Xbox boss blames ‘tunnel vision’ for Redfall’s performance

Xbox Games Studios executive Matt Booty discussed what he thought really went wrong with Redfall’s performance.

Following its launch in May 2023, Redfall earned a few abysmal reviews for its laggy gameplay and lackluster combat. Dexerto’s review called the title “undercooked and uninspired” – with an aggregate review score of 53, many pointed out technical and gameplay issues with the title that kept it from being a game worth recommending.

As a result, the Bethesda team offered PC advice to players underwhelmed with Redfall’s performance. However, one customer service representative forgot to replace Fallout 76 with Redfall in an apology to an unhappy user.

With everything that hit the fan involving Redfall’s quality, it’s hard to pinpoint one mishap that happened. However, Booty has attributed the mass criticism of Redfall to “tunnel vision” and that they expected it to “perform better than it did.”

Xbox executive had high expectations for Redfall’s performance

Bethesda / Arkane Austin

In an interview with IGN, Booty offered his explanation as to what he would change with the Redfall development process.

“If I were to take a post-it note back in time in my little time machine to 2017, it’d be to make sure that everybody understands that they don’t get to just ship a game as Double Fine or as inXile anymore,” Booty said. “They’re going to be looked at as part of first-party.”

The Xbox executive continued, “Sometimes, a team can just get a little bit of tunnel vision around their game, and sometimes management can have the opposite problem where maybe they’re zoomed a little too far out.

“We had people play the game, we had reviews, we do mock reviews. We just had indicators that it was going to perform better than it did.”

In addition to Booty’s reasoning, the Redfall devs revealed their experience working on the title. According to the accounts of those who worked at Arkane Studios, many left during the production of Redfall. Check out our article to learn more about the situation.