Trivia / Redfall

• Creator Killer: The disastrous launch of the game effectively ended Bethesda as an independent company under Microsoft, as not too long after, Microsoft restructured the company so that they will report directly to XBOX Game Studios. The game's troubled development also resulted in an exodus of much of Arkane Austin's talent that had worked on games like Prey (2017) and Dishonored, many of which had experience going back to the original Deus Ex and some even further to Looking Glass Studios.
• Creator's Apathy: As outlined on Troubled Production below, most of Arkane Austin's employees were not interested in developing a live service game, and many of them have left the company as a result, with the remaining skeleton crew secretly hoping Microsoft would have canceled the game.
• Creator's Oddball: Arkane is best known for making critically acclaimed Immersive Sim games; Redfall is instead a Wide-Open Sandbox Looter Shooter, having more in common with Borderlands and Far Cry (except made by a team with zero experience in either genre) than any of Arkane's previous games (though the game is arguably a natural evolution of the shift in direction Arkane was already demonstrating with Deathloop and Wolfenstein: Youngblood).
• No Port For You: Arkane originally planned a PlayStation 5 version of the game, but it was cancelled after Microsoft purchased their parent company ZeniMax Media and decided to make the game exclusive to their own platforms.
• Troubled Production: As per Jason Schrier of Bloomberg, Redfall was the product of a very troubled and confused production process. Development on Redfall started after Prey (2017) failed to sell well, and Arkane management wanted to create a Live Service "multiplayer Arkane game" without any real vision for how such a game would work. By the time the game released, over 70% of the staff that had started working on it had left. Additionally, Microsoft's (or more accurately XBOX Game Studios) hands-off approach to their acquired studios (to prevent instances of Executive Meddling that was infamous during the Rare acquisition and gave Microsoft bad publicity back then) meant that they never stepped in to intervene in the game's disastrous production cycle, when the developers themselves were secretly hoping that Microsoft would step in and either cancel the game outright, or at least allow Arkane to reboot Redfall as a single-player title. In response to this game's negative reception, a company restructure in November 2023 will have Bethesda report directly to XBOX Game Studios.
• What Could Have Been: A version was in the works for the PlayStation 5, as the game was in development before ZeniMax Media, the owner of Arkane Studios, got brought into the Xbox Game Studios family. Needless to say, the PS5 version was cancelled to make the game an Xbox console exclusive.
• Word of Gay: In pre-release articles, Arkane has mentioned Remi has a girlfriend named Lia. In-game, mentions of Lia are few and far between, but include Lady Whisper taunting Remi about her fear that Lia might be dead.

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