on their conversation at the not-E3 events in LA this year and they were talking about sticking with the game. Yeah, they were talking about sticking with the game for years and, you know, they want to give it a ‘redemption arc‘ and stuff like that.”
Jez later clarified to me that this is more “aspirational” than something that is definitely greenlit and happening, devs wanting to fix their work. Earlier reports suggested when Bethesda was acquired by Microsoft, some at Arkane actually hoped Microsoft would reboot or even cancel it. They didn’t, and later Phil Spencer had to say they should have gotten more involved.
But there is no viable path toward a true redemption arc for Redfall. This simply cannot happen every time a bad game comes out. We just saw a major patch for the game hit that added 60 fps, altered how shooting feels, made the world more densely populated and altered enemy UI.
It didn’t move the needle. Not at all. Some praised Arkane for getting out 60 fps like they promised, but a couple weeks after the patch hit, Redfall is not in Xbox’s top 50 most played games, despite being on Game Pass. Its Steam peaks are currently around 40 players total, its lows, seven players. This is identical to before the patch arrived.
The patch got some already friendly Xbox players to say “it’s better now!” but that conversation never lasted more than a day or two. I went back and played. Shooting was mildly better, still not good. Density was increased, but all that did is made me burn poorly distributed resources. Enemy UI was…well, I saw a soldier trying to shoot a vampire on a roof with a shotgun and miss for about five full minutes.
The bones here are rotten. The games I mentioned had something at baseline that worked. Fallout 76 was still a Fallout game. No Man’s Sky had its infinite planets that could become more populated. Cyberpunk 2077 had a great city and story elements and its main issues were technical.
Redfall’s main sin was chasing the live service train. It’s a four player co-op game without any matchmaking, and about half of your character kit is devoted to co-op play you will probably never use. Past that, the cutscenes are still images. The shooting is poor. The enemies are idiots. The art direction hurts my eyes.
The question now for me is not “can Redfall be redeemed?” because no, I don’t believe it can, nor should Microsoft or Arkane spend time and money and manpower to try to do that, but rather if Arkane still has to deliver on things they already literally sold to players, and continue to sell as DLC, namely the addition of two more characters. And they’re making that for what, a few hundred or thousand players on Xbox? A few dozen on Steam? But they sold it, so it’s that, or refunds.
It’s a miss. I still respect Arkane, I think they’re a great studio, but this just did not come together and is not in a position to be redeemed no matter how many more years are put into it.
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