Bart Wux
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Ich weise nur kurz auf Dead Island 2 hin, dass in V 1.0 nahezu perfekt veröffentlicht wurde. Vote with your wallet.
As a feature-complete AAA experience with a price tag of $70, Redfall is a massive disappointment. However, that’s not how most people are going to play — Arkane is a subsidiary of Xbox Game Studios, and Redfall will be available to Game Pass subscribers on PC and console, day-one and at no extra charge. The barrier to entering Redfall is low and this might be its saving grace, allowing developers to continually update the game while thousands of playtesters provide live feedback. Hell, that might even be the plan.
Immerhin gibt es SQUIRREL STATUES TO COLLECT!!!Ne, da gibts keine Rettung, das wird den selben Weg gehen wie Bleeding Edge, Lawbreakers, Battleborne & Co.
Selbst der Latrinennager hat seine Hoffnung vergraben.
One of the most controversial of Xbox's first-party releases, it's safe to say that Redfall arrives with users with a wide range of problems that urgently need addressing - and beyond the technical problems, the game itself isn't up to Arkane's usual levels of quality.
Hauptsache Phil gehts gut.
We weren't too impressed with the Xbox version of Redfall, but the PC version has its own range of unacceptably poor issues - from traversal stutter to non-descript, non-helpful settings menus, to visual bugs and terrible CPU core utilisation. Support for all modern upscalers and some kind of shader precompilation pass help matters, but this is still far from the kind of quality we'd expect from a major triple-A release.
Development of Redfall began in 2018. At the time, ZeniMax — the large, privately held owner of Bethesda Softworks — was looking to sell itself. Behind the scenes, the company was encouraging its studios to develop games that could generate revenue beyond the initial sales, a popular trend dubbed “games as a service,” which was taking off in the late 2010s thanks to lucrative hits like Overwatch and Fortnite.
According to people familiar with the process, ZeniMax was strongly urging developers at its subsidiaries to implement microtransactions — that is, recurring opportunities within games for players to spend real money, say, outfitting their characters. Although this wasn’t an absolute mandate, several ZeniMax franchises such as Fallout, Doom and Wolfenstein would soon release new versions incorporating online multiplayer and monetization options.
At Arkane’s headquarters in Austin, Harvey Smith and Ricardo Bare, respected industry veterans, were tapped to serve as co-directors of Redfall. Following the commercially unsuccessful release of its sci-fi shooter Prey a year earlier, leadership across the company wanted to make something more broadly appealing. What eventually emerged was the idea to make a multiplayer game in which users would team up to battle vampires and perhaps pay for occasional cosmetic upgrades.
Developers under Smith and Bare said the two leads were outwardly excited but as the project progressed failed to provide clear direction. Staff members said that, over time, they grew frustrated with management’s frequently shifting references to other games, such as Far Cry and Borderlands, that left each department with varying ideas of what exactly they were making. Throughout the development, the fundamental tension between single-player and multiplayer design remained unresolved. Smith and Bare did not respond to requests for comment.
Arkane was also perpetually understaffed, said people familiar with its production. The studio’s Austin office employed less than 100 people— sufficient for a relatively small, single-player game like Prey but not enough to compete with multiplayer behemoths like Fortnite and Destiny, which are developed by teams of hundreds. Even additional support from ZeniMax’s Wisconsin-based Roundhouse Studios and other outsourcing houses couldn’t fill the gaps, they say.
Morale at Arkane suffered. Veteran workers who weren’t interested in developing a multiplayer game left in droves. By the end of Redfall’s development, roughly 70% of the Austin staff who had worked on Prey would no longer be at the company, according to people familiar as well as a Bloomberg analysis of LinkedIn and Prey’s credits.
The acquisition gave some staff at Arkane hope that Microsoft might cancel Redfall or, better yet, let them reboot it as a single-player game, according to sources familiar with the production. Instead, Microsoft maintained a hands-off approach. Aside from canceling a version of Redfall that had been planned for rival Sony Corp.’s PlayStation, Microsoft allowed ZeniMax to continue operating as it had before, with great autonomy. Microsoft’s Spencer would later say in the Kinda Funny interview that Xbox “didn’t do a good job early in engaging Arkane Austin.”
Yet during the final frantic months, the remaining Arkane staff found themselves stretched thin and the debut date was pushed back from Halloween of 2022 to early 2023 and then eventually to May 2, 2023. Along the way, Smith and other leaders assured the staff that the game would get exponentially better once the final art was implemented and the bugs were fixed, promising that “Arkane magic” would manifest at the last minute as it had with previous games. (Other developers, such as Electronic Arts Inc.’s BioWare, have been widely criticized for using similar language.)
Joost van Dreunen, a video-game analyst and professor, said Redfall’s failure highlights the significant gap between Microsoft’s lofty aspirations and its actual products, which also calls “into question Microsoft’s ability to establish long-term franchises on its own strength, rather than buying them outright.”
Microsoft declined to comment. In a recent interview with the YouTube channel Kinda Funny Games, Xbox boss Phil Spencer said that Redfall’s review scores were “significantly lower than our internal metrics,” suggesting the lackluster debut may have caught the company off guard.
“The disappointment of Redfall evidences Microsoft’s desperate need for attractive content if it is indeed going to beat rivals Sony and Nintendo at their own game,” analyst van Dreunen said. “My hope is that it will inoculate Xbox from repeating a similar mistake in the future.”
ob wir dieses jahr noch einen 60fps patch sehen?
This patch brings a Performance Mode to Xbox Series X|S, stealth takedowns, new controller settings, Accessibility improvements, and much more. Explore an even more dangerous Redfall with an increased open world enemy population and new encounters. Read on for the full list of fixes and additions included in the update.