Xbox boss expresses "disappointment" with response to Redfall, pledges to continue work on the game
Phil Spencer comments on Redfall's reception among gamers and critics.
Microsoft's head of gaming, Phil Spencer, has weighed in on the critical and player response to Redfall.
Speaking with Kinda Funny Games, Spencer lamented disappointing the Xbox community, stating Xbox Games Studios will "revisit" its process.
"There's nothing that's more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community," said Spencer. "To watch the community lose confidence and be disappointed, I'm disappointed. I'm upset with myself. We'll revisit our process."
Spencer went on to say the team at Arkane Austin plans to continue working on the game and that despite the less than stellar critical response, he will not stop developers from being willing to take risks in the future.
"The critical response was not what we wanted, but one thing I'm not going do is push against creative aspiration. We're going to continue to work on the game.
"We've shown a commitment to games like Sea of Thieves, and Grounded, to continue to go and build games. But I also know these games are $70, and I take full responsibility for launching a game that needs to be great."
Spencer said one way to combat issues such as the team faces, is that in the future, Microsoft should be more engaging in games midway through production when they become part of Xbox.
"I do think there's a different expectation for a game and even a team when you've been third-party and all of a sudden you become part of first-party. We didn't do a good job early on in engaging with Arkane Austin to help them understand what it meant to be part of Xbox and part of first-party, and use some of our internal resources to help them move along that journey even faster."
In the podcast, Spencer also mentions the "punch in the chin" he received over launching Redfall with only Quality Mode on Xbox consoles, capping the game at 30FPS instead of the promised 60FPS. Currently, the game on Xbox Series X is capped at 4K with 30FPS, while Xbox Series S users are capped at 1440p with 30FPS.
"The Redfall videos on IGN showing videos of the game running at 60 on PC, at the point knowing that the game was going to be around 30FPS at launch on console," Spencer said. "We have to be transparent about what we're showing, and that what we are showing is representative of what our console customer is going to see, and what they're going to play. And our transparency just has to be better."
To that end, Spencer blamed himself, stating that it drives him crazy "when we self-inflict wounds by putting things out there, and communication that's confusing or misleading about what the actual end product is going to be."
That said, Bethesda previously promised 60FPS Performance Mode will be added via a future game update, so hopefully they will get that going rather soon.