Former Arkane bosses Harvey Smith and Ben Horne have opened a new studio, Black Pony Immersive, which is now working on “imaginative first-person action-RPGs.” The last game they worked on was the ill-fated Xbox-exclusive vampire game, Redfall. Both Smith (Redfall director) and Horne (Redfall producer) have now discussed that project and what went wrong.
Horne told The Game Business that Redfall was born during the live-service boom, and the team had to figure out, “How do we do this?”
Smith added that Redfall was a “difficult project” for Arkane, acknowledging that the studio “got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing.”
“Arkane is very specialized, but the industry is growing, and there’s always more mouths to feed. And it’s great when you can reach a wider audience. I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us. We can do this. Let’s take what we love, and mix it with [games-as-a-service]. And do different mechanics by day and night. And have character classes,” he said.
During the middle of development, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, which Smith said impacted Redfall. He also singled out “the great resignation” having an impact, as people started working remotely and changed jobs.
Smith said Redfall was “very poorly received” at launch, with the team then spending the year next patching the game in an effort to improve it. Then Microsoft closed Arkane Austin and laid the team off. The team had even more improvements planned for a 1.4 update, so Smith pitched Microsoft on the idea of coming back to release this update, even though he just got laid off.
“We went to Microsoft and said, ‘I know we don’t work here anymore, but can we please release this?’ And to their credit, they did not say no. They let six or seven of us sign forms that we could come back in the building. After being fired, we released 1.4, which I think if we had that on day one, it wouldn’t have set the world on fire, but it was a much, much better game,” he said.
Horne, for his part, said it was “like an achievement unlocked” in his professional career to release an update for a game “after I’ve been fired and the studio closed down.”
Also in the interview, Smith acknowledged that he was “clearly out of my lane” working on a live-service game like Redfall. “I was not working on the things that I should be working on.”
“Politically, there were very hard things. There were fires. The government announced aliens at some point. There was a swarm of murder hornets coming toward Texas. We had an ice storm that put power and water out for like two weeks for some people. It was crazy,” he said. “That development cycle, I’ll never forget it. And yet at the end of it, people came back together to release that patch even after losing their jobs. And some of them wanted to work with us again after that.”
As for Smith and Horne’s new studio, Black Pony, the team is working on “crafting games that push the limits of player immersion.” The studio has not announced any games yet, however.