does make it obvious that they were desperate to chase a multiplayer hit over their single player bread and butter, and it retrospectively makes a lot more sense as to why they signed exclusivity for Deathloop and Ghostwire with Sony and then sold themselves to Microsoft. I like Bethesda's lineup of studios and games a lot, I've think they're made more hits than misses, and I'm generally very lenient on the misses (Redfall is not great, but Arkane's output in the past has been solid and a bad game isn't enough to retrospectively dislike those games, nor does it diminish my faith that they will regain their footing in the future), but looking on their output as a whole over the past decade (Ghostwire/Fallout 76/Youngblood/Prey), it's definitely been a bumpy road and Redfall's position within the wider Zenimax family.

I feel like this gets down to the crux of the problem, and while I don't think Microsoft's 'hands off,' approach is necessarily a bad overall philosophy to take especially when acquiring seasoned developers, I would say that they need to do a way better job of managing expectations, especially when it comes to what Zenimax as part of Xbox's first party actually entails.

I think this being their first big AAA with a large marketing budget since Halo(?) puts it under a microscope, which doesn’t help things. They still have the power to delay the game and enact a level of quality control so the buck stops with them in this case.

So if they’re going to make Bethesda game’s exclusive and use them to fill out their yearly lineups they deserve to be criticized as any other Xbox game, and this only just started this year with HiFi Rush and now Redfall. Where it becomes more of their problem is 2022 was super light for XGS games and then 2023 is predominantly filled in with Bethesda releases outside of Forza. (Not that it really matters, what matters is the games exist and are on their platform.) I say super heavily because they obviously help in a lot of different ways, including being hands off and paying the bills. I agree, it feels kind of odd to praise Xbox super heavily for some of these games they inherited mid development, same with blaming them heavily if one of these game doesn’t turn out.

Redfall e3 clip