Redfall

I was not compensated for those five days, but I got to pick when they were.

They made it as convenient as possible, right? Now, if you were going to be fired or furloughed or what have you from a video game studio, you would think of situations like a, oh, I don't know, what's a recent video game disaster? Redfall.

It's not that recent, but you know what I mean.

Your game comes out, it has all these problems, it does not sell, and you can see the writing on the wall.

It de-

... to be fair, you love the Fortnite one, and to be fair, you love the Xbox, what was it, Redfall controller, so [laughs]

The problem is it's like those are, those are, like, bold, weird, flashy designs.

Those are just super subtle.

Oh, man, I tell you what, there are, like, games with fall at the end of the day don't have the best history when you look at some of them.

We've got Redfall, the game that... that killed Arcane Austin.

It didn't fall, indeed.

We've got Titanfall, the game that will never get a third one.

We talked about their new studio.

We talked about what happened with Redfall and the closure of Arkane Austin, the Arkane game dev scene, uh, Warren Spector's retirement, which I think was announced the day before they announced this studio.

Clearly they have stolen his soul or something.

Um, and also just generally about the health of immersive sims in 2026, because over on Noclip 2, we've, you know, on the podcast, on the channel, we've covered loads of great sort of like, you know, str- strange indie interpretations of r- of im sim stuff.

Oh, all right, man

... uh, it's i- in our backyard.

Um, what was, uh, the biggest change for you when you went to work at Arkane? Redfall was your first project there? Uh-

Yeah, that's right

I had a suspicion it was going to be a particular game, and this fits the brief.

So I'm going to guess Redfall.

Damn it.

It is Redfall.

Congratulations.

Oh, it is.

but yeah, it's disappointing.

But yeah, Redfall kind of didn't do well, obviously, as the other team, and obviously Blade still kind of hangs in the balance while Arkane tried to find a buyer for the entire company or a way to get out of Xbox.

It's changed.

I really want to see what they do with that, especially if that's going to be like this third person style game as well, like to see how that sort of translates.

I think that mechanic's fantastic.

And again, it's a really interesting signature design aspect of Deathloop, which... furthermore is indicative of you know arcane's approach to game design nothing has ever just simplistically kind of like spit onto the console or onto the pc it's like there's always some type of mechanic that is pushing the perception of a genre forward in a way that is both you know strategic and also like a layer of challenge that maybe you hadn't considered before but i that my read on like some of the grumbling around that game was like people just didn't really get it

yeah i think it's that and like i said the whole last death route like the console wars thing as well it's like oh it's a playstation exclusive and then of course you know arcane got bought as part of you know bethesda and by xbox no company has really suffered this generation more in that regard i think because you know prey back you know that had its own problems the audience for in general for games has got bigger and that means there's a lot more louder voices who are like not like this don't like this kind of game don't want that kind of and it just and we saw with Redfall that we ended up getting a game that was more like what they thought people would want and obviously for various reasons it did not turn out very well but yeah i don't know i do think it was mostly just console wars nonsense and the fact that it was just on a console that had barely been out you know at that point and we were in pandemic and it just yeah and i think um the other side of it was obviously people who loved arcane games before or maybe didn't like prey and we're still being kind of snotty and snobby about it.

Yeah, for that very complaint I made about, you know, the, oh, it's one and done.

I'm not going to be happy with Starfield at 30 frames per second.

I'm not going to be happy with Redfall launching at 30 frames per second and then turn around and be contrarian when it comes to GTA 6 and say, oh, well, it's okay for GTA 6 because it's GTA 6.

That's not like I have to be fair about this.

If you aren't going to launch a 60 frames per second mode and announce that and be confident this close to launch, then I have to say that's a little disappointing that they couldn't get that optimization in there.

Okay

... two weeks ago, and I asked him about Redfall.

Yeah.

Right? And he has, and even though the game, and I'm not, it's not related to your game, the game didn't do as well as he wanted.