Star Wars Jedi: Survivor came out four days ago. Tears of the Kingdom is out in less than two weeks. This is a bad time to release a video game, especially one with the main purpose of bolstering your brand and offering a prestige exclusive, while relying on hopefully convincing enough floating gamers to try out your fairly niche new IP. It's a bad time to release a game like that even if it was perfect. It's a frankly horrific time to release a game like that when it's still falling apart, and that makes Redfall's decision to launch right now all the more baffling. This is a poor launch window to attack, and rushing for it seems almost spiteful.
Redfall is not a good game right now. The community is busy making fun of the chimneys, which float above rooftops or have more rooftop beneath them, the sniper scope is just a dusty circle of glass, and the AI is horrendously stupid. Before you even get into flaws with the skill trees, looter-shooter mechanics, co-op reliance, and various other issues that make Redfall bad to play, underneath it all, it's broken. So why release it at all?
There are a few things to consider here. Since covering video games is my whole thing, I keep up to date on when games are coming out, and they frequently baffle me. Why would an indie hack 'n' slash game come out the week before God of War Ragnarok? Why are smaller titles eyeing up June when Street Fighter 6, Diablo 4, and Final Fantasy 16 already have that month locked down? It's often a matter of budgets - there are various costs associated with shipping a game, not to mention that delaying a game will mean needing to continue to fund various development costs, as well as keeping staff on retainer for post-launch patches. When a game is ready, sometimes it's impossible to hold it for three months down the line when the competition is thinner.
However, Redfall clearly isn't ready. Games have been delayed for a lot less, so the whole 'well, it's ready now so it's launching now' makes no sense when it isn't ready now. That takes us back to the window itself - why hold this position between two big hitters? It's a bad time to release a video game, but it's a great time to bury bad news.
A few months ago, Forspoken launched in a relative drought, having been delayed from sharing a launch window with God of War and Sonic. It seemed a sensible move - nobody was going to choose it out of those two, but with nothing else around, maybe it'll get a few more players interested. Unfortunately, what happened was the news cycle became dominated with negative angles. There were no distractions, and so all we could talk about was Forspoken stinking. I played it and did not care for it at all, finding it to be an extremely hollow experience that misunderstood its few strengths, so I will not say criticism of the game was unfair. It was, however, disproportionately loud. If it had stuck it out between God of War and Sonic, it would have been forgotten faster, and could have grown into a cult hit. Now, it's forever a joke.
I don't think there's much hope for Redfall. From the limited parts I've played, it’s even worse than Forspoken. If this release during a busy time was damage control to let audiences move on, then it makes sense to hold this position. Underneath the technical flaws which will be fixed in time, the game lacks the edge we've come to expect from Arkane. Some enthusiasts have found it in analysing level design layout or buried in flavour text, but the game is a pale imitation of a genre that is already dead. It leans into co-op in ways that make the solo experience worse and which blunts Arkane's experience.
Mostly, it feels like Redfall has been released now because there was never a good time to release a game like this, and conversely the worst time might be the best time. We're too busy with Star Wars and Zelda to notice that Xbox's prestige exclusive for the year is a dud. Starfield, Forza, and Hellblade can still make 2023 a good year for Xbox, but it's off to a bad start. The only good to come of this is a lot of people might not notice.