The closure of Arkane Austin became known in May 2024. The studio, responsible for Redfall, was liquidated as part of a large-scale Microsoft restructuring. At that time, the game had already received a rather cold reception – its average score on Metacritic was only 56 points.
However, Redfall was not going to be abandoned immediately after its release. Bethesda planned to continue working on the project, and one of the main future updates was supposed to be a patch with a full-fledged offline mode and other important changes. After the closure of Arkane Austin, its fate was in question.
Ultimately, the update was released on May 30, 2024. Now it has been revealed that this happened thanks to a small group of employees who had already lost their jobs.
In a new interview, Arkane veterans Harvey Smith and Ben Horn said that before the studio closed, the developers had almost completed version 1.4, which fixed a huge number of Redfall problems. After the layoffs, the team approached Microsoft with a request to allow them to deliver the update to players.
"We went to Microsoft and said, 'I know we don't work here anymore, but can we please release this?' And, to their credit, they didn't say no."
Smith believes that if Redfall had been released in this state initially, the game still wouldn't have been a big hit, but its reception would have been significantly better.