Redfall production designer Ben Horne stopped by IGN Fan Fest and showed off a bit of new gameplay footage while sharing some additional details about Arkane’s upcoming open-world vampire shooter.
Given that it’s a game where players can choose from one of four playable characters to fight off the undead, it’s unsurprisingly seen a lot of comparisons to Left 4 Dead. But Arkane has previously said it’s more like Far Cry due to its open world, and Horne went into what sets it apart in more detail.
“Left 4 Dead is an awesome game, but we wanted to make something different,” he said. “We wanted to make something that we feel has the Arkane DNA that we’ve made in games from the past, games like Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Prey, and most recently Deathloop. You can think of all of those games almost like a Venn diagram, where they overlap in really key areas or critical areas that we like to tell stories in games and we like to make games that have a rich, coherent story, systems that players can exploit and use to their advantage, maybe in some surprising ways.
“For Dishonored, we went a little bit stealth and for Prey, we really focused on physics. For Redfall, we wanted to focus on world-building, we wanted to focus on that narrative story. So that’s what we’re focused on delivering.”
Watch an extended gameplay and world exploration trailer below.
Hunting for Vampires (and Loot)
When it comes to the guns in the game, Horne clarified that they wanted certain weapons that players would “instantly feel comfortable with”: things like assault rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles.
But, he added, Redfall has some unique weapons involved when it comes to vampire slaying, like flare guns, stake launchers, and UV beams.
“This help to defeat the vampires in a very unique way because, in Redfall, vampires can’t be defeated by only bullets,” he explained. “They need something special and so a stake launcher, for instance, can really shoot from a distance when they’re vulnerable. And that really allows for players to scour the world, look for the weapon they really want, how they want to play, and allows them to be expressive in that way in taking on the vampire threat.”
That freedom of choice is something Horne went back to a lot, saying that players who want a more “guns-blazing-style” and those who take a more stealth-based approach will both find what they’re looking for.
“In our game, it’s not uncommon to hear an explosion in the distance and wonder ‘okay, what was that?’ and go to that area and two factions are fighting one another,” he said. “And that’s not always scripted; sometimes that’s just something that happens systemically in the game. And then you have a choice. Do I jump in the fray? Do I sneak around the side, grab some loot, and get out? There are benefits and pros and cons to all of those approaches.”
Redfall – Xbox Dev Direct
Arkane’s Biggest World Yet
Going into Redfall, Horne said Arkane had a big dream “to deliver the biggest, most ambitious setting that we ever have” — but not in a way that it doesn’t feel like an Arkane game.
“We knew that with that, we wanted to maintain the things about Arkane’s DNA that we love, things about our games in the past that we really appreciate: environmental storytelling, strong kind of narrative through-put in the world so the world feels lived-in, feel worth saving. And so, as we took on this challenge to make such a huge open world, we wanted to make sure that every home that players walked into, or convenience store, had readable.”
Horne said there are “thousands and thousands of lines of readable” that tell the story of Redfall the town before it was taken over by vampires, something that he thinks made the game “really special.”
Additionally, he revealed that there was never a version of Redfall that wasn’t open-world.
“In fact, that was one of the exciting parts of starting a game like this,” he said. “It was something new. I think it’s natural to make games and maybe you’ve made a few that are in a certain mold and to say, ‘we want to take what we love here and we want to break the mold.’ Making a large, open-world game, that was breaking the mold for us.”
Supporting Both Single-Player and Multiplayer
Another part of that mold-breaking, Horne said, was Redfall’s multiplayer aspect. As he puts it: it wasn’t just “can we go bigger?,” but “can we make an experience, a true Arkane experience, that you can play with your friends?”
“So the focus has been on supporting all of those playstyles,” he went on. “When you play single-player in Redfall, you are playing by yourself. There are no AI squadmates. And then you can add friends up to a four-player squad and what we found is that as you add more and more friends, the game takes on almost this party mode when you’re playing. There’s a lot of fun, a lot of action, a lot of ways that your skills and abilities can play with your squadmates.”
He also revealed that the multiplayer experience doesn’t leave the squadmates tethered to each other; players can wander the map apart from their friends. However, those who take that approach lose a benefit from the game’s trust system, which provides a buff when the team stays together.
“It’s a really, really cool system that allows players to be expressive with how you wanna play with your friends. You don’t have to be all locked together if you don’t want,” he said. “But there is a benefit. We kind of encourage people to come together.”
Redfall releases on Xbox Series X/S and PC on May 2.
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