Redfall Isn’t An Open World “Based On The Scale Of Vehicles”

image

Arkane Studios, in particular Arkane Austin, is going big with their upcoming game Redfall. Their upcoming title isn’t an immersive sim in the traditional sense as there will be an open world and there is multiplayer co-op as a feature. But Arkane seems confident that fans of their past games should still find this new world as immersive as their previous offerings.

In a dev diary video debuted at Quakecon 2022, members of Arkane Austin spoke in length about the development process of Redfall. And one cool tidbit about the Redfall, the setting of the namesake game, is designed to be traversed only on foot.

[embedded content]

The way studio head Havey Smith describes it is “It’s an open world, but it’s not an open world based on the scale of vehicles. It’s an open world based on foot.”

This hasn’t entirely ruled out the possibility of drivable vehicles, but with the scale of the open world Redfall is unlikely to have any.

The fictional town of Redfall is inspired by the towns of New England on the east coast of the US, cozy small towns rich with the history of early America, but is now twisted to be the home of spooky vampires needed slaying. It’s a change in pace for Arkane, as their setting has always been less based on the real-world like the whalepunk city of Dunwall in Dishonored or the Talos I space station in Prey (2017) (though Deathloop’s Blackreef is sort of based on the real world, albeit an alternate world based in the ’60s and ’70s aesthetics).

“Ultimately, we hope that players will play single-player if that’s what they want and it will feel like an Arkane game,” Smith said.

In the same video, Arkane also explained the philosophy when designing the skill trees for the game’s four playable characters.

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.

Time Stamp:

More from Gamer Matters