Vidjama Gmaes Work

Welcome to Redfall.

Redfall is like finding a delicious hoagie that someone half-cooked and then threw in the trash. The building blocks of something that could have been relatively decent were there before it got shoved out and covered in garbage as well as that combination of loose hair and fried oil that the Swiffer Wetjet picks up when cleaning around the stove after cooking burgers. Arkane is certainly higher caliber than this, or they used to be.

A lot of aspects of Redfall feel like they were built under the idea of being obligated to put the mechanic in but not having any time to do it well. I say this specifically of the game’s side quest system because every open world game needs safehouses, and do you idiots not play Ubisoft games? Well we don’t have time to do in-depth side missions to unlock the safe houses so let’s put the generator to the safehouse roughly twenty feet away and just have the player activate that to unlock it. At least we’ve checked off the list.

Oh and every open world game needs territory control right? Because taking back territory gives players a sense of accomplishment almost as good as opening lockboxes. So let’s put in a system where the player takes back the town by capturing territory. How much budget do we have for territory quests? Two very fast quests per area? Well that’ll have to be sufficient. You could take over all of the safehouses in this game in less than a half hour total. I’ve basically done it.

There are a lot of glaring signs of the game’s lack of playtesting or foresight. Redfall loves throwing tutorial screens at you after you’ve already done the thing that the game is trying to teach you. It’s also one of those new age games that requires you to hold a button down in order to clear tutorial messages, meaning if it decides it’s going to throw one at you and obscure a third of the screen while you’re in the middle of a firefight you’re probably going to eat shit trying to hold down the escape button to clear it out. Assuming it even lets you do that.

You can also get popups that come in so fast they overlap over popups, and the game doesn’t know how to handle that so you actually have to force-quit the client to clear it. The second popup gets stuck and you can’t hit escape to load the main menu.

Redfall has mini raids in the form of vampire nests, little instances that pop up over the world that give a ton of powerful loot if you dive in and kill a few vampires. They do showcase the worst of Redfall’s gameplay for solo players, as in the open world you do have the ability to run around and enemies somewhat consider cover. In vampire nests however, the arenas are tight and linear, meaning these instances just turn into a grind of five or more vampires bum rushing and tanking the player, and dying, and just running back to continue where you were a couple grand lighter in the wallet department.

It also showcases Redfall’s bad world design. The world of Redfall might be more interesting if there was stuff going on in it. Outside of loot your other incentive to get rid of these vampire nests is that they grow bigger if you let them stay, and the aura they create makes enemies within it more powerful. The problem? I have yet to encounter a single enemy inside these zones, and I have destroyed six vampire nests so far. It goes back to what I said about the studio not planning on how to use the mechanics they built.

But like I said somewhere toward the start of this, there are little glimmers here and there of a decent game. Redfall has a great feeling when you find a very powerful new weapon to play around with. The game does well balancing the stake gun, an inherently powerful gun, with its lack of readily available ammunition. Death is not a setback but a mere inconvenience going the route of just taking some of your money. Conceptually the story is interesting, and the gunplay with some tweaks is more than serviceable.

However it is all wrapped in a fundamentally broken package. AI is so stupid it often can’t comprehend looking down at you and shooting. Other times it understands the concept so well that the AI tries to shoot you through the floor of houses. The enemies in this game remind me of the worst of shovelware shooters, AI that doesn’t know how to use its environment, to target the player, or use their guns efficiently. I killed a boss vampire merely by standing on a ledge above him and breaking his pathfinding. If the guy who can teleport can’t get to me, what chance do the others have?

Luckily the issues with bad AI and performance problems can be fixed relatively easily in the grand scheme of things. But Redfall’s issues go much deeper, and it’s going to take a lot of effort to fix this game and bring it to a presentable state. Assuming you can get those people who will have dropped it in the interim to come back. Or assuming Microsoft doesn’t just tell Arkane Studios to abandon it in a few months after a couple small fixes.