Clearly we’re living in an era where games can launch in a terrible state and still put the work in to turn things around. Cyberpunk, No Man’s Sky… redemption is possible.
But it’s hard not to view showing up after four months of radio silence just to slap a 60fps update onto a game as busted and utterly abandoned as RedFall as anything other than a big waste of everyone’s time. The game’s faults run so much deeper than framerate.
It’s being reported that it cost CD Projekt RED over a hundred million dollars to turn Cyberpunk around, and that’s a game that, while janky, most people still saw a lot of promise in at launch. I doubt anyone feels RedFall is worth that much money, nor have they even indicated a desire to do a nuts-to-bolts revision the way CDPR did. I’m not even sure there’s a fanbase still rooting for this game to make any sort of miraculous comeback (maybe those three concurrent players on Steam). So at this point, why even bother with the band-aids? What poor employees at Arkane are being punished this way, stuck working on a game everyone else is happy to forget even existed?
“What poor employees at Arkane are being punished this way, stuck working on a game everyone else is happy to forget even existed?”
Maybe it’s punishment duty for when people mess up on something else. The coding equivalent of cleaning the latrines with a toothbrush.
Ye but it’s weird to punish the devs though. They should make whoever was in charge of this in the first place fix it. Oh right, all those people have no clue about how to actually make a game, they just have money.
while I agree, as a coder, I’d rather be punished than unemployed. I’ll resent it. I’ll be angry and frustrated. I may cry at night. But at least I’ll eat.
And then the same people who made the decisions that destroyed your work on the game will lay you off rather than lose a penny of their executive salary.
The equivalent of when people would be taken off from The Prince of Egypt and be made to go work on Shrek instead.
Except I’m pretty certain that everyone who was forced to work on Shrek are now proud of having worked on that movie.
I just switched to indie games mostly, screw you AAA. You can’t trick me into buying another unfinished mess of a game even if you actually finish it later.
I didn’t even buy Redfall, played it on Game Pass and STILL feel like I deserve a refund.
Word of advice, look up the often overlooked B-games (there’s quite a few about). They aren’t as innovative as the indie games, but you won’t get an unfinished mess like a AAA game. If anything, they’re quite similar to how games were during the PS1 and PS2 eras. It’s weird how everyone pretends they don’t even exist.
I don’t know what this is.
I feel like different people may have different definitions of what a “B-game” is. Care to provide some examples of which ones you mean?
They’ll still trick me occasionally into buying a finished mess of a game if the discount is steep enough.
Even at $8 Watch Dogs: Legion felt like it was $3 more than it was worth. And I still occasionally go back to Watch Dogs 2 because that’s honestly a fun game even with the somewhat cringe dialogue – it’s kind of a silly and “Why So Serious?” entry. It works.
Meh. Some big games are awesome. Just wait a few months to play them. Cyberpunk is great right now, starfield is good and will be awesome in 6 months, etc.
I’m interested in Starfield, but I’ll wait for the bugs to get worked out
Quite a lot of indie games are horrendous, and that’s not including the outright scams such as asset flips. But you don’t hear them because… they’re indie games. A large majority of them just don’t have a budget big enough to include anything other than “word of mouth” into the column labeled “Marketing”, not without a serious publisher behind them. And even then it may turn out poorly. (No Man’s Sky anyone?) Thus, the indie games we all have heard about are all the top % of the mountain made mostly out of crap. Of course they’re all good, they’re… Read more »
Indie games are low budget, with only a few people working on them. Take “7 days to die” it’s been in development for 12 years now. “The Infected” is another but it’s maybe 5? Both have potential, but are far from finished.
Redfall is, to me, the huge disappointment of the year. I was so, so looking forward to Left4Dead but with vampires and a huge open world, and instead we got… Well, that.
Such a promising premise, with such a fumbled and god awful execution. Thank fuck I didn’t pay any money for it.
This is why I like it when video rental places started to rent games as well. you rent it, take it home, play it for a bit, and then slam it into the return slot and try again. Saved me a ton of money. Now that I play on PC and most rental stores have closed up, it’s hard to test play… Not that was planned or anything, right?… right?…
I’m honestly thinking the exact same thing.
Just leave RedFall be, and work on the next Dishonored or something. It’ll be more worth it in the long run.
Oh god, this is just downright cruel! I love it!
You can drag a horse-corpse to water but you still can’t make it drink.
