It's no secret that development on Redfall didn't exactly go to plan - as evidenced by the state of the game when it finally released in May 2023. Since launch, Phil Spencer has come out and said that he's "disappointed" with how he handled the release, and now a fellow Xbox exec has made some interesting comments on the title as well.
In an interview with IGN, Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty was asked about about the Arkane shooter and how it could have been handled differently during development.
"If I were to look back, where I feel a little remiss on the Redfall thing, that project was started before we acquired Zenimax, and I think we could have done a better job of onboarding them,"
"Sometimes, a team can just get a little bit of tunnel vision around their game, and sometimes management can have the opposite problem where maybe they’re zoomed a little too far out [...] And it was a case of us having indicators that the game was going to perform a certain way...we had people play the game, we had reviews, we do mock reviews, we just had indicators that it was going to perform better than it did. And I think the team was so committed to what they were building that they just had a little bit of tunnel vision."
Although things could have been smoother for Xbox, Bethesda and Arkane, Booty explained that it's ultimately down to him as Xbox Game Studios boss, and ZeniMax head James Leder, to take the flak and try to improve the title.
"To me, I just feel for the people that spent all their time working on that, and are coming under all this fire for their game. I just immediately go to, how do we support the team? How do we support them to get the game in good shape, and what can we learn from this?"
As it turns out, we've just started to see those improvements take shape. This week, Arkane delivered its first patch for Redfall a little over a month since the game's launch - containing a huge list of bug fixes and improvements. Redfall Update 1.1 doesn't contain the team's promised 60FPS mode, but the team also provided an update on that, which you can read down below.