Currently Online 
Xbox was basically damned if they do, damned if they don't after inheriting Zenimax's mess. The best they could have done is delay it for polishing and extra content but it wouldn't have drastically changed the core of the project.
If they cancel Redfall then they piss off those who remain and believe in the project, Arkane is still a 100ish studio and acting like everyone who still remains hates working on Redfall is naive. They will piss off Harvey and Ricardo as they both explicitly believe in the project as well. They potentially lose a bunch of employees who joined recently to work on a Multiplayer project.
I'm 100% convinced that if Xbox cancelled it and made Harvey reboot it back into a sim after 3-5 years of development then we'd have an angry Harvey and articles about Microsoft meddling, not believing in Arkane, ruining Arkane, etc, and you can't only act like that is just bad PR, it's also a red flag to any independent studio thinking about selling to Microsoft, many studios sold to Microsoft specifically due to their hands off promise.
The new narrative would be that Microsoft meddles in their studios again, especially with an upset Harvey/Ricardo and discourage other studios from selling to Microsoft. They were screwed either way, the project was way too late in development to make drastic changes without annoying one group or another and causing departures, another reason why departures would happen is because a bunch of roles would instantly become redundant in a reboot.
In the future, they should absolutely be more hands on, they should be monitoring the state of the game, they should offer assistance wherever possible, they should make sure the current employees are happy, if they got in on the project right at the concept stage they could have provided input and got everyone on the same page before it had years worth of development on it and avoided annoying anyone.
Zenimax is largely to blame and I'm glad Microsoft acquired Zenimax because Zenimax surely won't be so multiplayer focused now, if not for Xbox then Zenimax would continue this death spiral into fucking up studios by forcing them to do something they don't want to because they need the cash. At least now under Microsoft they can make what they want from the start.
We're looking past the part that Arkane's own leadership wanted to go forward with this game, if Xbox was only communicating with Arkane's leadership then maybe they thought they should trust them and shouldn't interrupt them, and if they rebooted/cancelled a concept they believe in then they piss off the employees at the very top of Arkane.
It's a tough call, an awkward situation that I wouldn't want to be in, hindsight of course makes things every easy to comment on though, Lol.
Last edited by Ryuu96 - on 01 June 2023