But, but, it floats so well! oops Hang on he’s wandering off again… Silly horse, your tail fell off again… (stapler sounds)
Game devs and movie makers have run out of ideas again, they keep thinking reboots, redress, fixes and patches will fix everything. There’s only so long that people will keep sucking on the same teet, deal with it guys! The “next, best thing” is always out there, instead of thinking in that box, break it down, add it to the recycle bin, stomp on it a few times to make sure, and start fresh!!
It’s not really the devs/writers who run out of ideas, it’s more the publishers and the investors being cautious with their investments. When interest rates are low, keeping money around directly leads to loosing money due to inflation. So they dump all their money into sometimes really risky investments, hoping that they’ll hit the next big thing. But when interest rates are high, keeping money will not cost nearly as much or might even turn a profit. So they will reduce investments, beginning with the risky ones. Instead, they will only invest into stuff with almost guaranteed returns on investment… Read more »
You do have a point, many producers are like “NO, that costs too much, just make another one based on some weak idea, the regular people will eat it up, and it’s cheaper and faster than taking 5 years” which is really stupid, but what do we know, right? Even though game characters don’t age like actors do…
And it’s honestly a shame because I generally associate Arkane with good games like Prey, and Dishonored or game attempts like Dark Messiah
This is just poop on a platter, what happened? Brain Drain?
they were forced by corporate to make a multiplayer live service game when their specialty is single player story games.
Yes. A lot of the original creative from those titles, including Raf Colantonio, imoved on to found a new studio called WolfEye. They put out a supernatural western last year called Weird West that’s pretty good
I think part of the lack of player interest may come from a bit of Genre Fatigue. We’ve had more and more of these ’L4D-like’ games (group survival shooter?) lately that people are just getting tired of them. Since they either try to capture the same feel with a new skin, or go so far off course it just doesn’t work.
Redfall just felt like a hollow copy, under a mask of ‘ooh, vampires!’
Darktide at least has fans from Warhammer 40K to pad the player pool with.
I’m not sure if that’s really Genre Fatigue,.at least not in the usual sense. Genre fatigue would imply players simply don’t care about the genre anymore, but in that case people wouldn’t even have wanted to play Redfall in the first place. But plenty of people seemed interested, they just dropped it because of its quality.
I’d guess it’s more the opposite, it’s genre laziness. The concept is still fine, it’s the execution that’s lacking. Instead of developing a proper game to be enjoyable, they slap a generic concept together and assume it’ll do because people like the genre.
I, for sure, am tired of that kind of game. I didnt even install that one.
I personally really enjoyed the game when it first came out. But I also didn’t pay for it because of Game Pass. If I had to pay for it, I probably would have never played it. Also after beating that first main boss, it didn’t feel like there was enough story to keep me in it. To me, that boss felt like the reasonable conclusion for a shorter game rather than some mid game Boss.
I’m missing the joke here. Someone explain the history? Google didn’t really say much, and the basic game premise didn’t look terrible from what I did find.
The premise isn’t terrible but the execution was.
The issues are many and many YTers made their buck listing all of the faults with Redfall.
Ah, so it was more a WIP that got caught by the jackals? Maybe if they had a Starfield budget, the YTers would have inflated it instead ?
I’m one of the five people who did not have a problem with Redfall. I never expected it to be anything particular, and read none of the hype for it. Didn’t realize it was supposed to be an AAA title. I did not have bugs while playing it, which is really something for me. It wasn’t a memorable game that I’d go back and play over several times like Mass Effect or Fallout 4 but it wasn’t awful for me. I imagine if it had lived up to expectations, it could have been one of those kinds of title.
Going into a game with low expectations can be a good way to avoid disappointment, but I can’t imagine paying $70 for a game that I’m not expecting much out of.
Yeah I’m surprised it’s considered at AAA game, if I hadn’t gotten it for free with a hardware upgrade I wouldn’t have even heard of it. Still haven’t gotten around to playing it yet though.
Why is Redfall so bad? I didn’t play it.
Enemy AI is very poorly designed, with enemies frequently getting stuck in spots, spawning in places you can’t see them, being slow to react to you, and being very easy to exploit in general. Unless they’re bugged so they’re unkillable, necessitating a restart. It’s ‘open world’ but there’s nothing to do, it’s entirely linear really, with a point of no return to earlier areas that’s not laid out for you meaning you could get things unwinnable if you go too far. There’s no cinematic nature to the game at all, no cutscenes, so everything has a very BLEH presentation where… Read more »
Well, I think Final Fantasy XIV Realm Reborn started that trend.
Except that it was a sucess after a messy launch.
Didnt even heard of this game. Think i can guess the reason
I feel so bad for Arkane. I still have trouble believing that Redfall was made by the same people that made Prey.