Following a recent developer interview with the two game directors on Redfall, we have to admit we're rather excited to go hands on with what the team describes as "Arkane blended with Far Cry 2 or Stalker". However, it sounds like the dev is a little bit wary of the title's day one Xbox Game Pass nature, despite no-doubt looking forward to wrapping up development.
That isn't to say the quality of the game won't be up to snuff on day one - we'd expect this developer to deliver on that front. The team is more wary of the sheer amount of players that'll have access to Redfall on release day.
"The pool that Game Pass offers is huge for us. It's kind of shocking, and scary in a way. Like, how many people are going to play Redfall in the first week? What if it's a lot more than we anticipated… we're going to get a lot of feedback very quickly, and a lot of people will see what we've spent the last few years on."
Game director Harvey Smith goes on to mention Redfall's pandemic-era development, and how the game has become intrinsically linked with that experience for the teams involved.
"Redfall is our pandemic game, man. It's easy to forget now, but there were dark days during the pandemic. People on my team were sitting at home alone, losing their minds because we didn't have vaccines yet, and nobody was sure what it meant for their kids and for the economy.
The team carried each other through it all; Zenimax, Bethesda, and Microsoft were very good to us during that difficult time. Now that we're on the other side of it, the last thing I got to do here is ship Redfall."
We can understand the fear of launching such a project straight onto a service with tons of potential players, but we must admit, we're very very glad that Redfall is an upcoming Xbox Game Pass title. We feel we're due a few of those from Xbox Game Studios!