Redfall

At the end of my Dishonored: Death of the Outsider post 4 years ago, I was speculating the direction Arkane Studios would be going. Arkane Lyon's Deathloop was still an unknown at that time and I was afraid that it would be some easy-to-monetize multiplayer cash grab. While that game turned out to have a player-invasion mechanic, it is still very much a singleplayer title. Deathloop had been in development way before Prey's sales were realized; it probably wasn't pressured by the latter's reception. Instead, I should have been worried about the next title from Arkane Austin. I wonder if Arkane's parent company Zenimax Media had laid down the terms after Prey: the next title would need to make more money -- all the money. Raphaël Colantonio probably said no thanks and peaced out to found Wolfeye Studios (he also worked briefly on Ken Levine's upcoming Judas) and Harvey Smith came from Lyon to take control of Austin's reins.

Welcome to Turdfall, Massachusetts

When ZeniMax trademarked Redfall back in October 2018, some thought it was going to be an Elder Scrolls title -- Redguard and Hammerfell, you see. Instead it was to be the mess that now is Arkane Austin's first person co-op shooter. The game is set in imaginary island town of Redfall on the East Coast of the United States. Vampires have isolated the town by raising a wave barrier around it -- somehow (Palpatine returned). Sun is also dimmed so that the often as daylight-avoiding depicted beings are free to move about even during the day.

Now, while the game is clearly meant for more than one player, monetization is far from its biggest issues -- though many have expressed contempt for its $70 asking price. Redfall's problems include: numerous glitches, bugs, and bad enemy pathfinding/awareness. But even worse is how the game is creatively barren. Especially coming from Arkane Studios, you'd expect something far more interesting. All their games I've played so far have been good or better. (Deathloop is still on my backlog and I might check out their first title, Arx Fatalis, one day too.) Redfall's poor state amplifies the audacity of its premium price tag.

Redfall also could have been monetized-to-the-max during development -- the many character/gun cosmetics would suggest so -- but perhaps the many live service failures in the recent years caused a pivot. In fact, that seems to have been exactly the case based on a Bloomberg article by Jason Schreier published a week ago. Zenimax had wanted their studios to monetize more and the results can be seen in Fallout 76, Rage 2, Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and DOOM Eternal: all of them have microtransactions. However, currently the only thing you can buy in addition the actual game of Redfall is a Bite Back Upgrade for 30€. That is pricey but hardly nothing new for a deluxe edition.

I found it amusing though how, before release, Smith stated: "There's no store in the game, and there's no microtransactions." And then added that there may be bundles of "stuff like guns, costumes, characters". They're not selling you things but they may be selling you things. Not on their store, because there is no store. There is the Xbox and Steam store but it's not their store. You know. He also said they're looking into removing the always-online requirement from the game. I reckon Colantonio is happy he's not in Smith's shoes, having to spew corporate bullshit. Although Arkane's not exactly speaking anything right now: they've been very quiet post release. It has been over a month since release and there has been only a single minor hotfix.

The only person to say anything has been the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer. Probably because Redfall has not been a good look for them. It is the first big release announced after Microsoft's recent acquisitions, the first one at the 70€ price point big publishers are now pushing, and one that runs only at maximum of 30 FPS on their Series X console.

I wonder if there is some intentional purpose to mislead by having the game's developer to be 'Arkane Austin' on Steam when every other Arkane game, even Deathloop, is from 'Arkane Studios'. I have seen a few commenters on Reddit and Youtube thinking Arkane Austin is some new offshoot studio without experience. According to the Bloomberg article, by the end of Redfall's development, Austin had lost 70% of its staff that had worked on Prey. So I guess you could on some level argue that it is indeed a new studio. (The number seems high but it's also in vacuum: I don't know how big of a turnover large game studios generally have between projects.) With Arkane Austin being so understaffed, Roundhouse Studios (former Human Head Studios, reformed under Bethesda) had to help with the development.

Fun with friends -- maybe?

Bethesda has had trouble marketing Arkane's past few titles. Prey had the whole issue with its forced title and then Bethesda trying to sell it as a shooter when that's not primarily what the game is about. With Deathloop there seemed to be some odd difficulty with getting people to understand what exactly the game was. I personally didn't have trouble understanding what Deathloop was but with Redfall, I too was thinking it was going to be a Left 4 Dead kind of deal with the four hero characters based on early trailers. Later Smith and the game's other director Ricardo Bare managed to clarify that it was going to be more of an open world title, inspired by Far Cry 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

I expected the characters' abilities to have synergy with each other, like if Prey's Mooncrash DLC's whole cast were there at once or something: abilities combining as a co-op immersive sim experience. But that wasn't the case at all; Redfall can't be called an immersive sim. It has merely your usual party buffs, no systemic interactions.

