Redfall took Arkane Austin away from what it did best

When Redfall launched in May 2023, Arkane Austin had moved far beyond the kind of immersive sims it was known for. The studio behind Prey was now making a co-op vampire shooter designed around ongoing updates and multiplayer.

Redfall co-director Harvey Smith now says Arkane Austin "never should have been working on a games-as-a-service game." Ben Horne, its production director, similarly describes the project as work outside the team's expertise. Both are now at Black Pony Immersive, returning to the immersive sims that made Arkane's reputation.

Arkane Austin spent the next year trying to improve Redfall. Microsoft announced the studio's closure in May 2024 while more work was still unfinished. Former developers now describe Redfall as work outside Arkane Austin's expertise. The game itself shows what that meant, with ideas built around solo exploration stretched across co-op, an open world and live-service progression.

In Prey, Arkane Austin gave players tools that could solve the same problem in several different ways. The GLOO Cannon could create a climbable path or seal a jet of flame, depending on what the situation required.

A wall could become a route upward, a fire hazard could be blocked, and the same tool might solve a completely different problem in the next room.

Redfall brought that approach into a four-player game, with each hero adding abilities that could work alongside someone else's. Remi could heal the group, Jacob could eventually share his invisibility with teammates and randomized weapons added even more variation to how a fight might play out.

The open world made those fights harder to control as well. Arkane said before launch that it could not place every encounter by hand, so designer-made encounters could appear in different locations. Enemy strength and composition also changed depending on party size.

A fight might therefore appear somewhere different, face one player instead of four and be approached with a completely different mix of abilities. Arkane still wanted players to explore, improvise and find their own solutions, but it no longer had the same control over the spaces in which those decisions happened.

The move toward co-op and a larger open world was part of a broader bet. Smith believed Arkane could reach more people by combining the studio's immersive-sim ideas with games as a service, while Horne has described that model as a common direction across ZeniMax at the time.

Smith now says he overestimated how easily those two things could fit together. Arkane knew how to build spaces full of possibilities, but Redfall also needed progression systems, multiplayer balance and content that could keep expanding after launch.

The Hero Pass included with the Bite Back Edition had already committed Arkane to two additional playable characters. The team therefore had more powers and interactions to design and balance beyond the original four.

Microsoft inherited that project when it acquired ZeniMax in March 2021. By release, Redfall was still being sold on Arkane's reputation for player freedom, even though the studio had spent years learning systems that sat well outside the work that had defined Prey.

The problem was that Arkane had taken on a type of game that demanded constant support and expansion, while at the same time it was trying to preserve the detailed, systemic design people expected from the studio.

By the time Redfall launched, Arkane was still trying to get some of those fundamentals in place. The game cost $70 and arrived on Xbox without a 60fps performance mode because, according to Horne, the frame rate still dipped too noticeably. Console players were left with 30fps while Arkane continued working on the faster mode after release.

Combat had bigger problems. Enemies could get stuck or stop responding altogether, which made many of Redfall's hero abilities and alternative approaches less useful than they should have been. Choosing how to enter a fight means much less when the enemies on the other side do not reliably react.

That stood in sharp contrast to Prey, where the environment and enemies gave players something consistent to experiment against. Redfall offered more heroes, more weapons and more ways to approach combat, but the encounters themselves were not always strong enough to support them.

Arkane spent the following months fixing that foundation. The October update increased the number of enemies in the open world, addressed opponents that stopped responding and added stealth takedowns against human enemies. The long-promised Xbox performance mode arrived at the same time.

Five months after launch, Arkane was still adding basic combat options and repairing encounters while also carrying the longer-term commitments of a live-service game.

Microsoft closed Arkane Austin on May 7, 2024 as part of wider cuts across Bethesda. Xbox executive Matt Booty said resources were being moved toward other priorities. Some employees were reassigned to other Bethesda projects, while further Redfall development was initially ended and the two additional Hero Pass characters were canceled.

Arkane had spent a year trying to bring Redfall closer to the game it had promised. The studio was closed before that work was finished.

Smith says six or seven former employees obtained permission to return and release version 1.4. The update was already in development when they lost their jobs, and they asked Microsoft to let them finish it.

"I know we don't work here anymore, but can we please release this?" he recalls asking. Microsoft agreed and allowed them back into the building. Their return allowed work that had survived the difficult first year to reach players despite the shutdown.

Game Update 4 arrived on May 30, 2024, adding offline play and the ability to pause in single-player. Redfall could now be played without relying on its servers, even though that independence arrived only after the studio itself had been shut down.

There is something fitting about Arkane Austin's final work on the game being a step away from the live-service structure that had pulled it so far from Prey. The developers returned after losing their jobs to make sure Redfall could survive on its own.

Arkane Austin never got another game in which to return to what it did best. Its last update instead left behind a version of Redfall that was, at least in one important way, closer to the kind of game the studio had always understood.