Bethesda Hasn’t Given Up On Redfall, According To An Interview With Pete Hines

It seems like whatever is going on with Redfall, it may be too early to actually declare it dead. Maybe we should just go for quiet. In a recent interview with Games Industry.biz, Bethesda’s Head of Global Publishing Pete Hines discussed the company’s latest game, Starfield. One question asked how Redfall’s reception affected the new game and if it put any additional pressure on it.

In response, Hines stated that Bethesda doesn’t enjoy “failing to meet” player expectations, but noted that it's not unfamiliar with having launches not go the way they hoped. He added that they “don’t quit or abandon stuff just because it didn’t start right.” He then goes on to discuss examples of games, including Elder Scrolls Online and Fallout 76, not landing the way they hoped initially and points out that in both those cases they carried on and kept working on them to get them up to snuff. He notes that with Games Pass, players will be coming across the game ten years from now, and it’ll be there waiting for them.

Hines notes that they’ll be doing the same with Redfall. The company feels it’s a fun game, and they’re going to keep working until it’s a good shooter game. That includes getting that 60fps in there. As for the rest of their library, the developer likes to “embrace chaos”. As Hines puts it, they “could make a safer, less buggy, less risky game if [they] wanted to”, but they’d rather offer players more freedom. The question he asks is if bugs “take away from [the player] experience”, or would players rather “have a consistent, fun game that [they] just can’t stop playing and experimenting with?”