Redfall game director Harvey Smith has revealed that he negotiated with Microsoft to allow him and colleagues back into their old offices to release a final bug-fixing patch for the poorly-received game, despite already having been laid off. The vampire shooter launched to negative reviews in 2023 and became the last project for Arkane Austin before Microsoft shut the Texas studio down in May 2024, cancelling the game's planned post-launch content in the process.

Smith, previously lead designer on Deus Ex and creative director on the Dishonored games, said his team had already spent a year fixing thousands of bugs and had version 1.4 ready when the studio closed. He said Microsoft agreed to let six or seven former staff sign back in to release the update, which he believes would have made Redfall a "much, much better game" had it shipped at launch. Smith also discussed how Arkane's push into games-as-a-service elements, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, contributed to the project's troubled development, and noted he has since founded a new immersive sim studio, Black Pony Immersive.