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.