Redfall has, unfortunately enough, turned out to be one of the year’s biggest high profile flops. From core design issues to the technical state it has launched in, Arkane’s open world shooter has been criticized wildly by critics and audiences alike, and is currently sitting at a Metacritic score of 62 on Xbox Series X/S and 57 on PC.
In the wake of the shooter’s launch, Xbox boss Phil Spencer recently sat down for an interview with Kinda Funny Games, where he apologized for the state of the game and spoke about how Arkane is planning to support and fix it going forward. Something he also touched on was Microsoft and Bethesda’s internal expectations for how the game would review, and interestingly enough, it seems Redfall’s stark scores weren’t something the companies anticipated. Its final reviews, Spencer says, are “significantly below” those “internal metrics”.
According to Spencer, mock reviews conducted for the game suggested that its score would be “double digits” higher than it turned out to be, suggesting an aggregate score somewhere in the 70s at the very least.
“We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and [Redfall] is like double digits lower than we thought we would be with this game through our mock reviews,” Spencer said. “That’s one of the disappointing things. We would never strive to launch a game that we thought was gonna review in the low 60s. It’s not part of our goals.
“It’s not a defense at all, [but] if you look at our review scores over the last year, I think the teams have done a much better job in upping the level of quality of the games that we’ve shipped. Some of those games first shipped on PlayStation, but still, when you go through the list of games, you still have to build a game, you still have to ship a game. And [Redfall] was significantly below our internal metrics in terms of where it actually reviewed. But that’s not on anybody but us. We have to own that.”
In our own review of Redfall, we gave the game a score of 5/10, saying, “Redfall is Arkane’s most underwhelming game to date. A fascinating setting and some remnants of the developer’s beloved gameplay formula aren’t enough to overcome the game’s numerous issues, from stiff controls and disappointingly rote design choices to lackluster storytelling and technical deficiencies.” Read the full review through here.
Of course, Arkane Studios has committed to long-term post-launch support for the game – more so than any of the developer’s prior releases, in fact – so it should be interesting to see what the studio can salvage from the situation.
Meanwhile, a recent report has claimed that Redfall’s development had little to no involvement or oversight from Microsoft. Read more on that through here.
Redfall is available on Xbox Series X/S and PC.
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