Yesterday on the Kinda Funny channel, Xbox head Phil Spencer publicly addressed the launch of Arkane Austin's multiplayer vampire shooter, Redfall. Spencer in the interview apologized to fans and claimed full responsibility for the state of the launch.
Speaking with the Kinda Funny team in an interview yesterday morning, Spencer stated that he was "disappointed" in the state Redfall was in, and stated that he was "upset" with himself on the results of the launch.
"There's nothing that's more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community," Spencer said in the interview. "Just to kind of watch the community lost confidence, be disappointed - I'm disappointed. I'm upset with myself. I kind of revist our process. I think back to the announcement of 60 frames per second, and then we weren't shipping 60 frames per second. That was kind of our punch in the chin, rightfully, a couple weeks ago. And then seeing the game come out, and the critical response was not what we wanted. It's disappointing."
Spencer also mentioned something curious in the interview: internal mock reviews and just how different they were from the real deal this week. Every major developer and publisher does mock reviews to get both a sense of what to expect from a critical response, but also get an unbiased, outside look at the game they are building before launch. Spencer mentions in the interview that the internal mock reviews and the reviews that came out this week were very different.
"We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game," Spencer added. "That's one of the disappointing things: we would never strive to launch a game we thought was going to review in the low 60s, it's not part of our goals."
Many have questioned that if Redfall had been given more time to bake through another delay, some of the issues could have been addressed versus launching in a very broken and buggy state. Spencer also addressed this, saying that another delay wouldn't address the core issues of why Redfall is reviewing so low:
"There are quality issues, and we're working on those, but a fundamental piece of feedback I get is that the game isn't realizing the creative vision that it had for its players. That doesn't feel like a, 'hey, just delay it', that feels like the game had a goal to do one thing and when players are actually playing, they're not feeling that."
Redfall has released with myriad issues this past week, with many a critic panning the latest Xbox game thanks to lackluster gunplay, an empty world, broken AI and just the overall lack of polish players should expect when dropping $70 on a triple-A title. We've got our Redfall review in progress pretty much finished up and will be laying down our final verdict this weekend. However, if you're curious whether you should play Redfall for yourself, despite critical reviews, check out Steven's latest.
