I played and finished Redfall and I wouldn't call it a Live Service game at all. It was basically a single player campaign with a co-op mode. There was zero Service in Redfall. No new weapons, missions, map expansions, new Heroes, etc. Literally all we got was them fixing the enemy AI at the beginning of the game because some of the baddies wouldn't react to low level characters and just stay frozen in the air and a 60 FPS patch. That's it. A map expansion, with new mission types and weapons, along with two new heroes should have been released LAST Halloween. Then we would of had a Live Service game and maybe a redemption arc for Redfall. Honestly, it's kinda amazing Arkane Austin has stayed open this long.This is one reason I don't like to bother with Live Service games. Not that this game was even appealing to begin with. I don't know why people are eager to play these games when you aren't even guaranteed you will even get to play over a year. Unfortunately, closing of Arkane doesn't surprise me, but it sucks to see more and more studios closing. Phil Spencer did a poor job managing Xbox. I wish more people saw that in the beginning of this generation instead of the cultlike praise.
Some games honestly don't need it.Yeah! Fuck game preservation!
Arkane Austin Was Working on a Big Redfall Update for May Before Microsoft Ditched the Game and Closed the Studio - IGN
The now abandoned Redfall had a roadmap of support that was being actively worked on before Microsoft scrapped all development and closed its developer, IGN can reveal.www.ign.com
So Arkane Austin was about to release an update that would have given Redfall an offline mode, something that they said a year ago they were working on.
And Microsoft won't even allow them to do that.
What do all the people who were calling Microsoft pro-consumer the last few years, all the people who said they would buy games on xbox because Microsoft "is the safest place to build a digital library because they care so much" think about this?
Get in here and tell us about how they're oh so pro-consumer and how they're the only ones who care about our digital gaming libraries.
Without anger, but save it for the next time people gloat about MS money war chest, cheer for them to buy another publishers, and fantasise about MS funding all sorts of niche games and bringing glory to dormant great IPs and how GamePass is sustainable and great for all devs please.We've recently done a home renovation and the weekly cash burn with 5 tradesmen on site is enough to make you lose sleep...
...I cant imagine the insane amount of $$$$$ it cost to keep Arkane Austin up and running per week.
For those thinking they should have given them a few more weeks to patch a poorly-received game that didn't have a playerbase, it's throwing good money after bad.
What happened at that studio to go from Prey, which was critically well received, running on Cryengine, an engine very few devs mastered (is there even a dev, other than Crytek, that had reasonable success with it?), to Redfall with the more commonly used Unreal, where every mediocre dev should be able to do something with. Probably also helped here and there with other projects but these two games were all they did, right? Started out strong, but not really commercially successfull, only to trip soonish after. Did they lose people after Prey anyway or after the acquisition important people left to avoid MS?
They have non of the identity of the 360 days. They're basically just a shitty PC now. They could drop out tomorrow and the games industry would be just fine. It would probably be better off.
Prey and Redfall seems to share Ricardo Bare as the main writer, and Harvey Smith instead of Raphael Colantonio directing, but both worked on Dishonored in the key positions.Same thing that happened at Rocksteady.
exactly, imagine going on a mission to create an anti ms thread and of all things you cherry pick redfall, doesn't do much for your cause.After everyone unanimously shit on this game over and over again. Don’t act like you care about a offline mode.
Prey and Redfall seems to share Ricardo Bare as the main writer, and Harvey Smith instead of Raphael Colantonio directing, but both worked on Dishonored in the key positions.
I thought I read people left Rocksteady but the same Sefton Hill directing always + some writing, Ben Wyatt programmer, Ian Ball designer+ writing.
(If I can trust the wiki infos)
I usually assume the main roles were not the best people if a game is not really fun, but here it seems in both cases the main people were not really changed and the quality of what they directed/wrote/designed just fell off a cliff with increasing complexity, more outsourced work, more people involved, everything becoming harder to manage, more or too litlte involvement of top management??
Warner forcing Suicide on Rocksteady, sure, but who would order Redfall to be created?I think it's simply a case of developers who have a passion and interest in one type of game, being forced to make an entirely different type of game by the higher ups.
If you can't stand what you're making, it's likely to turn out as complete shit.
Warner forcing Suicide on Rocksteady, sure, but who would order Redfall to be created?
They might have been given some GaaS directive and shooter stuff seems natural but basically maybe a blank check to do whatever they come up with. There seemed to be no Gaas happening in any way, but the base is seemingly rather terrible, which is worse than Avengers and Squad where at least the main quests were competent - those fail at whatever is needed to be GaaS though. Hating to be ordered to have xyz in your game, okay, but Redfall seemed to fail even more so, with more freedom to come up with their own ideas.