If there’s one thing Harvey Smith wants you to take away redfall‘s gameplay trailer, shown on Sunday’s Xbox and Bethesda Games Showcase, states that Arkane Studios Austin’s next game will not be Left 4 Dead-like.
“It should, if I’m not mistaken, end all Left 4 Dead comparisons,” Smith, the studio’s director, said in an interview Monday.
redfall looks more like Borderlands than any of the asymmetric or cooperative PvE multiplayer games that have revived the Left 4 Dead gameplay loop for the last two years. This is mainly because it’s an open-world title (although this also includes L4D-likes such as e.g Second die out). More importantly, the campaign is a fully soloable experience, and no, you can’t bring bot teammates with you, another key difference.
It’s probably better to talk about it redfallin which players, as part of other Arkane games, fight to save a New England town overrun by vampires. redfall is the studio’s first open-world game; Here, the Austin developers are stretching their legs to see if they can present Arkane’s distinctive visual style in a more open format.
“We’ve always tried to be relatively unbiased about the different approaches,” Smith said. “Missions that are very tailored, with broad linear paths to a location, are obviously very strong, and that’s what we’ve done with the Dishonored games. A game where there’s really only one big mission, in a big room, like prey, which is also a strong approach. The open world gives you new strengths. So we were excited about that risk, we’re excited about the creative power that an open world offers.”
There are also the multiple protagonists that players will level up as they progress through the gameplay. This is also an Arkane premiere, where titles like death loop and prey were led by a single player character. “You could say that of all the games Arkane has made redfall is the most…” Smith began, searching for the words, “It’s the party game, right? You can sneak and hide and play at your own pace and absorb all the storytelling in the environment and all the readabilities. If I were a player, I would do it like this from start to finish the first time. But it’s also a party game because as soon as you add another character, those two characters talk to each other. And in that sense, it should just be fun.”
redfallThe four heroes of were introduced when the game’s original announcement trailer wrapped up the 2021 Xbox and Bethesda Show. There’s Jacob Boyer, a sniper guy who showed up in Redfall on a contract with the private military company that employs him; Remi de la Rosa, a Coast Guard officer and engineer-controller whose gadgets buff the team and shape the battlefield to their advantage; Devinder Crousley, a cryptozoologist packing a powerful offensive toolkit and trade-offs to go with it; and Layla Ellison, “the telekinetic menace in student debt,” an all-rounder who adds psionic abilities to her athleticism and firearms skills.
“You can use your powers against the very dynamic AI in a way that you would expect from arcane games,” says Ricardo Bare. redfallCreative Director of , with credits on Dishonored and prey. Layla’s psychokinetic powers can form a shield or lift teammates to a higher level, literally manifesting an elevator car. Jacob’s sniping skills are aided by the “Vampire Eye” and “Ghostly Raven” acquired after being ambushed by the undead.
redfall trades with other Arkane games in its odd mix of supernatural and metaphysical abilities with basic first-person combat, but it differs in terms of its atmosphere and antagonists. redfall‘s waterfront location reflects a Massachusetts beach village full of seedy tourist traps and lodgings; It’s intentionally familiar, at least more so than Dishonored’s weird steampunk whaling port or prey‘s space station.
“What if instead of a fantasy land, it was a real place that you might have visited?” Bare recalled, going back to the original discussions the team had shortly after prey launched in 2017. “Like a New England beach town, with liquor stores and a dumpster in the alley and cables across the street and a history museum. What if we put Arkane’s powerful art and narrative focus on that?”
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For the antagonists, Bare and his colleagues came to the vampire incursion aided by a powerful vampire witch who manages to put the sun into a permanent eclipse. Bare said that the storytelling trick was not intended to avoid a dynamic day-night cycle (it’s still light when the eclipsed sun is out), but rather to make the vampires more and more active during the day during the game , rather than inventing a rest period that is less action-oriented.
“We definitely wanted to do a day/night cycle and our tech team has the brawn to do it – kudos to them,” said Bare. “Our tech team has put an inordinate amount of effort into a dynamic day-night cycle.” This includes gameplay mechanics like enemy and monster spawning, their relative strength (sunset is a dangerous time), and other features.
The vampires are aided by gangs of one-sided humans who have ambitions to become as powerful (if not as dramatic) as their idols. Vampires will build “Psychic Nests” over world landmarks, where players can either fight the threat in Redfall themselves or venture into a psychic portal that will warp the location and fuel the opposition to take out the “heart” of the Nest and the threat Get rid of. Obviously, one way supports more immediate, shorter-term gains and loops, with the more difficult option required to take control redfall‘s world and drives the story to its endgame.
redfall was originally expected later this year, until Bethesda Softworks announced both starfieldthe latest RPG from Bethesda Game Studios, would be pushed back to 2023. Smith said Arkane Austin’s developers were given “a lot of leeway, a lot of freedom” as they evaluated development milestones and whether the project was really on track for the delivery window that had been promised.
“We understand that the best thing is to make a great game that people will remember and play for a long time and talk about how they still talk dishonored or Prey,” said Smith. “Ricardo and I worked together on Deus Ex 20 years ago, you know, so if you do it right, it gets under their skin. It’s in their blood. We always try; Make a game that we believe makes sense for both our time and yours.
When it arrives – which Microsoft said is within the next 12 months, in a blanket guarantee made during Sunday’s presentation – redfall will launch on Windows PC and Xbox Series X. It will also be available on Game Pass on day one.
