Redfall: Arkane's Worst Day at the Office

Redfall released in May 2023 as a co-op open-world shooter about a small Massachusetts town cut off from the outside world and overrun by vampires, developed by Arkane Austin — the studio, distinct from its Lyon sibling, responsible for Dishonored 2 and Prey, two of the most tightly designed immersive sims of the last fifteen years. Redfall shipped requiring a constant internet connection even to play solo, ran at a stated framerate cap of 30 on console, and launched with review scores among the lowest of any game the studio had produced. Fourteen months later, in May 2024, Microsoft closed Arkane Austin entirely, alongside several other Bethesda-owned studios, in a restructuring the company attributed to the wider game industry’s post-pandemic contraction. Redfall wasn’t explicitly named as the cause in Microsoft’s public statements, but the timeline speaks for itself, and the game is worth examining precisely because its failures are so legible against the studio’s own established strengths.

What Arkane actually does well, and what Redfall asked it to do instead

Dishonored and Prey both work because of a specific design discipline: dense, hand-authored spaces built around multiple viable solutions to the same problem, where the player’s freedom comes from the density of interconnected systems in a small area rather than the size of the map. A Dishonored level rewards a player who’s scouted every route, learned every guard’s patrol, and improvised a plan combining two or three systems — possession, time manipulation, a sleep dart — that the designers built to interact. That’s an entirely different discipline from an open-world co-op shooter, which needs its content spread thin across a large traversable map rather than concentrated into a handful of dense set-pieces, and needs its systems built to withstand four players doing unpredictable, uncoordinated things simultaneously rather than one player executing a carefully scouted plan.

Redfall asked Arkane Austin — a studio with over a decade of institutional experience in the first discipline — to build in the second, and the seams show constantly. Redfall’s open-world town, Redfall itself, has isolated pockets of the density Arkane is known for: a handful of vampire nests and side objectives with genuine environmental storytelling and multiple entry points. But the connective tissue between those pockets is generic open-world filler — collectibles, repeated enemy camps, fetch objectives — of a kind the studio had never built at this scale before and it shows in how thin it is compared to the highlights.

The always-online requirement solved a problem nobody had

The decision that generated the most immediate backlash was Redfall’s requirement for a persistent internet connection even when playing entirely alone, with no offline single-player mode offered at launch. This wasn’t a technical necessity in the way some always-online requirements are defensible — competitive integrity, shared persistent-world state — because Redfall’s campaign is not a shared persistent world; it’s four separate hosted sessions, and a solo player gains nothing from the connection requirement except vulnerability to server outages. Arkane and Bethesda patched in an offline mode roughly two months after launch, which is itself a tell: a studio doesn’t remove a requirement that quickly unless it was never load-bearing to begin with, and the initial decision looks, in hindsight, like an assumption inherited from the co-op live-service design brief rather than anything Redfall’s actual content needed.

The loot and progression layer undercut the shooting

Redfall’s gunplay, taken in isolation, is competent rather than special — serviceable hit feedback, a reasonable variety of stakes-based and conventional weaponry for dealing with vampires that require specific kill conditions to stay down. What undermines it is a loot and levelling structure bolted on in the Destiny mould, with rarity-tiered weapon drops and a level-gated map that requires grinding lower-tier content before higher-level areas become survivable. That structure asks the player to engage with Redfall’s thinnest systems — the repetitive open-world filler — for the longest stretch of playtime, precisely because the loot treadmill needs volume to sustain itself, and it does so in a game whose actual strength, when it appears, is dense hand-authored content the studio didn’t build enough of to fill a loot game’s appetite.

What’s public record about the studio, and what isn’t

It’s worth being careful here: reporting on Arkane Austin’s development of Redfall, including accounts published by outlets covering the industry closely, described a troubled production stretched by the studio’s small size relative to the scope of an open-world live-service game, and by turnover during a multi-year development cycle. That’s a fair comment on how the project was resourced and the decisions made about its scope — a studio built for tight, authored immersive sims taking on a genre that demands a completely different production pipeline. It is not, and shouldn’t be read as, a claim about the effort or competence of any individual who worked on it; the gap between Redfall and Prey is a story about scope mismatch and production discipline, not about talent.

