Examining my first gaming failure: Redfall

I don't like the word failure to me when something has failed it is irrevocably collapsed and been ruined the original intention is gone and there is no saving it nothing to be done but wipe it away and start over completely yet various sources have also instilled in me the idea that being mature enough to know when you have failed and when to admit that failure is not only a skill but a virtue it is with that in mind that I am making this video and posting it here on my channel so I can use its platform to admit to you all here and now that I the console fenic have failed you see I had intended to make a video about redfall the latest game from the now closed Arcane Austin Studios as I was coming up with ideas and themes for the video I had this vision of a video that examined what happens when a game is made with zero passion I had this vision of playing the game and examining its flaws and digging down to maybe find some redeeming qualities to the game that might make it worth someone's time I even went on a multi-paragraph ramble about passion and what it is and how we can tell when someone is passionate about their work versus when they're not I had it all planned out it was going to be beautiful a great way to wash away the slightly exasperated feelings that Final Fantasy 8 had left me with and yet after playing the game for a few hours my plan fell apart don't get me wrong the game isn't a complete failure there are some good aspects to it but those aspects are few and far between few enough and far enough between in fact that I found myself in a rare situation simply put I didn't want to play the game anymore after less than 6 hours of gameplay I was ready to put this game down and be done with it that did change slightly when I jumped into it with a friend for some multiplayer Co-op but overall red fall as a solo experience was kind of stressful and unfun at least to me that being said I still have the remains of my planned script and about 2 hours worth of videos so why don't we explore that let's explore my first gaming failure redfall please keep in mind that I am by no means an expert on any of the subjects covered in this video and if you have opinions that differ from mine that is okay right off the bat redfall tries to hit you with Exposition how did we get to this situation well a strange and mysterious girl was brought to the island by the local medical research hospital under the guise of using her blood as a base for building potential cures for various diseases which to me implies that she might be some kind of asymptomatic vampire one that has all of the strengths but none of the weaknesses of course it turns out to be a trick and once the scientists have her in their clutches they take turns carving her up and taking everything they can from her before using what they've learned to turn themselves into the first vampires which can I say while it's an interesting setup I really rolled my eyes pretty hard when they brought up the whole vampire Gods concept I get so tired of humans getting even a little taste of power before suddenly declaring thems a God to me it shows how laughably small our concept of a god really is to me a God is a being so far beyond our understanding in terms of power and scale that they literally shape reality with their thoughts and whims then again I also subscribe to the DND philosophy of gods where the more worshippers they have the stronger they are so a small island town of less than 10,000 people of which only a thousand or so are actually vampires does not make you a god it makes you a warlord with some magic which did also kind of make me wonder if vampires are real what about other forms of magic like werewolves warlocks witches stuff like that any who shortly after the scientists go insane with power is when they start to spread their Newfound corruption first to the homeless and the marginalized population of the island before their numbers swell large enough to start grabbing ordinary Everyday People this sequence here I kind of like particularly these two images of the mother in bed guarding her kids only to have fallen asleep sometime later after hours or even days of near constant vigil only for the very thing she was protecting her children from to attack at that moment of weakness and once the exposition is done the game just kind of dumps you into it making you wake up to the sight of two vampires chowing down on the fairy Captain who was supposed to be getting you away from the island if I'm honest I don't like this abrupt opening I'm kind of tired of games just dropping us into the middle of a disaster after something major happens and then expecting us to act like panicked survivors I'm not panicked or anxious up until this point I wasn't even a Survivor I was a viewer before the two vampires can Chow Down on us another fancier Vampire shows up says some cryptic stuff that I'll never see the conclusion of and gets ready to eat us only to be burned by the Sun and flee good for me but kind of weak writing if I'm honest I spent some time in the wrecked Ferry Scavenging anything I can get my hands on admiring the art style of the game and arming myself with a few syy looking pistols one thing I will give the game credit for is the art style it's not bad definitely a good look to it kind of sell shaded modernist look with a dash of surrealist maob for some of the spookier stuff and it has a nice look and I'm sure it's not too hard on the console to render small tangent here but I'm getting really tired of games chasing photo realism can developers please stop trying to make the rock on the screen look like a rock outside and instead work on writing better stories and better characters please anyways once I'm done grabbing everything that isn't nailed down I exit The Beached Ferry and make my way outside up close the wall of water is kind of cool looking for a minute or two also as I was wandering around out here I couldn't help but feel that this area would make a neat multiplayer versus map in some multiplayer game soon enough though we run into