The vampires are helped out by gangs of suck-up humans who have ambitions of becoming just as powerful (if not also as dramatic) as their idols. “Our tech team put an inordinate amount of effort into a dynamic day-night cycle.” This covers game mechanisms like enemy and monster spawning, their relative strength (sunset is a dangerous time), and other features. “We definitely wanted to do a day-night cycle, and our tech team has the muscle to do it -kudos to them,” Bare said. Bare said that narrative trick wasn’t meant to avoid a dynamic day-night cycle (it’s still plenty bright when the eclipsed Sun is out) but more to make the vampires more involved and active during the game’s daytime, instead of contriving a dormant period that is less action-oriented. In Redfall, the sun is in permanent eclipse, so the freaks come out at night - as well as day Image: Arkane Studios Austin/Bethesda Softworksįor the antagonists, Bare and his colleagues arrived at the vampire incursion, abetted by a powerful vampire witch who manages to put the Sun in a permanent eclipse. What if we turned Arkane’s powerful art and narrative focus on that?” “Like a seaside resort town in New England, with liquor stores, and a dumpster in the alley, and wires over the street, and a historic museum. “What if, instead of a fantasy land, it was a real place you might have visited?” Bare recalled, going back to the original discussions the team had, shortly after Prey launched in 2017. Redfall’s seaside setting reflects a Massachusetts beach hamlet full of shabby tourist traps and accommodations it’s deliberately familiar, at least moreso than Dishonored’s strange steampunk whaling port or Prey’s space station. Redfall comports with other Arkane games in its weird blend of supernatural and metaphysical abilities with basic, first-person combat, but it diverges in terms of its atmosphere and antagonists. Jacob’s sniping abilities are aided by the “vampire eye” and “ghostly Raven” familiar he acquired after getting ambushed by undead. Layla’s psychokinetic powers can form a shield, or elevate teammates to higher ground by literally manifesting an elevator car. “You can use your powers against the very dynamic AI in ways that would come to expect from Arkane games,” Ricardo Bare, Redfall’s creative director, with credits on Dishonored and Prey. There’s Jacob Boyer, a sniper type who showed up in Redfall on a contract with the private military corporation that employs him Remi de la Rosa, a Coast Guard officer and engineer-controller type whose gadgets buff the team and shape the battlefield to their advantage Devinder Crousley, a cryptozoologist who packs a powerful offensive toolkit with attendant tradeoffs and Layla Ellison, “the telekinetic threat in student debt,” an all-rounder who adds psionic capabilities to her athleticism and firearm skill. Redfall’s four heroes were introduced when the game’s original announcement trailer capped off 2021’s Xbox and Bethesda show. Image: Arkane Studios Austin/Bethesda Softworks And it’s just meant to be fun in that sense.” ![]() But it’s also a party game because, as soon as you add another character, those two characters are talking to each other. If I was a player, the first time I played, that’s the way I would do it from beginning to end. “Of all the games Arkane’s made, it may be true to say that Redfall is the most …” Smith began, searching for the words, “it’s the party game, right? You can creep along, and stealth, and play at your own pace, and absorb all the environmental storytelling and all the readables. That also is an Arkane first, where titles like Deathloop and Prey were led by a single player-character. There are also the multiple protagonists that players will level up across their playthroughs. So we were excited about that risk, we’re excited about the creative strengths that an open world offers.” A game where there’s only really one big mission, in one big space, like Prey, that’s also a strong approach. “Missions that are very bespoke, with wide linear paths to a location are obviously very strong, and that’s what we did with the Dishonored games. “We’ve always tried to be fairly non-judgmental about the different approaches,” Smith said. ![]() Redfall is the studio’s first open-world game that’s where the Austin developers are stretching their legs, seeing if they can present Arkane’s distinctive visual style in a more open-ended format. It’s probably better to talk about Redfall, in which players will fight to save a New England town overrun by vampires, in the context of other Arkane games.
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