Quick Look: Redfall

I played less than an hour of this game tonight and I’m 50-50 at best as to whether I’m going to play any more than that. A 60 fps mode is not going to get anywhere close to fixing this game.

I think its safe to say now that whenever a game is close to coming out, and the developer gives bad news like the game is only going to have a 30fps mode, when it clearly should have a 60fps mode or both for players to choose... prepare to be disappointed. The same thing happened with Gotham Knights, and likely would've happened with Suicide Squad, but Rocksteady was somewhat smart and delayed the game until next year.

For all the great AAA games like the latest God of War, Horizon, and Elden Ring, there have been many disappointments. If not for the Indie game genre, which consistently outputs fun and innovative games by developers not afraid to take a chance, the gaming industry today would be dead.

And this is another massive blow to Xbox and their exclusivity library. They can't seem to get a break.

Mannnn..... This looks..... Boring.

I don't think I've ever seen such am empty open world.

Visually it doesn't look terrible, clearly a large amount of effort went into the detail of the world and it's design, but the failure seems to be on the design of the game and what the hell to do in it.

That long walk to the objective and not encountering a single thing.... Yikes. I'm not one for map barf but jesus.

This is the most 2010-ass game in a while, and not in a good way like Evil West.

This is such a shame coming from Arkane. I loved the Dishonored series and 100% completed Prey. Deathloop had an interesting premise but got too repetitive. All those games featured fantastic exploration: massive maps with multiple pathways to suit different play styles.

This is just so uninspired. Visually impressive in parts but that alone does not carry a game.

Difference in the final product is day and night when it comes to passion vs. profit.

Real damn shame.

Remember when Arcane were talking about this game in the same breath as Far Cry 2.

What the hell?

I played an hour or so and the most disappointing thing was being kicked back to the main menu a couple of times because of the always-online shit. I have a full group of people to play with, so regardless of anything else, I know I'm gonna have fun with the game in that sense.

Whatever else you can say about this game, they absolutely nailed the look of small town coastal New England.

Hoo boy. I'm in the target demographic for this sort of game. I dig co-op style games like this and I revel in open worlds often but this seems empty to me. It also just looks like a mess. Yikes, Arkane. Y I K E S.

At least it's free on GamePass? I guess..

Yeeeesh. What a bummer to hear from a studio I really dig. If only my friends weren't such blind loyalists and got a PS5 instead. There's little reason to own an Xbox these days. :\

I have not played this game yet, but it kinda sounds like Dan and Jeff haven't either. "Can I get you back up?" "Oh I can still shoot when I'm down." Then they both die after complaining that the game was too easy.

Okay I finished the video and Dan didn't know that you can use UV guns to kill vamps.

Also, are there character abilities? I saw Jeff do the specter sniper once at the start but that was it. I'm also curious about character mobility. They didn't seem like they were trying to climb anything or explore at all. Is there an exploration aspect that they are just ignoring?

This game looks so boring

I played about 3 hours of this before seeing this quicklook last night. The things that stuck out before I saw anyone else's opinion are clearly on display here, such as walking a long way with nothing happening, enemy AI is pretty much turned off, story is presented in this vague and uninteresting way, the player character commentary is out-of-context bragging and framerate stutters despite being on a upper tier PC.

I'm gonna play a bit more of it, because it's Arkane, and I love Arkane. Literally everything else they have ever done has been gold and I really hope this isn't the sort of thing that gets them relegated to being a support studio for other peoples games. I want Arkane to succeed and continue to do their usually bold work.

This is like when your friend gets into acting, really seems to love it, everything you hear from them is that it's really helped them find themselves, but then you go see a show of theirs and it's objectively terrible and the whole crowd boos and you can't blame the crowd. You don't want to boo them, it's your friend. But it's is really just awful and you can't lie. That's where I'm at. Just....what a goddamn bummer.

@av_gamer: I'd even go as far as saying if a game is announced to have multiplayer, and it's not from a studio or specific devs that ave a history of it, it's not gonna work out. Multiplayer, and I'm including vs, co-op, live service and MMO in that catagory, all of it) is so hard to pull off right that I frankly think most studios should stop trying. When it clicks it's magic, but when it doesn't, which is about 90% of the time, it's a disaster and wastes years of developers talent chasing a dragon just for disappointment. I can count on one hand how many studios known for good single player games have made a hit in their freshman attempt at multiplayer, especially in the AAA space. If you are gonna do it, make some smaller projects with limited budgets. Have a skunkworks division to experiment with. Don't just throw the whole studio at something you don't know how to do and bet the farm on it. Ugh. I'm so sad about this one.

So is it actively bad or just "meh" levels of forgettable? Also, it suddenly reminded me of Back 4 Blood as something that was multiplayer vs monsters but I didn't stick with very long since I don't really have a multiplayer crew. How does this stack up vs that?

This is the issue I'm running into. I bought a Series S last year primarily for Game Pass but only sign up when there's something new and interesting since I've already gone through much of the back catalog. I check every couple weeks to see what's being added. It's been almost 5 months since I last signed up for a month of Game Pass and I don't think I've fired up my Series S this year at all. They just aren't adding anything interesting (outside of maybe a few Indies that are cheap enough that I'd just buy them on Steam rather than signing up for a month of Game Pass to play them), and what they are adding that had the potential to be good hasn't been.

This was one of the games Microsoft was pushing hard as a tentpole release when talking about Game Pass for this year. For it to be what it is can't be good for them. From here, I guess they have to hope Forza and Starfield are good because it doesn't seem like there's anything else on the horizon for them, and certainly nothing else worth buying an Xbox specifically for.

Dishonored II is a great game.

Oof. That is disappointing.

Remember when everyone in the comments was triggered and offended that Dan and Jeff didn't like Redfall during their preview a few weeks ago?

And now, suddenly, most people are singing a different tune. Game looked boring and unimpressive then, looks boring and unimpressive now.

Redfall is a tragedy and years away from being finished.
This sucks for Arkane Austin and I really wonder what went wrong.

reminds me of how lifeless and uninspired Rage 2 was.

@larmer: That's not completely true. Like Redfall, Rage 2 didn't live up to the hype, but it is a much better game overall than this diet Borderlands clone that's mostly empty and broken.

@av_gamer: Rage 2 is also mostly empty. Jeff mentions that in the quick look.

It’s also an incredibly easy game. I beat it on hard mode and even the final mission I was able to beat on the first try using only the standard pistol you start with, no upgrades. The Kotaku review mentions that the “dumb cool” weapons the game gives you are often really ineffective.

Rage 2 has some good visuals, but it’s bland as fuck.

Durchfall.