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Arkane has grown a dedicated audience since 2012’s Dishonored. It went from obscurity to putting itself on the map of game developers shaking up the industry. The studio’s level design and stamp on the immersive sim genre captured us with both Dishonored entries, Prey, and Deathloop. It then disappointed people recently with Redfall. As video games have found ways to go from the bottom to the top by having updates to improve them, maybe the looter shooter will find its way into our hearts, or it could be another forgotten AAA game.
Every studio has seen failures. It could be technical problems on release or a lack of content that did not match expectations. For the ways Redfall could be better, the issues spring up in various categories. In some ways, it may not be able to be salvaged due to baked-in faults. In other cases, it can see improvements to rise to be what people imagined.
Give the Town More Life
A lifeless town that has been sucked dry by vampires and occupied by cultists is a difficult thing to create. Like post-apocalyptic games, you need things to do to give life to the environment while making you believe in its history that led to its vampire infestation. By letting vampires and cultists have more character, you could create more personality in the town.
The other issue is the lack of things to do. Giving people a variety of tasks will liven up the map. Although most people were dead on Talos 1 in Prey, it still had a sense of history and life from the survivors and interactions you had within the space station. Redfall was missing this element that made this fictional town both unbelievable and boring.
Patch Redfall Up
One of the easiest ways to make Redfall better is to wait for patches. Arkane knows it has work to do on the content, but that does not matter when core aspects are not working for players. Glitches and crashes have been just some of the many problems plaguing gamers who dove into this world filled with bloodsucking creatures. Games have lacked content before, such as No Man’s Sky, but a technical disaster distracts the team from creating more content, like what happened with Cyberpunk 2077. A redemption arc can still happen, but the game must get in working order first.
When advertised and showcased, we saw the game running at 60 FPS on both PC and console. We were sold on this, but the game ran, at best, at just 30 FPS. Depending on your PC, and if you have something like DLSS to give you a bump, you could manage 60 FPS or beyond. Not everyone has the graphics card to get you over 100 frames. While bigger technical issues suck the experience dry, a solid frame rate for the shooter will give the gameplay the feel it deserves.
More Diverse and Better Missions
Previous Arkane games had a specific gameplay loop, but you got a diverse selection of missions and activities to make that repetition keep from weighing you down. Redfall‘s missions are mostly fetch quests or combat encounters filled with brain-dead AI. Giving players more things to do will make for a more engaging and fun experience, which the looter shooter lacks. The company has proven it could do this, as seen in the assassinations featured in Dishonored while having people asking other things of Corvo Attano.
For ways to make Redfall better, it needs to utilize its world with more creative methods. Prey utilized its aliens and the effect they had on the surviving crew for unique situations. You could have a crazed chef causing problems, or a treasure hunt that employees had going before shapeshifting aliens started killing people wanting their morning coffee.
Improve the AI’s Intelligence
The second word in AI is intelligence, which is not seen by cultists or vampires. Often, they stand there waiting for you to shoot them. If you are lucky, they actually put up a decent fight. Too many times, from a lack of strategy, it feels more like a shooting gallery. Without a challenge, the guns lose that punch as you start to see your targets as targets, not enemies that need to be taken down before they kill you.
Arkane may not have the most advanced AI, but it has shown it can have NPCs that act accordingly to what you are doing. Deathloop will have enemies using their weapons and powers to the full extent to attack you once you are spotted. The aliens in Prey will relentlessly attack, but for the Mimics, they may strategically flee in an attempt to come at you when you cannot find them. Nothing that resembles life comes from the cultists or vampires to outsmart you or take advantage of their abilities and weapons to overpower you.
Needed an Identity
While some issues could be fixed, it would be harder to give an identity to Redfall. Arkane was known for its immersive sims that had distinct personalities and styles. Deathloop may have been the studio’s most stylish with its sci-fi ’80s vibe. It went beyond having the aesthetic and music, which Redfall does well with its visual language, but Deathloop managed beyond that. We got memorable characters and mechanics that did not feel like a hollow copy of other shooters. Even if you could point to similarities to other games, it still stood on its own.
Plenty of ways could make Redfall better, but melding Arkane’s style with a formula done by plenty of other shooters was not something that worked. Studios should experiment, especially Arkane, so it can keep its games fresh, but concentrating on what makes these parts distinct is important. If the content was there while having a more creative angle at its activities with the smart level design that Dishonored, Prey, and Deathloop had, then Redfall could have been another hit.
Redfall is available on Xbox Series X|S and PC. It is also available for Game Pass subscribers.