Redfall is perfectly playable solo too. However, your character selection will most likely have a big impact on single player difficult, Layla being the worst choice you can make. Many, including Yahtzee, have thought Jacob to be the best for solo due to his invisibility cloak. However, while cloaking is useful, it is Devinder who's the most powerful character because of his ultimate ability, Blacklight.

Instead of catching on fire or vaporizing, vampires in Redfall react to ultraviolet light by petrifying. Most petrified vampires are easily pulverized by simply elbowing them. Devinder's Blacklight plants a UV light shining totem that trivializes big vampire fights. And if there are enough vampires around, Blacklight will become available again from all the psychic residue you get from destroying the vampires.

After certain point in the story, vampire nests start spawning on the map. They can be entered for a fairly short, somewhat randomly generated (and underdeveloped) dungeon with a nest heart at the end. Destroying the heart gives access to loot chests and makes the nest collapse in a minute. Escaping the nest before it has collapsed nets you 1000 experience which is a significant amount through most of the game's 40 character levels.

As Jacob you can probably cloak through a nest and destroy the heart without waking up the vampires. (I'm not certain how his cloak operates exactly.) But as Devinder you can and should aggro every single vampire in the nest while running to the end where you'll plant Blacklight and gather the easy bonus experience from all the petrified vampires around you.

Devinder's Arc Javelin is a good ability too but what made me pick him initially was Translocator. From its description, I immediately identified the ability as a continuation to Dishonored's Blink. Although, due to its clumsiness, Translocator feels like a regression: you can't use it while sprinting and it has a travel time.

You can throw the device up and down cliffs to keep going straight forward. And most importantly, you can throw it through windows to get past locked doors without using a lockpick or rewire kit. As sort of an immersive sim veteran player, I found it bemusing that not all have realized the ability's utility in that regard. Redfall itself isn't consistent when it comes to allowing Translocator's usage however. Some houses for no reason will not let you translocate into them even though you can shoot through their windows just fine. Sometimes a window will block the translocator but the window next to it will not.

Being able to avoid using lockpicks every now and then is nice also because Devinder (and I think the others too except Jacob with a perk) can carry only three of each device at once. Meanwhile your inventory can be filled with 40 sniper rifles. It is quite non-immersive. There's no lockpicking or hacking minigame either, just having to hold down a button for a while. (Damn hold-to-interact user interface plague infects everything.)

Since there are no keypads or any kind of puzzle to enter values into, I started to wonder if the 0451 code was not in Redfall. Maybe the developers thought Redfall wasn't worthy enough for it. But I did eventually spot it in a note next to a UV light -- in two places even.

The setting has issues

Vampires should be scary or sexy -- preferably both. In Redfall, they're neither. The game has this odd contradictory tone. The base theme is obviously dark but then things like its colorful art, the typical-to-Arkane large-handed character models, and the flippant player characters work against that. Sometimes you get a moment that is briefly creepy: a vampire perched atop a roof or one floating eerily between treetops. Then the illusion is immediately broken by how the vampire starts moving about erratically or the floating one twitches up and down to stay at the same distance from the surface under it. And then there are occasional glitched vampires that ignore you and all your attacks.

After the prologue when exiting your home base the first time, you get a brief scene of helicopters crashing and one of the game's villains giving a speech somehow, ending in: "I am... the Hollow Man." At that point I was certain Redfall wasn't going to be great: such a comic book introduction, delivered so soberly. The game's lore is a weird, unstylish nonsense urban fantasy.

As you progress through the main story, you learn that the vampire outbreak came from medical research. However, there's quite a power level leap from eternal life into halting the ocean and dimming the sun. Maybe if Redfall wasn't set in the real world that could work but it's such an out-of-nowhere thing, similarly to how the characters have suddenly all their powers. I also got this slight hunch that removing water from the game allowed Arkane to avoid all the challenges involved with swimming and combat while in water. The Dishonored games did have that but maybe it would have been too much this time for the developers to handle.

