Co-Op Multiplayer FPS Redfall’s Skills Are Designed For Single-Player Use First

Redfall is Arkane Studios’ biggest game yet. The immersive sim specialist is branching out way, way far from what you expect with this title, even further from Deathloop, with it being set in an open world, and having online co-op.

That said, Arkane Austin is adamant that you can still play Redfall as a single-player experience. And that can be seen in the way the skill trees are designed.

In Redfall, your four playable characters have skill trees and loadouts you can customise. The new sit-down dev diary revealed at Quakecon 2022 explains a bit about the philosophy of how the skills are designed.

While this is a co-op game, there are no multiplayer-focused skills that work incredibly well when playing together but absolutely useless when playing solo.

Instead, the skills in Redfall are designed for solo use first, but when you level them up further they can benefit your co-op buddies as well.

In the “Slay Your Way” (a pun on Arkane’s favourite phrase “Play Your Way“) segment of the talk, the devs shared an example of one skill for Jacob, which allows him to be cloaked.

“We tried to not make it so that ‘this skill only works in multiplayer but this skill is only useful in single-player’,” says Ricardo Bare, creative director at Arkane Austin. “It has the single-player benefit but then it has a multiplayer [addition]. If you happen to be playing with friends, it does cool stuff for your friends too which I think is going to be super fun.”

While most of the marketing seen of Redfall highlights the wicked fun of slaying vampires together with friends, there is definitely an effort made to ensure Arkane fans who like their im-sims not feel too alienated from the switch to open-world and co-op play design.

“It was super important to us to let players still play by themselves and have that, sort of like immersive Arkane experience,” Bare stated earlier in the segment.

Redfall won’t be coming out this year, and will release sometime in 2023 for Xbox and PC (Steam, Epic Games Store). It will release on day-1 on Xbox and PC Game Pass.