![]() ![]() Generations of families with hopes and problems, rising and falling, and no one even remembers most of them. You can’t help but walk around and feel the gravity of how many lives have been lived and ended here. “Whereas a lot of states feel like they tear everything down and rebuild it every 10 years, New England has that sense of history. “An early consideration was: How do we make New England feel like an Arkane setting?” Smith says. ![]() In discussing Redfall’s fictional Massachusetts setting, Smith makes it clear that Arkane approached the location the same way it would Prey‘s Talos I: by treating it as a main character. It’s not a live-service game littered with microtransactions - Smith says there are none at all - it’s just an Arkane world that can be explored with friends.Įven the rural setting isn’t as much of a departure for the studio as it seems. Those details immediately recalibrated my expectations ,making it clear that the multiplayer component doesn’t signal a radical change for Arkane. In one building, I’d use context clues to realize I was walking through some sort of religious orphanage - an eerily empty one.Īn early consideration was: How do we make New England feel like an Arkane setting? I’d discover a whole lot of audio logs and lore snippets building out the world, be given multiple ways of infiltrating a manor, and get a whole lot of story through environmental storytelling. A lot of the hallmarks of those games were present in my playthrough. I wasn’t paired with a squad during my playthrough, allowing me to experience it as a single-player game like Dishonored 2 or Deathloop. I was immediately surprised to learn that Redfall is much more of a traditional Arkane game than I was expecting. Even Smith himself was all too aware of the difficulties of marketing a game that needs to be played to be understood (“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” he says on the subject). A recent gameplay trailer made it out to be another spin on Left 4 Dead, emphasizing co-op shootouts over the hybrid RPG-action style Arkane is known for. An Arkane settingīefore actually getting to play Redfall, I was entirely unsure about what it was. Engage with what it’s getting at, though, and you’ll find a searing takedown of the 1% underneath all that blood. Those who want to look away will find a fun vampire shooter here that has everything we’ve come to expect from an Arkane-developed game at this point, at least based on what I’ve played so far. That worldview doesn’t just inform Redfall, but puts it in lockstep with Smith’s long history of using games as a vessel for rich social commentary. “You literally have aristocrats in Dishonored saying, ‘I made more money during the plague than I normally do because I’m selling the elixir at a 1,000% markup.’ That’s vampiric.” “This is not new for us,” Smith tells Digital Trends. ![]()
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