our first group of enemies Hollow Man cultists which are basically [ __ ] humans who worship and work with vampires so they don't get eaten and also in the hopes of being turned into vampires at some point combat in this game is serviceable at best against human targets the guns feel about like they should a pistol takes two or three shots to depending on where you're aiming and has an expectable spread human enemies in the game are also about what you'd expect they carry the normal arrays of pistols assault rifles and shotguns though at this stage I can't pick any of them up aiming feels stiff and prior to some sensitivity adjustments it felt kind of sluggish but at the same time also Twitchy I never felt completely comfortable juggling multiple targets like I do in other games in fact combat gets exponentially harder the more enemies you have to jugle at least for now I'm fighting only human enemies ammo pickup in the game is also a little janky sometimes it seems like my character will pull them in and collect them automatically when I get close to them other times I have to meticulously place my reticle over them and hit a button to collect the ammo I will say the game throws a ton of it at you so you'll never exactly be wanting for bullets which is nice I just find the will it or won't it automatically collect it a little confusing and frustrating rating another thing worth mentioning is that unlike most games redfall lets me have three weapons at the ready instead of just the standard two which is a nice change it means I can have a sniper a shotgun and an assault rifle all ready to go at the same time it might not seem like a huge change but I find it very refreshing to not have to go into my inventory unequipped my shotgun and swap to a sniper rifle any time I want to pick someone off from long range a few more gunfights later and I find myself at an old fire station investigating the building has me killing a few cultists and rescuing the survivors they had cornered in one of the upper rooms before they'll come out and talk to me though they need me to do two things one they need me to turn the power back on for the building and two they want me to kill the vampire in the basement vampires in this game are janky one of the male models looks very similar to The Outsider from Dishonored which I found really distracting since the outsider is one of my personal favorite characters in all of game G I also can't help but feel that it's a bit lazy since Arcane is the same Studio that made Dishonored which means they probably had the outsider's character model just kicking around on some random hard drive which makes me wonder if they slapped his model into the game as like a placeholder and then decided hey let's just make some basic tweaks and call it a day fighting vampires feels kind of strange too I can't remember where but a long time ago I read a book where one vampire was explaining to a newly SED vampire that humans and vampires have a rule of three in their biology for humans it's 3 minutes without air 3 days without water 3 weeks without food for vampires it's 3 days without blood 3 weeks without water and 3 months without food and he also went on to explain that the average vampire is about three to four times as strong and as fast as an average human Olympic Athlete again not sure exactly where I read it but ever since then it's kind of been my Baseline for vampires and in combat vampires have this kind of Dash teleport ability that they will use constantly making Precision aiming very difficult which is frustrating to me personally because I like to use Precision aiming and not waste my limited ammunition this combined with the clunkiness of the aiming and tracking targets makes fighting them a pretty panicked and wild experience which in some ways I can appreciate just not enough to actually enjoy it luckily before we fight our first vampire in the game the game is smart enough to give us a shotgun because our pistols don't do jack [ __ ] but even the shotgun doesn't deal nearly as much damage as you feel like it should I'm not saying a single shotgun blast should kill a vampire outright but I feel like blowing a soccer ball-sized hole in your gut or shoulder should do more than just take away a third of your health I do kind of like that they made it so only a stake to the heart will actually kill the vampires once and for all it's a nice nod to the original vampiric lore even if it doesn't go into the details about the steak needing to be made of a specific wood fun fact though both times I played through this Mission I killed the vampire and went back upstairs but forgot to turn on the power meaning I had to turn around walk all the way back downstairs flip the breaker walk all the way back upstairs before the survivors in the room would talk to me and with that the firehouse becomes our base of operations and we get introduced to the surviving cast which is pretty much what you'd expect there's a doctor who will sell us medical supplies a pregnant redneck lady and her husband who run the gun selling and modding scene and a priest who runs the General Store all the stores run on an influence currency which basically means if you find cool SL useful stuff out in the world you get influence for it and you can use that influence to buy stuff at the various stores meaning you have to explore and contribute in order to be able to buy things which I kind of like reminds me of State of Decay and the most recent Dead Island it's also around this time that our chosen player character unlocks their first special ability in my case I chose to play as two different characters Jacob the spec ops soldier with a spectral Raven Scout and Lila the colleg goinging goth girl with various telekinetic Powers however they play very similarly in the momentto moment gameplay also while we're near the subject let's talk about their powers they're underwhelming don't get me wrong I know they're lowlevel right now but still still they feel kind of useless for the most part for Jacob he can use his Raven to tag nearby enemies a power that does sort of make