Redfall Impressions

[Frindis]

Redfall just launched, so feel free to throw in some impressions. Noticed a lot of negative reviews, but I am not reading them yet. I'm going in blind, buying some candy, and crossing my fingers that people just don't understand the vampire lifestyle. I'll post my own experience later tonight or tomorrow.

 

[Brian Boru]

GMan says it's ok, but clearly had higher hopes beforehand based on Arkane's track record of old.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afLllMz1GZg&t=1226s

 

[Colif]

its being compared to Fallout 76. It repeats its initial mistake of not having any npc to get quests off and uses notes around world to tell story/ the world feels empty

Spoiler

 

[Frindis]

Played the game for around 6 hours now, so I got some good and A LOT of bad stuff to talk about..

Good things first:

• Redfall is a visually pleasing place to explore as the outside is quite colorful during the day and the night has decent lighting to shine up different places. A lot of buildings have different themes going on so it can be interesting to visit. They can have different interiors like a decorated kids' room or a living room decorated with items from a metal fan. There are also some sad stories being told through trails of blood or from a letter scattered around the home. The interiors can be nicely detailed or not so much, so it can be a bit hit-and-miss depending on the house you visit.
• The stake gun is fun to use and I enjoy staking the vampires. Decent killing vampire animations and takes me back to the Blade movie for those who remember that gem.

The really bad stuff:

• Stuttering, frame drops, glitches, bugs.
• Hold to click for doing different stuff takes too long of a time, which is strange considering you do the same when fast traveling but it takes much less time.
• Black screen after fast traveling. Really!? You couldn't include an animation or a wallpaper, something to keep us in the game?
• Climbing feels weird and often the animation does not complete.
• Items you pick up in the game look way too big and misplaced.
• You don't need to have a garbage icon next to every single garbage item when you pick hundreds of them!
• Hold to heal is another holding animation that is just annoying.
• Batteries and barrels laying everywhere outside make it look copy-paste.
• The talent tree so far looks very lackluster. Why even have one when it is just boring scaling stats?
• The shooting is absolutely horrible. You can't adjust the Aim down sight speed, so what you get is what you get, and what you get is BAD! I was wondering why one of the community managers during the Bethesda Twitch stream yesterday was having a problem aiming. Now I know why!
• You can look through different telescopes and see that the compass is moving, but nothing else is moving. So, what is the point of them?
• Menu laaaaaag on several occasions.
• Moving the camera when you preview weapons takes too long.
• Invisible enemies shooting you from the ground.
• A.I. mindbogglingly dumb at times to the point of standing completely still even if their friend's brain got splattered right next to them.
• Restock ammo same price regardless of ammo. You use a medkit even when full health.
• Ammo disappearing and weapon dps stats lowered on an item!
• Some items and characters look pixelated when they are highlighted.
• The characters look stiff and boring.

Yeah, it is not good guys. The ONLY reason to play this is if you have it on GamePass or through similar cheap options. The audacity to sell this for full price is bloody insane and laughable.

 

[Colif]

The trailer doesn't represent the actual game. You won't see any animation apart from slide shows.

there is a fun bug where the zoom gets stuck in sniper view.

AI bugs out, and often doesn't fight back.

 

[Frindis]

@Colif It seems they used up all their money in marketing the dreadful game.

You would think the vampires would be a bit more sensitive to sound, but from what I have experienced so far, you can make the house alarm go or shoot a gun inside and only if you are close enough to them they'll care to investigate. I guess it kind of makes sense since they are supposedly sleeping while floating in the air, but then why would they have a question mark around them as they surely noticed it but just didn't care while the alarm is still going..

 

[Colif]

That was speculated in a review I watched.
They also kept review embargo up until just before release. Always a sign of quality. Some reviewers went early and people saw what was coming and Bethesda started playing whack a mole on early reviews... it was too late, people had seen enough.

2 bad games in a week. At least Jedi Survivor can be fixed, this is more ingrained, Where do you start?

Game also starts to get monotonous as you killing same things in same locations and its pretty much always the same. Not enough different vampires.

 

[Colif]

Redfall - Redfail
Fallout 76 - Failboat 76

Shame the last 2 games Bethesda have released with Fall in name have ended up as Fail.

I worry about the next Fallout game, but then the last Fallout game I really liked wasn't made by them, so there is that.
I starting to think I don't like any of their games.

 

[Frindis]

2 bad games in a week. At least Jedi Survivor can be fixed, this is more ingrained, Where do you start?

I'm sure they'll start with a similar sob story as EA. The "We Sorry" clip from South Park comes to mind.

 

[Colif]

I'm sure they'll start with a similar sob story as EA. The "We Sorry" clip from South Park comes to mind.

its not as graphically impressive as Jedi, its not as easy to fix. It looks like it needs an expansion to fix everything.

I saw pop in watching the video below and specs show he should be fine

 

[Colif]

Spoiler

The deluxe version of this is $165 here, I feel sorry for anyone who bought that.

 

[Brian Boru]

Jake Baldino's review is also not big on praise, but not a complete downer either.

Looks like an ideal for Patient Gamer, pick up for $10-15 in 2024, whenever they've finished fixing it and there are some good mods—especially a daylight mod, I don't like all the artistic dark crap.

