It’s a well-documented fact that Arkane Austin’s multiplayer FPS Redfall has had a messy launch, with players and critics panning the game, Phil Spencer issuing an apology over the matter, and reports of a generally understaffed and misguided development team. Despite the stumble, however, Microsoft’s game studio chief Matt Booty promises that the studio and the game won’t be going anywhere.
The Axios interview sees Booty admit that there was “a failure to set expectations around what the game needed to be as a first-party release” while Booty lays blame on himself for the matter. “I feel accountable that we could have done a better job with Arkane,” he says.
However, Booty also says that Redfall is getting “good play” on Game Pass and that Microsoft will continue to support Arkane Austin and keep its doors open. “It was a miss, but how much of a miss? I want to support them to be able to keep working to deliver the game they had in mind. […] [Keeping Arkane Austin open] is the plan right now. They are hard at work on updates and continued content for Redfall.
Speaking of updates for Redfall, patch notes from last week detail increased enemy spawn rates in the open world, fixes for unresponsive foes in combat, better AI behaviors in regards to pathfinding and vampire reactions to player noise, and multiple performance improvements both in multiplayer and in general.
The notes also promise these fixes are the first of may while acknowleding that the game still has a lot of fixing ahead of it. “Building a play space this large has been humbling to say the least,” the notes open. “We plan to address as much as we can, as quickly as we can.”
