10 Most Disastrous Releases Of The Current Generation

Question: If you were running a restaurant and you had a world-class baker on your payroll, would you turn to that baker and say "Great job with those cakes, pal! As a reward, you're now in charge of making fugu, the poisonous pufferfish that kills people if not properly prepared. Can't be any different than making a really good cake, right?"

You can see where this analogy is going. During Redfall's tumultuous creation, the developers at Arkane Austin were the put-upon baker, their bosses the irresponsible restaurateur.

Arkane Austin had developed their reputation on the backs of the Dishonored series and Prey - single-player games of astonishing quality and depth (for this writer's money, Prey is the most under-rated sci-fi game ever made). Unfortunately, as reported by Bloomberg (via Eurogamer) the company's leaders took their single-player studio par excellence and forced them into chasing the live-service dragon with Redfall.

It was never going to work. Arkane Austin excelled at creating immersive, highly detailed environments designed to be pored over by a single player. This made them wholly unsuited for the wham-bam, thank-you-mam action of an online shooter and Redfall wound up serving the worst of both worlds, with levels too dull to be worth exploring and combat too flat to be worth experiencing. The game ultimately collapsed, and took Arkane Austin down with it.

Moral of the story? When life gives you bakers, don't make pufferfish.