Night and day not being that different is one of the big mood problems. Like, if you think of Dying Light whose nights are dark and full of terrors. Now that's a proper atmosphere. But in Redfall it doesn't matter if night falls. Sure, you will encounter more vampires in the night but they're not exactly hidden during the day either, just floating asleep under a dock or in an open garage.

Redfall's cutscenes are unengaging static 3D scenes with camera moving sideways and characters narrating over them. And the music playing during them is some awful rap backtrack. There is maybe one or two good, ominous vibes giving tracks in the game but overall its music is awful. Ambient audio is pretty atmospheric when in the open world though. There was this one sound whose origin I never figured out. My best guess is that it's some bird I'm not familiar with.

To give you more insight into the story, there are collectible grave locks scattered around the game's world. In a very gamey way, there are exactly 100 of them and no hints where to find them, outside their turquoise glow. Picking one up gives you a short audiolog from the person who was the subject of the immortality research. The audiologs aren't diegetic; your character doesn't acknowledge them. It felt dumb that at the end of the game, Devinder was surprised the key to the research, the Gateway, was a person. That had been obvious from the first few grave locks. By the way, there are only around 80 unique audiologs for the grave locks: after that they start repeating. That is so typical to this game.

The grave locks have a gameplay benefit as well. At certain thresholds of them collected, you get an increasing automatic chargeback for your ultimate ability. I'm not entirely convinced it functions properly though. The charge comes back slowly and it seems to get negated if you gather any psychic residue before that has happened. I reckon the effect could be instead an increase to residue collected or something.

Gameplay a mixed bag

Some of the gameplay does feel good. There is sprinting and sliding though the latter doesn't have much purpose in this one. Ledge grabbing is as universal as ever like it usually is in Arkane games. But in combat everything is not as smooth.

I wished that you could have more than three guns equipped at once: not having to open inventory to equip a UV gun just for the occasional red mist spewer would have been nice. Usually I carried a semi-auto assault rifle, shotgun, and sniper rifle. Devinder can find a special stake launcher but I didn't like the weapon class due to its slow reload and low ammunition capacity.

In addition to vampires, there are human enemies: either cultists or Bellwether mercenaries. ('Bellwether' is weirdly close to the Belltower mercenary company in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.) For them, Redfall incorporates the hit point model of headshot being lethal while body shots being far less so. Humans are thus easy enemies -- at least in the first half of the game. While they still have kind of poor perception later, they do become far deadlier. You can no longer just walk into middle of them without care. And getting jumped on by a human group while doing something else was always a tough situation.

Rook is a miniboss vampire that appears periodically (after certain point), just like the Nightmare in Prey or the Big Sisters in BioShock 2. They always drop a weapon of the highest rarity which is nice but there is an easier method of obtaining them. Still, you might as well try to kill it before it kills you. Exploiting the poor enemy pathfinding makes the rook fights easy, as long as you make sure no human group is nearby, ready to unload their guns on your ass while the rook is keeping your attention.

Redfall has the usual color-coded rarity system from white to orange, though it has its own names for them: orange rarity is called unrivaled instead of legendary, for instance. The game has even less variation in its loot system than Everspace 2. There are few places where a container is guaranteed to have an unrivaled weapon in it. If you don't take everything from the container, a new unrivaled weapon will spawn the next time you load into the game. By quitting to main menu and going back in, you can effortlessly get a full loadout of your favorite unrivaled weapons to match your current level.

There is also a mission whose reward is a guaranteed unrivaled blood remnant trinket. It has two randomly rolled stats that you can check before taking it because it's in a container. If they're not to your liking, you can again quit to the main menu and run back to the container for rerolled stats. Unfortunately you can finish the mission only once per playthrough, locking the blood remnant on the level you looted it. The preferable stats you most likely want are health restore on vampire and human kills because using a health kit in combat takes so much time and might not even help if you're being attacked.

My loadout settled eventually onto using a Cass Special semi-automatic assault rifle, a Causeway shotgun (not unrivaled), and the highest damage sniper rifle I could find. The Cass Special always comes with a 75% headshot damage bonus. I found vampires hard to kill early on because they tend to start teleporting around once they've seen you. But then I found a pattern in how they do it, eventually running at you in a straight line, making headshots easy with a semi-auto rifle. (Assault rifle tooltips need an update because both semi and fully automatic rifles are described as automatic, not really telling you the whole story since there no selectable firing modes.)

