Arkane Austin, the developer behind the incredible Prey and much maligned Redfall, will likely be judged more on its last failure than its past successes. But, things could have been different for the co-op vampire shooter, as director Harvey Smith said in a recent episode of the My Perfect Console Podcast (via Eurogamer).
After Arkane Austin was shuttered, the studio released Redfall 1.4, an update which Smith says allowed the team to get "as close as we could" to the original vision. "If we had launched with that and then built from there it might have been a different story," he said.
Smith also spoke about the awful responses developers can get online, even when their game succeeds. "I feel like video game developers get it worse. You release your game, it took years to get there, maybe it flops, maybe it does ok, maybe people hate it. Even if they love it, there's a social media caustic, acidic vitriol that gets thrown at you. And every time you ship a game there's always going to be that, every time there's that vitriol no matter what you do."
After Arkane Austin's closure, Smith said he felt the most bad for the newer folks in the industry. "I really felt for were the people who were new, this was their first project or they'd only been in the industry for a while."
Do you think Redfall could have been saved?