More than three years after Redfall's disastrous launch, Harvey Smith has decided it's time to let it all out and share a few home truths. Arkane Austin's former creative director has now looked back on the game's development and admits the studio simply should never have taken on a live-service game. A directional mistake that, with hindsight, looks like one of the reasons behind a fiasco you could see coming from several thousand miles away.
« It was a game that didn't come together, and we should never have been working on a games-as-a-service game, to be honest », Harvey Smith explains in an interview with PC Gamer. A remarkably clear-eyed admission coming from one of Redfall's co-directors, but one that above all sums up the gulf between Arkane's historical DNA and the project it had been handed. In fact, we learn that after Dishonored and Prey, the Arkane Austin studio found itself developing an open-world co-op FPS about vampires, with a live-service dimension that demanded a very different logic from its previous productions. A direction that gradually pulled the studio away from what made its name: the immersive sim, environmental storytelling, the freedom given to players and the systems that let you solve situations in all sorts of ways.
The team still wanted to save Redfall
Redfall's release in May 2023 confirmed the fears surrounding the project, with a distinctly frosty critical reception tied to a raft of technical problems. The game was called out in particular for its lack of polish, its repetitive gameplay and the absence of a 60fps Performance mode at launch. Despite all that, the developers kept working on the game, and according to Harvey Smith, some team members even "begged" Microsoft to let them come back and finish update 1.4. They eventually got to do so, even though Arkane Austin had in the meantime been shut down by Microsoft in May 2024, with close to a hundred people losing their jobs. Harvey Smith still reckons version 1.4 brings back some of the things the team genuinely wanted to offer. He points in particular to a sequence written by Ricardo Bare about love, community and what symbolically separates a human being from a vampire.
Harvey Smith has since left Arkane and founded Black Pony Immersive, a new studio that aims to go right back to the immersive sim. With hindsight, then, Redfall looks to have served as a lesson in the dangers of pulling a team away from its area of expertise to chase a market trend. The contrast is all the more striking given the project came from a studio whose identity rested precisely on rich single-player experiences packed with systems and possibilities. Redfall was meant to mark a new direction for Arkane Austin. In the end, it was its final game.
