Akane Austin’s Redfuall was released on May 2nd. And as our title reads, its been a veritable dumpster fire from day one. Some might call it a Shakespearan gaming tragedy, only if gaming existed in the 16th century Tudor period. At least back then there’d be no social media to trash the game instantaneously and globally – simultaneously (we like rhymes).
Xbox is apologizing for a myriad of problems with Redfall much like a Chili’s apologizes for failing to deliver the apps before your burger.
“There’s nothing more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community,” Phil Spencer, CEO of Xbox, told Kinda Funny. “Just to kind of watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m upset with myself.”
Here’s the full interview.
The launch was, as it turns out, a rock and a hard place for Xbox who banked on Redfall achieving a recently illusive top-tier game success. Xbox could have held the game back, but chose to push it amidst internally understanding the game wasn’t ready for market.
“There’s a fundamental piece of feedback that we get that the game isn’t realizing the creative vision that it had for its players. That doesn’t feel like a ‘Hey, just delay it.’ It feels like the game had a goal to do one thing and when players are actually playing, they aren’t feeling that thing, they aren’t feeling the creative execution of the team.” Spencer went on to explain.
But none of this CEO apology is without at least some pass the blame vibes. Much like that Chili’s manager telling you they’ve spoke to the waiter, Spencer says Arkane Austine, the developer of Redfall, lacked a “creative vision.”
Arkane was, by default fo the Microsoft takeover of ZeniMax, for all intents and purposes, acquired by Microsoft. Some believe the turnover to the Microsoft powers that be may have structurally changed Arkane to a lesser quality studio. And thus, you have the many fails of Redfall.
Redfall has been called “hollow,” among the many insults of its presentation and story.
Many of the scenes are still images with voice overs. This was a far different experience from the hyper animated trailers luring people into buying it. These non-animated cut scenes are rampant in the game.
The non-animated scenes represent the greater portion of the story. You’ll need to read A LOT. Its sort of joke. You don’t interact much with other characters, the game consist mostly of you chattering about alone. Its awkward, and sort of bizarre. You have no option to talk back to characters that essentially talk at you as if you’re all in agreement.
The game’s excitement hinged on fighting vampires. But guess what? That rarely happens.
The vampire fights aren’t bad, graphically, they just aren’t there much of the gameplay. And even more absurd, if you walk back and too the left, you pretty much neutralize the vampire. You’d think it would be a silver bullet or a garlic shot spray or something. Nope, walk back, and left.
Oh, its hard to pause the game. The map sucks. Like, what’s happening here? How would we use this?
Redfall claims they’ll continue to press forward and improve the game. That’s going to amount to a lot of pressing, given the current list of notable issues.
We’ll see.