#I hope they kept the random cultist conversations I implemented

[sappho-official]

Feeling very weird about Redfall, for a whole host of reasons. I was a dev on it for about eight months and it’s honestly strange that the writing was on the wall three years ago and nothing ever got fixed.

There were plenty of issues, but scope was a big one; you can say that you’re going to make a larger project than your company has before and that you need to expand, but there’s only so fast a company can grow. Also, finding niche but important roles like AI designers/programmers that are extremely skilled is incredibly difficult and not something that should be left up to chance. And you can only hire inexperienced kids fresh out of their bachelors for so many roles.

It was a good job with incredible, passionate people that were trying their best. I’m sure many people I knew left a long time ago and I do not blame them for that. Arkane, when I was there, actually had a fairly healthy work culture (a low bar in the games industry) but the structure and management was just messy enough to be a problem. Nearly every single person was stretched completely thin. How often I would bring up a concern to someone just to be told “I don’t have time to fix this.” I can’t help but wonder if someone asked “but is the game good?” to the response of, well, we don’t have time to fix it.

Anyway. I actually have an old tag on my blog for Redfall posts; if you go to #o on my blog (the codename for Redfall was Omen) you can see some old shitposts that reminded me of it. I will probably never play the shipped version myself, but I hope a few small details I contributed made it into the final product and put a smile on someone’s face.