Vidjama Gmaes Work

My last commentary on Redfall.

It’s been a few days since my last Redfall commentary and I swear it’s not because I forgot how to spell my own website name. I finally finished Redfall, well I finished the main quest series and most of the side missions, and roughly 60% of the achievements.

The further you go into Redfall the more the game’s rampant technical problems reveal themselves. And there is a massive diversity of technical problems some of which I already mentioned. Most players will likely encounter the UI just breaking, where quest text disappears, health bars disappear, buttons stop working, etc. I had been operating under the belief that the game arbitrarily disables your flashlight in certain areas for effect. Nah, the programmers just suck.

Outside of the UI going on vacation I think the most impactful bug has to do with the AI. We’ve all seen the videos of NPCs in Redfall being stupid, and 80% of the time they are useless and barely responsive to the world around them. I have been in a fight with a vampire or cult member only to have them forget while I am shooting them that they were in combat. But other times the game suddenly kicks into high gear and become marksman snipers leading to a very quick, very unexpected, and very unfair death.

I have figured out since my last article that the key to vampire nests with numerous vampires is the UV ray. I also got a really cool looking assault rifle, one that slowly became functionally worthless since it shoots one bullet at a time and holds 12 bullets in a magazine. Maybe once the game is optimized to not run like horrible shit having a precision-based assault rifle will be more useful.

It’s hard to feel bad for anyone who paid $70 for this game and came out bitter because of all the technical and design problems, because they are morons. I don’t know how much it needs to be drilled into people’s heads to stop pre-ordering games, but the ship of reasonability has sailed many years ago on that front. If you bought Redfall day one and are enjoying it, well good for you. Which isn’t to say I’m not empathetic, AAA games have no business releasing in the state that many of them do. But it’s the reality of the situation right now that we must work around.

This game makes me want to go back and actually put some time into Deathloop, a title that I admittedly haven’t played nearly as much as I’ve wanted to. Not on the PS5, where the controls are Arkane-levels of garbage. Probably on the PC.

Stop buying $70 games.