It's great it can be played solo and guns are good. 4 quite different characters to choose from at start should make replays more interesting and worthwhile.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTogE55mZYM

 

[Colif]

it looks like Fallout 76, if they bother to fix it, it will take ages. 2024 might be too soon.
Empty world, brain dead monsters who just sit there and let you shoot them or get stuck on the environment. Fetch quests. the entire game is fetch quests.

It's great it can be played solo and guns are good. 4 quite different characters to choose from at start should make replays more interesting and worthwhile.

4 different characters that have skill trees that mimic each other. Making some redundant.

stats on weapons that aren't explained anywhere (though this isn't a new failing of games, Grim Dawn suffers from this)

the only good thing about game is its performance isn't as bad as Jedi Survivor. But really, thats a pity as performance problems can be fixed, bad game play is way harder.

 

[Brian Boru]

performance isn't as bad as Jedi Survivor

Jake played mainly on XBox, and said there were places his FPS dropped to 10-20. An overall cap of 30 isn't great anyway, hope they'll get that up a bit on PC later.

2024 might be too soon

No worries, I can wait—I waited 5-6 years for Civ 6

 

[Colif]

console game box said it could run at 60fps, they had to cover it up with a sticker saying that it only ran at 30. The 60fps mode is a work in progress.

Its getting bad, they used to at least pretend to finish games before release. Now... who cares, just release it and we fix after... maybe.

People... please stop buying these things. Stop pre ordering anything. Better to assume a game is broken on release and be pleasantly surprised if its not. Its only sane approach now. Stop believing hype. They try to sell you dreams and they often end up nightmares.

 

[Kborom]

Thanks for taking the time here, it's on my wishlist but now relegated to sub £10 pending any improvement.

 

[FreezerBurn]

While I'm sure it will be a good game someday, that day is not today. I played it for free through Xbox pc game pass, and in the end I still decided it wasn't worth the 98gb space it was consuming. It's irritating honestly that Arkane studio as of 2020 has a total of 150 employees and yet they still felt that it was okay to release that in the state it's currently in. I get it there was most likely a lot of pressure from Xbox and Bethesda, but honestly that's what we get for that $69 price tag? There are a bunch of games I saw at PAX East and on steam from tiny dev teams with under 5 people, and they still managed to release a complete polished game.

 

[Frindis]

Watching this as I write. Phil Spencer talks about Redfall in this interview and I think he so far brings up some good points. Not often you'll see this kind of transparency from higher-ups, so I applaud that.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKwfEQ1eEyM

 

[Colif]

Lets pretend its only problem is graphics. No. It might run bad but the rest of the game is bad too. Its just icing on the cake

I think they could review a game about feces and still not realise that it doesn't matter how good the graphics are if its still a pile of...
It doesn't matter about its performance if the rest of the game is bad. Graphics has nothing to do with the AI

 

[Colif]

I understand why their last 3 games have been bad. The lead dev of Arkane studios left after their last good game, and took some other devs with them. So basically all the talent is gone. They instead make games like this

 

[JailaRolla]

This will be an interesting game to play.

 

[Colif]

This will be an interesting game to play.

lol.

reasons why it isn't something you want to play

• You can only do 1 quest at a time
• the map marker doesn't automatically track the main quest. You have to put a map marker in yourself.
• you can't sell multiple guns at once
• Death doesn't mean anything, no penalty. Just go back to where you died and keep going...
• game has tutorials for basic movements... it treats audience like idiots (or maybe they left in so game play testers knew how to play as really, was there any Quality Assurance run on this? Play testing lol? By someone who played a game in last 20 years or worked on Prey?)
• items in game aren't always visible to other players in your party. So you might see gun you are using but other people might just see you holding hands up with an imaginary gun.
• No match making, no party system. If one player gets Disconnected, everyone gets put back in lobby.
• no item comparison system
• Enemies go from being brain dead and letting you shoot them to death machines who can kill you from off screen, by the end of game... so perhaps they need to make them less like puppies at start

Have to guess it also doesn't have voice chat.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I understand why their last 3 games have been bad. The lead dev of Arkane studios left after their last good game, and took some other devs with them. So basically all the talent is gone. They instead make games like this

Yea that definitely wouldnt help. Looks like the only game by Arkane Austin before this was Prey in 2017.

They used Unreal Engine 4 to make this which I guess is the first time they used it, at least according to wiki. I dont think Prey sold very well, despite being a critical success. Wouldnt be surprising if there was corporate pressure from Bethesda at the start of the project to come up with some trendy buzzword focus group live service game to make a lot of money, rather than working on something the devs actually wanted to do and were inspired to work on.

Game looks awful, real shame.

 

[mainer]

Phil Spencer talks about Redfall in this interview and I think he so far brings up some good points. Not often you'll see this kind of transparency from higher-ups, so I applaud that.

I watched part of that video, and I do think that he genuinely cares about the quality and gameplay of games MS releases (which gives me hope that Starfield won't be released in the same state). It would be nice if other large companies, like Electronic Arts, took the same approach and admitted the mistakes, instead of hiding behind corporate rhetoric.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

I dont think MS has had much to do with Redfall. MS has been really good for studios like Obsidian, they've released a couple of passion projects they straight up said they wouldnt have had time to work on if it wasnt for MS that have done pretty well.

Seems to me Redfall had been cooking a long time, and it was a bland idea from the get go. I think Starfall will be be a huge success and do pretty well critically. They really dont want to miss with it, nobody cared about Halo Infinite and I cant think of another AAA game thats come out exclusive to Xbox in a while.