Vampires still remained difficult to hit once in melee range, thus the shotgun. The Causeway uses a box magazine, making it the quickest shotgun to reload. The rest of them are not as viable for bigger fights. The tube-fed and drum-thingy shotguns are particularly maddening.

A sniper rifle I carried because it's just fun to take out enemies afar and being able to scout with a scope. Vampires -- with the exception of one type -- can't be be sniped unfortunately because a non-petrified vampire will go into a weakened state, still requiring you to put a stake through them. That can be done from a distance (though not as far as a sniper rifle will hit) with a stake launcher or a special handgun but most of the time you will use a gun with a bayonet (a shotgun or assault rifle). Why are there no crossbows?

Staking stays rather satisfying through the game. It's kind of stupid though that despite having a bayonet on the gun you're using, your melee attack is just an elbow strike. There's no special stealth takedown animation either despite there being a sneak attack damage bonus: humans die to one stealth elbow. Just more silly things Redfall has, I guess.

Common vampires being able to blink around didn't sit right with me either. It's like they're using the same behavior as phantoms in Prey. I wonder if Arkane simply wanted to do that or if it was to alleviate the bad pathfinding by making vampires be able to teleport through obstacles. They're so erratic about it too when they have heard you making noise but not seen you yet. A handful of times I heard one blink around the rooms of a house and then end up somewhere outside while looking for me.

Suspiciously demanding

I can't really blame a new game for not running great on my old PC but I did find it disappointing after playing two other Unreal Engine 4 releases of this year without needing minimum settings to not max out my CPU. Then again, since Redfall doesn't have a 60 FPS mode on the Series X either, it might simply be poorly optimized. I guess the level of detail Arkane wanted in the world was too much. Or they didn't have the expertise to implement it without a massive performance hit.

It was amusing how after the credits there's a message from Smith and Bare that states: "--our goal was to create an ambitious new game while building on Arkane's signature creative values." As I recall, Arkane has (or used to have) 20 design mantras, of which one is: "FUCK LADDERS -- You'd just fall to your death anyway." Redfall has an awful many ladders to have been made by a team following that rule.

Mission and location markers on the compass would have been a nice feature to have too. I feel like every open world I've played has had those -- except this one.

Another oddity are the many quad bikes. They look like they were placed so that they were intended to be drivable but that got cut and instead they are just another thing that will explode easily -- cars are so unexpectedly hazardous: two bullets through a car's windows and it will go up in flames.

Can it be fixed?

I believe Arkane Austin is dedicated to getting the performance mode released for the Xbox still. I guess that's why there have been no big patches yet: they want to get that out properly. They will also be releasing two new characters that are included in the Bite Back Upgrade's hero pass. And I reckon they will be fixing bugs in general with those additions.

But I don't see longer support coming; I don't think many at Arkane or Bethesda deem Redfall worth it. Were its performance and bugs fixed, it still wouldn't be particularly great game. There aren't exactly numerous vampire shooter co-op titles around but I don't think the vampire killing experience in this one is so special that you're not better off playing some other, actually fun and interesting co-op shooter, like about any Borderlands game.

Redfall was a huge failure for Arkane Studios. It makes you wonder what the future holds for them, at least for the Austin studio. After two commercial failures, they may even end up getting shut down. Maybe they could pivot back to making singleplayer games now under Microsoft but with their original Prey staff having been replaced so heavily, is there enough skill there to make something as great as Prey?

It will be interesting to see what happens and if there will be any news in the Xbox/Bethesda showcase on Sunday or will the silence continue. Being a first party title, Redfall will most likely be staying on the game pass but I doubt I will be revisiting it, especially now that Microsoft stopped the 1€ trial months. I was still playing Everspace 2, so I let my subscription continue for one full price month (which then allowed me to beat this game too). That almost doubled the amount I have paid for the service in total. In the future, I will be more particular when I pay for a month: how many titles there are to play and if they're yet in playable state.

My current game pass stats are: 22€ paid for 21 months during which I have beaten 32 games. It really has been the best deal in gaming hands down and still remains good -- only 10 times more expensive (or more, considering the past 3-month deals).

One more thing: I was checking which screenshots to include and was reminded of yet another malfunctioning feature. Redfall's subtitles have an option to be only subtitles or include closed captions as well. Of course the annoying closed captions show up even on "only subtitles".

Edited 2023-06-14: Fixed typos.