sense with his role as a scout and spec ops Soldier the issue I have is that more often than not unless I'm purposefully trying to be sneaky and not be seen by the time I ping an enemy with my Raven who I nicknamed Edgar after Edgar Allen Poe the enemy had already seen me and thus didn't need to be pinged this led to me crouching and playing very stealthily for hours at a time when I played as Jacobs always trying to get the drop all my enemies or sneak up behind them Leila's powers are telekinetic with her first Power gaining a kind of block ability that she can use to defend herself with that's what it says on paper in reality I never quite got the hang of it I'm sure I did catch a bullet or two with it but it felt like most of the time I still got shot I'm also kind of unclear on if the ability blocks vampire melee and Claw attacks or if it's strictly for bullets Leela feels definitely like a support character the kind of character who helps set up the battlefield for other players by using her powers for various effects but when you're playing on single player once combat begins a lot of your tricks Fall by the wayside combat becomes especially frantic when you start dealing with multiple vampires their combined Dash and evasion mixed with their damage output can make battling just too a difficult task never mind if they're mixed up with cultists who are shooting at you so again I found myself creep creeping around mostly trying to whittle down groups of enemies or else Ambush them and take out the vampires first honestly I kind of started to play redfall like I would play bloodborne or other Dark Souls games which I did find kind of funny it really underscores how weak and alone a single player is in this game later on a friend of mine booted up and joined me and I had a completely different experience like night and day level difference now full disclosure my friend was about five levels higher than me and had had some better guns than I did so he definitely carried me for a bit but we basically did a [ __ ] around and find out Circuit of the island where we were just blasting vampires left and right like it was a carnival game and it was here with a friend that I got the most enjoyment out of redfall as we casually discussed our work what we were fixing for dinner and what our DND D characters were up to while shredding wave after wave of cultist and at least a dozen or so vampires at the same time the feeling of the game was completely different it was light-hearted and arcadey shoot him up most of the time we did run a few story missions and spent some time opening fast travel points as well as just hitting up places for better gear we were able to use basic tactics like using Leila's second ability to catapult my friend onto the rooftops where he could snipe enemies while I drew them out of cover or hos them down with automatic gunfire it was great we even spent some time commiserating on the game's lack of grenades which honestly doesn't sound like it would be a big deal but it truly was the lack of in-game inclusion was really baffling like okay I suppose it would be a little odd if I walked into a dude's garage and found three m67 frag grenades just rolling around but like you're telling me I can't steal booze from the gas station and make a Molotov cocktail out of it arguably that would even be more useful in this situation since basically every vampire story I've ever read says that fire should be just as deadly to them as sunlight we also kind of joked about how ineffective the melee attack is in standard combat and particularly against vampires you might as well not even bother which was particularly frustrating to me because I tend to reflexively hit that melee button to try and stagger those that get too close to me to try and buy myself some time to gain some distance between us after about 2 hours of [ __ ] around we called it a day and honestly this is where my story with the game pretty much ends I did try a few times to boot it back up and play again in single player but it was like the fun had been completely drained out of it I went from laughing and joking with a friend to once again stealthing everywhere terrified of every sound I heard and struggling to keep up with groups of more than four standard enemies and for the record I was only playing on normal difficulty the game just doesn't hold my attention in the way that I or it wants to the game wants to be a fun arcadey shooter that you play with your friends that much was made clear in the advertising and in the character selection it doesn't seem to really account for people who want to or have to play it as a single player experience I will say I think playing it alone gives it a better atmosphere more in line with the game's actual situation you are alone you are small you are weak compared to your enemies the vampires in this game feel powerful but it's kind of in an oddly cheap way they're powerful because they're fast and they hit really hard but also because if you're playing alone you're their only Target and because your bullets don't do a lot of damage overall this does seem to change a little bit as you level up and get better gear as evident by my friend being able to deal more damage than me but if I can't make up for my lack of damage with creativity or tactics then what else have I got on my side surprise main character armor and leveling up is slow in this game during our romp around the island my friend and I killed easily over a 100 cultists and various vampires and I only leveled up once which does make me think the game leans harder into the quests and missions being the source of experience and not combat which isn't a bad thing necessarily but again leaves into the idea that you're meant to be playing with friends so you can run through these missions quickly and level up during our time playing my friend and I did come up with a few ways that we think we could improve the game without necessarily doing a complete rewrite number one start the game before the attempted Fairy Escape maybe start it off during a vampire assault on the ferry in which you