The One Question I Still Have About ‘Redfall’

Redfall

Arkane

Yesterday, Xbox had a well put-together showcase focused on four games with a surprise fifth, Hi-Fi Rush, an instant Game Pass drop that seems to be delighting everyone. But I originally tuned into the show to see more from Arkane’s Redfall, and it did indeed close the show and teased a somewhat soon release date, May 2, after being delayed out of 2022.

And yet I left this part of the presentation with one main question:

Is Redfall doing anything new?

The entire concept of Redfall seems to be Arkane wanting to do their own take on games like Far Cry and Borderlands. But so far what feels like it’s missing to me is what exactly their “own take” means. As they went through the features yesterday, it felt like a checklist of the games they were emulating:

Four player co-op with specialized player classes and skill trees A world loot drop system with rarity tiers Safe hub areas where NPCs will give you quests out in the world. “Neighborhood reclamation” where you will clear out zones from vampires and fight a vampire underboss, who when killed, will be a key to unlock a fight against a larger boss.

It was just weird to hear all this stuff listed out when it’s been the meat of most open world games for going on 15 years now. The main difference between those games and this one is probably the vampire concept, though the actual structure and listed content of the game just feels…extremely familiar.

Redfall

Arkane

The pushback to this is that even if Arkane is not breaking new ground, if they do everything really well that will be enough. I can agree with that, and I certainly think that Arkane’s history has earned them some amount of trust.

I will say, however, that I remain somewhat skeptical of Arkane’s combat shooting, which unlike its past, ability-based games, seems to make up the vast majority of fights here. It just looks a bit…robotic to me, like something is missing from the mechanics of wielding, firing and reloading the guns. This is something that I’d have to have in hand to fully judge, and yet in past Arkane games where you have had guns, I’d argue it was not exactly their strong suit. That is not true of a game like Borderlands, where even if you don’t care about looting and don’t like the humor, those games play extremely well. So that’s a point of concern.

I think I’m most interested in exploring Arkane’s open world map, as it looks pretty detailed, and that makes it pretty unlike Far Cry, which had maps so sprawling most of the areas started to blur together. I’d down for a smaller, foot-traversed, hyper-detailed island here.

My gut tells me that Redfall will be pretty good. But I do wonder if it will do enough to differentiate itself from two decades of open world games to be truly great.

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