Arkane Austin is no more after Xbox announced its closing three studios and merging one at Bethesda. The studio that created the original Dishonored game (with Arkane Lyon as Arkane Studios) and the 2017 game Prey will unfairly be remembered by their last game, the multiplayer co-op shooter Redfall.
What’s worse, the closure meant that an update that removes the need for a constant online connection will never come out. IGN reports that the update would have been ready for release sometime this month.
Upcoming content in the form of the Hero Pass has also been cancelled, where players who purchased them will be compensated in some way. If Arkane Austin continued operations, the Hero Pass content, which adds two new playable characters, would have dropped in Halloween.
As much as Redfall is universally panned, for good reason, the fact that it was a month, or even mere weeks, away from getting an offline patch is truly unfortunate. The servers may be still be online but like most games that require an online connection has proven that servers will go down eventually, taking down the game with them.
After the closure and delisting of Ubisoft’s open world racing game The Crew, a campaign spearheaded by content creator Ross Scott has started to stop publishers from killing games. Even a mediocre game like Redfall deserves to be preserve. Future generations of gamers can discover the qualities the game has, that may be subjectively be viewed differently in time, and can even inspire new art derived from Arkane Austin’s work.
Xbox closed down Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Games and merged Roundhouse Studios into ZeniMax Online last week.