Arkane Studios’ highly anticipated co-op multiplayer Redfall has failed to live up to the studio’s prestigious history. Not only have players and critics voiced concerns with the game’s condition during its launch, but even Xbox CEO Phil Spencer has been apologizing for it.
Having a promising triple-A title fail under his indirect yet influential supervision is something Phil Spencer definitely didn’t want. On May 4, he took Kinda Funny Xcast’s platform as a chance to share his feelings regarding the game.
“There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox Community,” Spencer said. “I am disappointed, I am upset with myself.”
He described the failure to deliver an important promise regarding frames-per-second as a “punch in the chin, rightfully.” Arkane Austin and Bethesda promised 60 FPS support for Redfall at launch but backed away from their plan last minute, restricting fans to a 30 FPS experience on consoles. Players can, however, play the game at 60 FPS on PC, but many reviews claim the framerate frequently dips even lower than 30 on PC.
Spencer also commented on Arkane Austin’s developmental career before Redfall, highlighting its achievements. “I’m a huge supporter of Arcane Austin, their track record is awesome. Love a lot of the great games that they built.”
The Xbox CEO also suggested that a launch delay may not have helped solve all the complex issues the team faced while building the experience. “This [Redfall] is one where the team didn’t hit their own internal goals. When it [Redfall] launched, I think it’s maybe a little simplistic to just say, ‘Hey, if you would have just delayed it three months, the core creative of the game would have delivered on something that was different than what it was.’”
Spencer assured fans that the Arcane team is dedicated to considering the community feedback and also adding the previously promised 60 FPS patch for consoles in the near future.
“The team at Arcane is taking the near-term feedback, we’re still working on the 60 frames per second. We have a good timeline for that. We’re committed to getting that done, and we’re going to continue to work on the game.”
Even though Arkane Austin failed to deliver with Redfall, Phil Spencer maintained that he wouldn’t be restricting the “creative aspirations” of teams. “I’m just not a believer in that; maybe that means I’ll underdeliver for some of our fans out there. I want to give the teams the creative platform to go and push their ability, push their aspirations.”
For Redfall’s unfortunate situation, however, he was sincerely apologetic: “I also need to have a great selection of games that continue to come, that surprise and delight our fans. and we underdelivered on that and for that, I apologize.”
Fans who purchased Redfall for $70, however, aren’t satisfied with Spencer’s statement. A viral Reddit post by Redfall player Turbostrider27 on May 4 saw several players lamenting how they’ve lost faith in Spencer.
Players also pointed out how some of the bugs were too prominent to go unnoticed before launch and it’s a shame that Arkane didn’t take the chance to make things easier for fans who bought the game at the first chance.
The most commonly reported issues in Redfall were major performance hiccups. Even gamers with high-end hardware struggled to stop the game from crashing multiple times. Many also highlighted the disappointingly barren open-world map, unchallenging AI design, and issues with the co-op multiplayer system.
Dot Esports reached out to Microsoft and Bethesda for comment but didn’t receive a response at the time of publishing.