The real ancestor

Redfall’s clearest design ancestor isn’t Left 4 Dead, despite the four-player vampire-hunting premise inviting the comparison — Left 4 Dead’s entire design is built around tight, linear, replayable levels with a director system generating fresh tension each run, the opposite of an open world’s sprawl. Redfall’s actual structure sits much closer to Far Cry’s open-world outpost-clearing template, with vampire nests standing in for Far Cry’s radio towers and enemy camps. That’s a perfectly viable design lineage on its own terms. It’s just not the lineage Arkane Austin had spent fifteen years building expertise in, and the mismatch between the studio’s talent and the genre it was asked to work in is the whole story of why Redfall disappointed as badly as it did.

Four heroes, and how thinly their identity was drawn

Redfall’s four playable characters — Layla Ellison, a telekinetic ex-student with a vampire ex-boyfriend now among the town’s antagonists; Remi de la Rosa, an engineer accompanied by a combat robot; Devinder Crousley, a paranormal investigator turned believer; and Jacob Boyer, a sniper with supernatural vision granted by an eye implant — each carry a distinct traversal or combat gadget in the mould of the Specialist systems other 2023-era shooters were also experimenting with. On paper the cast has the ingredients of a strong ensemble, each drawn from a different relationship to the town’s vampire outbreak. In practice, the writing gives each character only a handful of story missions’ worth of development before the game’s thin main plot resolves, and the banter that’s meant to carry the rest of the runtime repeats across enough hours that it stops feeling like character work and starts feeling like ambient noise — a problem Arkane’s own Dishonored and Prey never had, because those games invested their writing budget in environmental storytelling and a handful of pivotal NPCs rather than four player-facing protagonists who all needed sustained arcs simultaneously.

The framerate cap was a symptom, not the disease

Redfall launched on Xbox Series X capped at 30 frames per second, with no 60fps performance mode offered even as an option — an unusual absence for a 2023 shooter on hardware capable of considerably more, and one that drew sustained criticism given the genre’s general expectation of a responsive framerate for aiming and movement. Microsoft and Arkane later patched in a 60fps mode, but not until several months after launch, following the same pattern as the offline-mode patch: a fix arriving well after the criticism had already shaped the game’s reputation. The framerate cap is worth reading as a symptom of the same underlying production strain as everything else — an open-world co-op shooter with four playable heroes, procedurally varied enemy encounters and a persistent world state is a considerably heavier technical lift than anything Arkane Austin had shipped before, and a studio without deep experience optimising that shape of game for console hardware was always going to arrive at launch with performance problems the review cycle would catch immediately.

Game Pass day one softened the financial blow but not the reputation

Redfall launched day one on Xbox Game Pass, a distribution choice that meant a large share of its player base experienced the game’s problems without having paid full price for the privilege, cushioning some of the commercial fallout Microsoft otherwise absorbed directly rather than passing on to purchasers. It didn’t cushion the reputational damage at all — if anything, a wider Game Pass audience trying a broken launch generated more immediate word-of-mouth criticism than a smaller day-one purchase base would have, simply because more people were in a position to notice. It’s a reminder that a subscription service changes who bears the financial risk of a bad launch without changing whether the launch was actually bad.

The vampire “Gods” hinted at a better game hiding in the margins

Redfall’s small set of named vampire boss enemies, the “Gods,” were built with genuinely distinct mechanical gimmicks — one manipulating gravity in its arena, another cloning itself to split the player’s attention — that stood out sharply against the repetitive generic enemy pool populating the rest of the map. Those encounters are the clearest evidence in the whole game that Arkane Austin’s design instincts hadn’t vanished, just been spread far too thin across a map that needed several times more of that density to justify its size.

Co-op matchmaking never fully solved who was hosting what

A smaller but persistent complaint ran through Redfall’s co-op sessions: mission progress and world state were tied to whichever player was hosting, so joining a friend’s game already in progress could mean losing track of your own save’s objectives entirely. It’s a networking architecture choice that’s mostly invisible when it works and deeply frustrating when it doesn’t, and it compounded the always-online requirement’s core problem — a connection dependency that delivered none of a shared persistent world’s usual benefits in exchange for the inconvenience it introduced.

Spoilers below

Redfall’s story concludes with the player characters confronting Dr Alan Wells, a scientist whose experiments created the town’s vampire “Gods” — a small set of named, more powerful vampire bosses distinct from the generic enemy pool — and severing Redfall’s isolating barrier, the “Bellwether” field, that had cut the town off from the outside world for the game’s duration. The ending leaves the fate of the wider vampire outbreak deliberately open, a sequel hook that, following Arkane Austin’s closure in 2024, will almost certainly never be followed up on.