Bethesda Reportedly Wants To Give Redfall A “Redemption Arc”

Redfall, a once-ambitious Xbox exclusive, couldn’t hit home in terms of fan and critic reception back when it made landfall in May this year. In fact, the game was more of a disaster at launch, coming with a mountain of bugs, performance issues, and fundamental flaws that pretty much labeled Redfall unenjoyable. Combine that with silence from the devs’ side, and the picture is painted dismayingly here.

That said, after a wait of four months where neither Bethesda nor Arkane pushed out an official update to reassure Redfall players that they’re working on bettering the FPS, a 60 FPS performance mode finally came out. Sadly, the latter still didn’t do much for the game’s concurrent player count on Steam, considering how the latest update was supposed to entice more than its current count of 10 players. 

However, a new rumor seems to be tipping the scales in favor of Arkane’s vampiric shooter, iterating that the devs don’t plan on giving up on the project just yet. Speaking to Digital Foundry’s John Linneman in his podcast, Jez Corden — known industry insider — has claimed that Bethesda is planning a redemption arc for Redfall. For reference, you may want to skip to 42:53 in the following video. 

Jez said, 

I spoke to some Bethesda people, and well I say I spoke to but I eavesdropped [laughs] their conversation at the not E3 events in LA this year and they were talking about sticking with the game. Yeah, they were talking about sticking with the game for years and, you know, they want to give it a ‘redemption arc‘ and stuff like that.”

At the time of writing, Redfall is still doing badly, at least on Steam it’s this way. The charts on SteamDB tell us that a total of 14 players are in the game right now, and the all-time peak of 6,000-ish players dates back to 6 months ago. Though it’s worth mentioning that not even Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t plummeted this hard when it launched, there’s still hope for Redfall, and it mainly comes in the form of Xbox Game Pass. 

Related Content to Check Out: 

• When Will Redfall Become Arkane’s “Most Supported” Game?
• Redfall Has Now Lost More Than Half Of Its Concurrent Players Since Release
• Redfall: Modern Hardware’s Strength Is Wasted On Uninspired & Broken Games

Sitting down in an interview, the Bethesda Softworks’ Head of Publishing let out a promising statement for the future of Redfall, saying how he has hope for the IP to stick around and persevere even after a decade from now, saying, 

Okay, we didn’t get the start we wanted, but it’s still a fun game… and we’re going to keep working on it. We’re going to do 60fps. We’re going to get it to be a good game because we know, as a first-party studio, Game Pass lives forever. There will be people ten years from now who are going to join Game Pass, and Redfall will be there. We are the same company that has had launches that didn’t go the way we wanted, and we don’t quit or abandon stuff just because it didn’t start right,” said Pete Hines.

Redfall made landfall on May 2, 2023, for the Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Feel free to read our review of the game and find out why it has no bark, no bite.