Great, they wanted to make a multiplayer game...but the multiplayer aspects of their game aren't good. The loot game isn't interesting enough. The abilities aren't interesting enough on their own, and there's no sense of build diversity or choice. The world isn't dense enough with activities or enemies to promote engaging gameplay for ONE person running around, nvm a GROUP of people, that require MORE engagement.

If you wanna make a multiplayer game, then you gotta bring in the personnel that has experience in making those types of games, so you can bring those elements to life. 

What they shipped, is a game that pleases nobody. It's not a good single player experience, and it's not a good multiplayer experience. So who's happy over there now? Nobody. If you come in and make a tough call, yes, SOMEBODY will be unhappy...but others will actually have to opportunity to be happy, and turn around and hopefully produce a better product. The perfect is the enemy of the good. There was clearly no perfect solution here. Yes, someone was gonna be bitter at the end of the day. But the whole point is that MS needs to get better about coming and realizing that sometimes you NEED to make a decision that's not gonna go over well with everyone, because it's better than the alternative.

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.

Its way more complicated that that.  Just because a group of people are excited about what they are doing does not mean the product will be a success.  Instead what makes a product a success is strong leadership in understanding how to execute whatever their vision is for a product.  A strong direction and understanding of what is required for a successful product is way better than people being excited about what they are doing.  I have been on many projects where people were excited about what they were doing but miss big time on what would make the project a success.  Also having to many cooks in the room can make a product appear incohesive which is also an issue.  

For Redfall, I'm not sure conditions that resulted in what it is would have been possible if Bethesda was acquired prior to its inception. In fact pretty certain they aren't. So it's really hard to say if MS should take action other than added verification that their 'Let studios do what they want to do' policy is applied from the staff up and not the leadership down.

Actually MS decision to do nothing is a decision and how the game failed also helps in the long run.  Think about it this way, if MS came in and started to lord everyone around, people would be leaving left and right and probably would not be something MS want spread around if they are looking to obtain more studios.  Now with the failure of Redfall, MS can easily do oversight within Bethesda and there can be no real complaint.  This allows MS a better chance to be more hands on without looking like this was their plan all along.  Also if we kind of think about Starfield and how Phil got personal with that game and held it back, its clear that Phil understood the importance of Starfield and how it needed to hit hard when release.  It could be that Starfield took so much resources that no one really thought that Redfall needed any help and the studios heads probably never reached out.  Of course that will probably not happen again because I am sure Phil has let Bethesda and all their studio heads know that being first party means things have to change within the company and their approach to games.

Schreier literally reported the devs there were HOPING that MS would come in and make changes, so we can't say that people would be leaving left and right if MS had done exactly what various people on the team were apparently WANTING. And I'm really not down with the idea of letting a studio fail so they can then be more accepting of oversight. That's just a downright horrible leadership philosophy. 

I know it is. What I'm saying is, they need to make sure the team is on board when deciding on what project to make and then go from there. 

I'm trying to think what I would have done but it's hard because we don't know when most of these 70% left, I would assume near the start of development because that would be the most sense to leave if you don't want to work on a multiplayer project and WolfEye comes along in 2019 to take even more.

• Give them an extra year of polish and content, delay to 2024.
• Suggest they cut the scope a little, focus on just one open map, rather than the two it has.
• Add XGS support for the technical side of things.
• Add resources to allow Arkane Austin to expand.

Ultimately I'd still let Harvey release what he wanted to work on but I'd try to ensure it's a 70 Meta at least...I don't think it gets much higher than that.

Meanwhile if there are any staff in Arkane Austin who want to work on sims and who haven't already left by the time I'm involved.

• Encourage two teams at Arkane Austin, allow one team to go off and make an immersive sim, any losses to the Redfall team can be replaced via contracted studios, Harvey and Ricardo, the two most senior employees at Arkane Austin, will remain on Redfall because they wanted to make Redfall.

This is all assuming I get involved with Arkane Austin as soon as the acquisition closes and can see for myself it's in a bad state.

We don't need to cancel the project, we can let Harvey work on what he wants and also allow other employees to work on what they want, look at Obsidian, it'd be like if they forced everyone at Obsidian to work on Grounded, I'm sure they'd be mass departures even though it's a great title but instead Obsidian has multiple games in development so people have their pick of what they want to work on.

So the solution is surely just to set up two teams inside of Arkane Austin, that way, nobody is upset.

Too late now obviously but teams should be set up to be allowed to go and do something new without having to drag the entire studio with them.