Xbox Team Thought Redfall “Was Going To Perform Better Than It Did”

Redfall’s rocky launch has led to some retrospection for Xbox Game Studios boss Matt Booty. He now knows that Microsoft must do better in setting expectations for acquired studios, like Arkane, on what it means to make first-party games.

Booty opened up to IGN about what he’s learned after Redfall released with mixed reviews and a laundry list of bugs–including GameSpot’s Redfall review saying “it should not have been released yet.” The Xbox executive said it started with conveying to new teams under his watch how becoming first-party means “they exist in a different spotlight.”

“And it is my responsibility, our responsibility as the wider Xbox org, to make sure they understand that, and then to make sure that they’re set up and that we set expectations appropriately,” Booty said. “… If I were to look back, where I feel a little remiss on the Redfall thing, that project was started before we acquired ZeniMax, and I think we could have done a better job of onboarding them.”

In addition, Booty mentioned that he and management believed the game would be received better than what ultimately occurred. “Sometimes, a team can just get a little bit of tunnel vision around their game, and sometimes management can have the opposite problem where maybe they’re zoomed a little too far out,” he said. “And it was a case of us having indicators that the game was going to perform a certain way … we had people play the game, we had reviews, we do mock reviews, we just had indicators that it was going to perform better than it did. And I think the team was so committed to what they were building that they just had a little bit of tunnel vision.”

This all echoes a bit of Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer’s reaction to Redfall’s bad reviews. He stated last month that his team “didn’t do a good job early on of engaging with Arkane Austin to really help them understand what it meant to be part of Xbox.”

Redfall reportedly had a rough development cycle, with 70% of the staff who worked on Prey at Arkane leaving the team. Sources claimed there was a lack of vision on the project, with some people led to believe they were making something akin to Far Cry while others thought the title was more like Borderlands.

Arkane did just push a huge 32GB update for Redfall that aims to fix dozens of issues, including increased enemy spawn rates and improved responsiveness of foes.