Almost three months after Redfall's massively disappointing launch, Arkane Studios may be looking to return to form for its next game. Arkane Studios, a Bethesda studio which is now also part of Xbox's first party family, has become known for high-quality immersive sims. Highly praised games like Dishonored and Prey have helped gain it notoriety over the years. As its sister studio Arkane Lyon amazed critics with Deathloop in 2021, even more eyes turned back to Arkane Austin's vampire-slaying Redfall as the studio's first title as part of Xbox.After being delayed out of Summer 2022, Arkane Studios' open-world looter shooter Redfall finally launched earlier this year but missed the mark both in terns of rampant technical issues and poor design choices. Arkane stepping away from its signature single-player immersive sim prowess and attempting a Borderlands-style co-op looter shooter in the studio's first-ever open world is something that's been since reported to be a call made by parent company ZeniMax several years prior to Xbox's Bethesda buyout. Looking at other multiplayer-focused Bethesda games from that time like Fallout 76 and Wolfenstein: Youngblood, it adds up that ZeniMax was at a financial low point, thus tasking its lauded single-player studios to produce potentially more lucrative multiplayer titles. Now, with Arkane Austin picking up the pieces and moving forward it would seem like it may be returning to what made the studio great. On Twitter, Idle Sloth highlighted a posting on ZeniMax's job board for a Lead Technical Engineer to join Arkane Austin. The posting specifically mentions the need for experience with single-player action RPGs and immersive sims, two terms that describe Arkane's past work perfectly.
This shift back to the studio's strength of single-player immersive sims makes sense considering that ZeniMax is presumably much more financially stable now that it's taken permanent shelter under Microsoft's umbrella. With the financial security of Xbox, ZeniMax no longer has the need to have its studios try long-tailed multiplayer projects in order to secure ongoing profits; it can allow its studios focus on their strengths once again. With Arkane Austin looking ahead to the future it'll be interesting to see if the studio will be able to hire back some of the talent that left because of Redfall now that the studio seems to be returning to what it does best.
Whether Arkane Austin's next game is Dishonored 3, Prey 2, or a new IP is entirely unknown, and it will likely still be several years before fans of the studio can expect to learn more. In the meantime, as Arkane begins working on its next game, the promise of Redfall's 60 FPS console patch still remains unfulfilled. With August being three months since the game's launch, perhaps Redfall players on console don't have too much longer to wait for the sorely needed performance upgrade.
Redfall is available now for PC and Xbox Series X|S.