Redfall at this point is an anomaly. Critical and public reception has been abysmal marking it as the first big miss for Arkane. Failure seems to bring out the worst folks and has drawn away from more important conversations to be had. Redfall is not the game I wanted it to be. It is not the game that the downbeat zeitgeist has made it out to be. It is a mess, but at the end of a twenty-hour playtime it was a mostly good time leaving one question, am I so out of touch?
It isn’t that hard to make excuses when you can see the stumbling blocks a mile away. No studio can change their engine or design, let alone both, without facing hurdles. Add to that some early mandates for a game as a service, a pandemic, staff attrition, and an acquisition and you just get the sense that Redfall was built on an insecure foundation.
There are plenty who will say that there is nothing here. A rotten package at the core. An exaggeration at best and certainly a byproduct of the greater fervor surrounding the game. The core is respectable enough. It is simply that there are asterisks attached to a lot of the compliments you might be able to give the game. Take for instance combat. It feels good and there is enough variety in the characters to have something good here, but the enemy design and placement is so poor that there is hardly ever a real engaging combat loop. To make things worse, any trademark complex level design of Arkane is gone too. Most buildings are empty—one way in or out. It is a game of simple environments and simple enemies to shoot at.
The real shame is a small town during the fall harvest caught up in spooky shenanigans is the setting of most great Halloween stories, but the town must have people in it to feel real and Redfall is barren. there are no people to connect with out in the open world. There just isn’t any real connection between the player and Redfall. NPC interaction is limited to the safe houses and itself is limited. Where most games rely on game loops or engaging characters Redfall can’t even provide proper cutscenes. After an initial animated cutscene and a proper in-game cinematic setting up the scenario the entire rest of the game is poorly color graded still images with vague narration. This is not effective storytelling. Arkane is capable of great diegetic and cinematic storytelling. Redfall has glimmers of an interesting story within the game world hinting at something more than the still image slog ever does. You have to really dig for that, and it is just so disheartening.
Playing through the game it felt as though some adjustments to the enemy design—placement, AI, variety, and consistent difficulty—would do wonders in setting the game right. Is it ever going to be a masterpiece with just some general improvements? No, but that doesn’t mean people should hold this over Arkane and the industry at-large for the rest of time. There are some real issues here. Some not so easily fixed. You can’t just make cutscenes for an entire game for free. You can’t just populate the world with neat things to find. You can’t just make the characters feel more present with a few weeks of dev time from a reduced team. Hell, even if the team does tweak its enemy design that won’t fix the games greater structural weaknesses. It is no exaggeration to say that Redfall has one of the worst final boss encounters in a game. Honest, the final boss is just holding X at three points, and you win. There is no fighting if you are quick enough. Twenty hours later and the bottom falls out and you just have to hold X.
Still, even after everything I can’t say Redfall is wholly a failure. Sure, the game is a mess, but it is an enjoyable mess. There is a good time here and I honestly wouldn’t mind playing more of it, even if they don’t fix it. It would be a wonderful Halloween game, but what will really captivate anyone back to this by October?
Arkane is just stuck at a crossroads. Either they pump more money in for a course correction and after a few years the game has its cult audience that never really justifies the cost but maybe makes folks more kind to Arkane for doing right by the final product or it is dropped and left to haunt the memories of the people who hold onto this stuff as ammunition in any gamer debate for years to come. A dire fate for any game.
I don’t think Arkane wanted to release Redfall like this. There clearly is a story here that echoes the halls of famous “game development is hard” stories because game development is hard. It remains a miracle that any game ever ships and sometimes a developer just ships a bad game.
It isn’t that hard to make excuses when you can see the stumbling blocks a mile away. No studio can change their engine or design, let alone both, without facing hurdles. Add to that some early mandates for a game as a service, a pandemic, staff attrition, and an acquisition and you just get the sense that Redfall was built on an insecure foundation.
There are plenty who will say that there is nothing here. A rotten package at the core. An exaggeration at best and certainly a byproduct of the greater fervor surrounding the game. The core is respectable enough. It is simply that there are asterisks attached to a lot of the compliments you might be able to give the game. Take for instance combat. It feels good and there is enough variety in the characters to have something good here, but the enemy design and placement is so poor that there is hardly ever a real engaging combat loop. To make things worse, any trademark complex level design of Arkane is gone too. Most buildings are empty—one way in or out. It is a game of simple environments and simple enemies to shoot at.
The real shame is a small town during the fall harvest caught up in spooky shenanigans is the setting of most great Halloween stories, but the town must have people in it to feel real and Redfall is barren. there are no people to connect with out in the open world. There just isn’t any real connection between the player and Redfall. NPC interaction is limited to the safe houses and itself is limited. Where most games rely on game loops or engaging characters Redfall can’t even provide proper cutscenes. After an initial animated cutscene and a proper in-game cinematic setting up the scenario the entire rest of the game is poorly color graded still images with vague narration. This is not effective storytelling. Arkane is capable of great diegetic and cinematic storytelling. Redfall has glimmers of an interesting story within the game world hinting at something more than the still image slog ever does. You have to really dig for that, and it is just so disheartening.
Playing through the game it felt as though some adjustments to the enemy design—placement, AI, variety, and consistent difficulty—would do wonders in setting the game right. Is it ever going to be a masterpiece with just some general improvements? No, but that doesn’t mean people should hold this over Arkane and the industry at-large for the rest of time. There are some real issues here. Some not so easily fixed. You can’t just make cutscenes for an entire game for free. You can’t just populate the world with neat things to find. You can’t just make the characters feel more present with a few weeks of dev time from a reduced team. Hell, even if the team does tweak its enemy design that won’t fix the games greater structural weaknesses. It is no exaggeration to say that Redfall has one of the worst final boss encounters in a game. Honest, the final boss is just holding X at three points, and you win. There is no fighting if you are quick enough. Twenty hours later and the bottom falls out and you just have to hold X.
Still, even after everything I can’t say Redfall is wholly a failure. Sure, the game is a mess, but it is an enjoyable mess. There is a good time here and I honestly wouldn’t mind playing more of it, even if they don’t fix it. It would be a wonderful Halloween game, but what will really captivate anyone back to this by October?
Arkane is just stuck at a crossroads. Either they pump more money in for a course correction and after a few years the game has its cult audience that never really justifies the cost but maybe makes folks more kind to Arkane for doing right by the final product or it is dropped and left to haunt the memories of the people who hold onto this stuff as ammunition in any gamer debate for years to come. A dire fate for any game.
I don’t think Arkane wanted to release Redfall like this. There clearly is a story here that echoes the halls of famous “game development is hard” stories because game development is hard. It remains a miracle that any game ever ships and sometimes a developer just ships a bad game.