We had the opportunity to talk to Arkane Austin manager Harvey Smith and Redfall director Ricardo Bareile about Arkane;s new play Redfall, which has been postponed to 2023.
Honor: First, considering the confusion before the release of Deathloop and the negative reactions of people to 4-player Co-Op game announcements, let’s ask you to identify Redfall. What exactly is Redfall? Is its counterpart an L4D or B4B, or is it located in a different location?
Harvey Smith: Before every game we play, we see a similar debate like this. When we announced Dishonored, everyone was saying things like, “Why are you making a copy of BioShock?” Then our games come out and get their own unique identities and fanbases. For example, I love Left 4 Dead, but the feel of Redfall is different from L4D’s. The essence of Redfall is to be stable, to level up and see its world on the journey it offers you, to read its environmental storytelling. As you move past the scenario missions, you’ll tackle side activities like safe zones, vampire lairs, and encounter dynamic scenes. You’ll be able to play alone or with friends, but it will make you feel like it’s an Arkane game. Of course, although they have something in common with them, the taste it gives will not be the same as Dishonored or Prey, it will manage to be its own game.
Harvey Smith
Honor: What we often encounter in co-op games is that they are replayable, players get hundreds of hours of efficiency by playing and grinding the sections of these types of games over and over again. What kind of game is Redfall in this sense? Will we be facing the game again by incorporating long grind elements, or will the game play itself again by supervising the different things within us as in other Arkane games?
Harvey Smith: I understand what you’re talking about, you’re talking about playing the same sections over and over again in a competitive way and to overcome high challenges, like playing sports. That’s not the point of our game, but people play Dishonored over and over again. Every time you play Dishonored, the inexperienced can be a little different, you can see a part of the world you’ve never seen before, or you can witness an enemy doing something you haven’t seen before.
Ricardo Bare: I think people will play the game over and over again, even if it’s just to try other characters, like in Diablo, for example. If you’ve played with Layla, you can start over with Layla and increase the difficulty, or you can say, “Let me try Jacob.”
Honor: Are there any other elements that will encourage the player to play the game again? Any loot system or randomly generated Roguelike-style stuff?
Harvey Smith: This time there are more randomly generated procedural things in the game. I think Ricardo has had previous statements about how much they learned about which procedural things worked well and which didn’t work while working on Prey: Mooncrash. We have gained experience in making each new game a little different.
Honor: Arkane is a studio famous for making games in the Immersive Sim subgenre. So is Redfall an Immersive Sim again? Because when I think of multiplayer Co-Op gaming, I think of the exact opposite of what is called Immersive Sim. Progressive Co-Op games try to create a more linear experience to flow easily. In the Immersive Sim genre, a large number of possibilities are placed at the disposal of a single player. Which side of the spectrum is Redfall closer to?
Ricardo Bare: It’s interesting to use the word spectrum because it’s one of the most appropriate words to describe what you’re talking about. How you play the game will affect whether you’re an Immersive Sim or to what degree you’re an Immersive Sim, right? If you play Co-Op and do a ton of clowns with your friends, things will of course change. If you talk to each other with your friend, of course you cannot play the game in the rush of “since I turn off the lights and put on my headphones, I can be fully immersed in the game, but the enemy is about to notice me!” Oh, but even if you play Co-op, you’ll still be on open maps, you’ll have an open-ended experience, and if everyone decides that way from the start and gets serious, you might even be able to get into the Immersive Sim mood again. Still, if what you want from our games is to gradually explore around, spend time with environmental storytelling, do interesting things with your character’s skills, then I recommend playing alone.
Ricardo Bare
Honor: But can I invite my friends to the game only at certain checkpoints or between levels, or did you use the “Drop-In/Drop-Out” system?
Ricardo Bare: We used a “Drop-In/Drop-Out” system.
Honor: As we see in the published images, the vampires in the game are different from the vampires we know, for example, their arms are very long, and ultraviolet rays do not kill them, they only petrify them. How did you approach Redfall’s vampires at the design stage? How do they differ from classical vampires, what similarities do they have with them?
Harvey Smith: When we started working on the game, we decided that we would focus on narcissistic themes such as sacrificing empathy and keeping personal riches nearby. We focused on what a vampire works as a metaphor, what his character is like, what sets him apart from other monsters. Moreover, we have chosen to trace the origin of our vampires to science of the supernatural. Without going into too much detail, I can say that it is biomedical reasons that exacerbate the events, and that some lines that should not be overcome in the process of studies carried out for the sake of prolonging human life have been crossed. The founders of the company behind the business ultimately get what they want, but the people around them pay the price, and they don’t care because they lack empathy themselves. Somewhere you have to be strong and athletic, but on the other hand, the price is to be a monster.
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Honor: In the meantime, do you have any plans to support the game after its release? Apart from the familiar debugging patches, of course, free content updates, patches that fix the game’s shortcomings, and so on? I guess we’re not dealing with a “live service” game, are we?
Harvey Smith: Game sessions are not set up on the founding player’s computer, but on the servers, so we can offer a better quality experience. Also, if you look at the games we’ve done in the past, you’ll see that the team that made each game created new content for that game. We released Dunwall City Trials, Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches for Dishonored, Prey was followed by Mooncrash, Dishonored 2 was followed by Death of the Outsider… Daud was added to our playable characters, Emily was added, Billie Lurk was added… We love that our games continue to breathe and take a place in people’s lives, but it has always been difficult in the past to add something to our games. In the case of Redfall, we have started to plan this in advance, and we will make our relevant explanations later.
Honor: Before Deathloop, when we were interviewing its director Dinga Bakaba, we had a conversation about the recording system. For my part, I am a person who attacks the quick load button at the slightest mistake, and he said that they want to take the players away from this habit, see the consequences of their mistakes and push them to play the game. What kind of game is Redfall in this context? It’s so obvious that we can’t record anywhere we want because it’s multiplayer?
Ricardo Bare: It’s an interesting “design space.” that’s exactly the value that roguelike games bring to game design: the feeling that “I have to live with the consequences of my actions.” That’s what Redfall has in it, even if you’re playing alone, and you can’t say, “Let me get a recording without taking care of that enemy, and I’ll go back if things go.” You suffer the consequences of your mistakes, and when you die, you will be resurrected in a nearby safe zone or at the main base.
Honor: You just said that Redfall has more procedural elements than your previous games. Will these elements vary depending on how many people play the game? For example, are there the kind of locks that only two people can open at the same time, or events that will occur when more than one player is in the game? If I play with others, will I see things I don’t see when one person is playing?
Ricardo Bare: The mentality in our approach to the multiplayer part of the game has not been “key & lock”. Playing as a group will not be mandatory in any way. You won’t see progression methods like a wall that you have to climb by stepping on another player’s shoulder or puzzles that you need to solve together. We designed even the forces to work in synergy with each other, but it is not necessary to have any of them. So Rumi has a skill that heals the whole group, for example, but you can easily progress in the game without having it. Separately, having more than one of the same character in a group does not deprive you of anything, if you want to play the game with 4 Jacob, you can play, there is no drawback.
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