Redfall creative director Harvey Smith believes the range of issues that developer Arkane faced during the development of the vampire game would have "tanked" a different studio. Appearing on the Iron Lords podcast, Smith listed off the many real-world events that transpired during the development of Redfall, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the January 6 storming of the US Capitol, murder hornets, aliens, and power outages in its local community of Austin, Texas, and much more.

"This team has been through so much along the way. We started this project before COVID. We've had the pandemic, everybody went work-from-home, we had the Great Resignation. In Austin, we had multiple ice storms that shut the electrical grid down for weeks at a time. We had to boil our water for a while. The country had an insurrection. We had important social movements happening across the country. We had murder hornets," Smith said. "The Air Force was talking about aliens at one point. We had so many things happen in the last few years that I think would have tanked a lot of development teams."

Smith went on to say: "At Arkane, we didn't work people too hard. We gave everybody Fridays off during the worst part of the pandemic. The company was kind enough to extend the [release] date so we did not have to crunch ourselves to death. We just kept putting the love into it."