Redfall is dying, Jim!

 Let it die!

Redfall is a game of all time. In a year that has seen wonderous soaring heights of creativity reinstill a passion for excellence into the sleeping gaming world, Redfall stands out sorely as a limp and forgettable stain which turned out to be every bit as dull as it's detractor's expected. It was a ingenuity-free gimmicky co-op Far-Cry clone with very little in the way of fully borne out ideas from the design room to the gameplay desk. It gave us a game about slaying vampires, if vampires were the most boring and dull mythical monsters in existence, it provided almost criminally average gunplay, a simply unforgivable bland setting and a tellingly low-budget presentation. It always felt like Redfall was sort of dropped out the front door of the Bethesda/Arkane offices and just left to rot and fester, which it has surely done given how little people remember it.

It's one of those games you have to look up to remember it came out this year! Like Forspoken, Gollum and... was Saints Row-? No, that was 2022. But you see what I mean, right? They fail to make a stamp in time and slip into the ethers of eternity, lost beneath the waves of quality we're been blessed with on the shores of gaming hopefulness. And as outlets are starting to report in their domino-style coverage on events, Redfall is pretty much dead in all but official statement. I'm talking Steam player numbers sometimes in the single digits, 'major' patch overhauls that go utterly ignored by the world and no glimpse of a 'roadmap' for future content anywhere in sight. The biggest we hear about the game these days are the many ways in which Xbox are reshuffling it's leadership in order to avoid the 'free reign' development atmosphere which led to something as painful as Redfall leaving the office.

Because just as it had been reported, there's not a single person who believed in this game- even in the development room! It was an idea that got whittled down and passed around and delineated into something gross that nobody wanted to claim ownership of. But in that lack of confrontation was set a ticking bomb, because whilst the game continued to exist it was being worked on, albeit half-heatedly by a team specialised in a totally different style of game. Everyone just kind of hoped someone else with authority would step in, smell the mess on the floor, and cancel the project- and when Arkane got shipped off to Xbox that seemed all but inevitable. Until it became clear that Xbox believe in the 'hands off' form of parenting. Leave the kid with an IPad and see what happens? Well it seems Redfall is what happens. (No wonder they're changing things up from here on out!)

Yet we still have that lingering anecdote from Non-E3 of a journalist who apparently eavesdropped on a conversation, by Bethesda employees I think, talking about a desire to stick with Redfall and mount a redemption- in the vein of a 'Cyberpunk' or a 'Fallout 76'. (Not that I feel 76 is fully redeemed, but you get where I'm pointing.) First off, how boring was that event for Redfall to become a topic of conversation? God, I feel terrible for those guys! Secondly, the problems with Redfall stem much deeper than those other games. Terrible as the bones of 76 were, someone believed in what that game could become. No one ever had a good idea about Redfall, and why would anyone waste their creative talents trying to drum up one for it now? It just doesn't make a lick of sense!

The 60 Frames Per Second Patch landed for Redfall providing a smooth play experience for anyone still around to play the game. (I would love the same for Starfield, but something tells me we're not getting it.) And do you know what the patch has delivered? A staggering 10 more players to the daily average on Steam charts. Now to be fair, the patch would be more relevant for console players anyway who yearn for 60fps, but that's still an awful look. That's like saying "Oh, that game is finally playable! Might as well give it a shot! Meh, it still sucks." To this day I still think Todd Howard should have stepped in and yanked the name away from them to use in a later Elder Scroll project. Redfall sounds so very Elder Scrolls-esque, he could have just claimed it right from under their noses and maybe even gotten the project cancelled for it. But I guess stealing from them like that wouldn't be in Bethesda's style as a responsible parent company, they're not criminals. Although, the real crime would be to not finished what The Elder Scrolls started with it's cool naming conventions!

Here's the path that Redfall would need to take in order to mount a Cyberpunk-style redemption arc. They would need to totally recode the enemies in order to make them actually threatening to the player, add in more variants of enemies to combat, restructure the vast majority of the missions to feel less like cut-and-paste fetch quest trash with minor narrative justifications, probably throw out 'The Rook' altogether or rework him into some sort of unkillable 'Mr X' style character to actually do his job of being a stakes shifter. They would need to rebuild the map to have more areas of interest worth exploring and visual differences between areas. Remake all the classes to rely on their co-op companions more. Create actual animated and properly acted cutscenes to replace the static cartoon slideshows the game currently has. What I'm basically saying is they would have to build an entirely new game.

Arkane are a company that do one thing really well, and that is 'Immersive Sim' style games where the player is constantly being asked 'how will you solve this conundrum'. Redfall just never fit into their strengths as developers and was really never designed to. The reason that Redfall should be abandoned isn't because the game doesn't deserve to live. It's not 'Kong: Skull Island' levels of bad. >Shudder<. The reason is because these developers would be wasted making something like this work when that effort could instead be put into reviving the Immersive Sim market with another piece of highly replayable candy just like Dishonored or Prey. We have need of the many talented at Arkane, and if Redfall's future prospects need to suffer for it, then damn if I don't feel too bad for that.

So Redfall is dying, and will probably continue to die until that inevitable developer post where Arkane lie through their teeth and say something along the lines of "We've reached the conclusion of everything we wanted to do with Redfall, so now it's time to take off the servers and probably delist the game while we're at it. Also, one of our men will be visiting your house with a Neuralyzer so we can all forget this happened in the first place." And that is the day we can finally nod along and say 'Thank god, they've put that sorry little episode to rest'. Beside, Xbox should be busy trying to make their next exclusive a good one, because after this year I can't help but wonder if they even have a future in this industry going forward.