have to defend the boat as it gets ready to leave that way there's a sense of accomplishment and hope that gets pulled out from under you once everyone dies and the water recedes number two Let Us customize our guns as it is the only customization we get is to slap some pretty lame paint jobs on it or else swap out the kind of stake that some guns have attached to them the player would have a much better sense of control and ownership of their guns if they could swap out Scopes magazines and grips you don't even have to go crazy but give us something to toy with with otherwise do away with the modding part entirely because it's basically worthless for that matter let us do melee attacks with stakes and instead let us put UV flashlights or possibly stake launchers on our guns that would have made for some nice variety number three it might have been an interesting idea if there had been an option to join the vampires I won't lie after seeing how hard they are to kill I wouldn't say no to some of that power perhaps there could have been a running theme keeping your Humanity or embracing the darkness with perhaps a middle path that allowed for some evil without going overboard just something to consider number four give the players more powers to work with three powers may be enough in some games but those games usually see the players spamming those Powers every 5 to 10 seconds or so or else they make the powers Uber powerful with long cooldowns to force the player to use them only in clutch moments redfall tries to go for something in the Middle with most powers regenerating after 15 to 25 seconds but not really making much of a difference when they're used it might have been better if there had been a wider range of powers to pick from definitely giving each player a Core Power one they will always have access to no matter what but then letting them pick and choose their other powers I know as Lea I was desperate for some kind of offensive ability something that I could throw with a vampires to knock them away while I was reloading number five have there be Variety in the enemies and the vampires this one is pretty self-explanatory after you blast your 10th Green Day emo boy looking vampire it gets a little boring I'm not saying every vampire needs to be a unique custom model but they should feel unique perhaps they could have done like in Sea of Thieves or Shadow of Mordor and given vampires randomly generated names or monikers to identify who they used to be I'm no longer blasting vampire number six I'm blasting Harold Jenkins former cashier at Dave's Video rent or Lisa Monroe former head cheerleader something that makes the vampires feel different even if they aren't visually different in my original script I wanted to explore the idea of a game made without passion one line I kept coming across in article after article was a quote that said no one wanted to work on this game now I want to be clear I'm not saying that the people who work at Arcane Austin were not passionate about making games their catalog of games proves to me that they were very passionate it just not about this game and it shows at the time of writing this I'm laughing to myself because I'm not exactly sure what I expected to happen with this game the devs admitted they didn't like working on it major game retailers said it was bad and yet I went in thinking they were all wrong that somewhere this game was going to be enjoyable so I went in searching for that game the one I imagined in my head because I wanted this to be a good game survivors trapped on an island with vampires and cultists honestly sounds like a campaign setup for one of my new favorite tabletop games monster of the week so I went in with that mentality the issue being in Monster of the week you play as Monster Hunters not survivors and as a hunter you have agency you have power and you have presence in the story a Survivor does not a Survivor is alone and weak and just trying to survive to the game's credit the single player experience does give you that it's just that this kind of gaml isn't fun to me it's the same reason why I really struggle to enjoy from software games and when combined with the issues in combat lackluster writing and boring characters there's nothing to bring me back I just don't enjoy being small and weak and pathetic I don't want to be a Survivor I want to be a hunter I will also mention a quick glance at Wikipedia also reveals that this game has a pretty by the book plot kill bu the head vampires free the girl they were experimenting on Save the town basic and predictable the final stake through the heart so to speak redfall as a game is a failure such a bad one in fact that it caused the closure of the studio who made it it's no secret that the gaming industry has changed over the years technology has improved stories have changed and companies are no longer making games for gamers but instead making games to please their shareholders redfall is a perfect example of this a game that was forced to be something it didn't want to be until those working on it were doing so because they contractually had to another article I read said that seven out of 10 developers who worked on redfall left Arcane Austin because they were so unhappy with the corporate meddling in this game which seems to become a theme in the gaming industry as of late when I look at redfall I see a game that could have had a fun lifespan a decent single player experience mixed with some ball or multiplayer maybe some DLC packs and then drifted quietly away into the background as other newer games were released and took its place maybe it might have gotten a sequel or a spin-off if it had done really well now that will never happen redfall was a failure but it was a failure born of outside meddling and that is what makes this truly sad if these people had gotten to make the game that they wanted it might have turned out so much better thanks for watching for

Channel: Console-Fennec

Views: 2,594

Keywords: redfall, vampire games, arkane austin

Id: s0PoKqSEGQc

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 30 2024