As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Redfall is not a particularly good video game. It’s totally playable and perhaps even enjoyable, but as far as open-world games go, it’s average at best. Redfall isn’t a particularly good shooter or RPG, it doesn’t contribute anything significant to gaming we haven’t seen before, and there aren’t any standout features or ideas that make it a must-play. It’s a thing you can play to pass the time with your friends, but with the unfortunate baggage of being made by one of the most critically acclaimed studios in the world.
Average games come out all the time, but Arkane isn’t an average studio. Were Redfall just another generic Ubisoft game cast atop the open-world pile, the expectations for it would have been lower, and the sentiment towards it wouldn’t be nearly as negative. While playing Redfall over the weekend it was hard not to think of Anthem, Bioware’s ill-advised foray into a genre it wasn’t known for, that players unanimously rejected. Redfall may not be a live service game, but it’s clearly Arkane’s attempt to serve a wider audience with a title that doesn’t fit its style.Like Anthem, it will be remembered as a beloved studio’s big mistake.
Despite its reputation, Anthem was not a disaster right out of the box. The world BioWare created for Anthem was up to the standards of Mass Effect and Dragon Age, and though the gameplay was unlike anything the studio had made before, flying around Coda in Iron Man suits was, at times, exhilarating. It wasn’t what fans had come to expect from Bioware, but it was not a game that was slapped together overnight from spare parts. It was a fully-realized, big budget experience - it just wasn’t a very good one.
Anthem’s shortcomings are more nuanced than history would have us remember. Its power fantasy was lacking because the stats and modifiers on gear were tuned to be low impact, so you didn’t get a sense that your character was getting stronger. It also didn’t have enough mission variety to keep players engaged once they hit the endgame, so players didn’t stick with it after completing the (relatively short) campaign. Anthem's problems are the same things that most live-service games face, because they’re hard problems to solve. But while some games are given the time and resources to figure it out, like Destiny 2, others, like Anthem and Marvel’s Avengers, die a premature death. Anthem would have quietly faded away into obscurity like so many other live-service false starts, were it not a BioWare game.
I see a lot of similarities in Redfall, including specific shortcomings like low-impact loot and underwhelming power progression. More importantly, I see a studio that built a loyal following making a certain kind of game, and in an attempt to reach a new audience, was unable to adapt to a new genre. Redfall isn’t just different from Dishonored, Prey, and even Arx Fatalis, it’s missing the essential qualities that made those games good; the things that gave Arkane its identity as a developer. There’s some brilliant environmental storytelling in Redfall, and there are hints of immersive, choice-driven gameplay, but within the open world genre, Redfall is utterly generic, which is not something you’d ever say about Arkane’s previous games.
It’s difficult not to make a behind the scenes connection between BioWare and Arkane, too. Bioware’s founders departed shortly after the release of Mass Effect 3 in 2012, and over the years leading up to Anthem there was a mass exodus of developers that had worked on Dragon Age and Mass Effect, particularly among leadership. This continued through the launch and failure of Anthem, and it’s only been since Gary McKay took over as general manager in 2021 that the studio started talking about rebuilding. With Mass Effect 4 and Dragon Age: Dreadwolf both in development, BioWare is trying to return to the studio it once was, though many of the people that made it have long since left.
Similarly, Arkane Studios founder Raphaël Colantonio left the studio in 2017 after the release of Prey, along with Arkane executive producer Julien Roby, to start a new indie studio called WolfEye and make Weird West. With their departure, the kinds of games Arkane makes changed significantly - first with Deathloop, and now with Redfall. In that same time frame, Microsoft acquired Bethesda, making Arkane a first-party studio for Xbox with a lot more people to answer to than it ever had before. Regardless of what the actual factors were that led Redfall to be the game that it is, it's easy to feel like the studio has lost its way under new leadership, just like BioWare.
And just like with BioWare, this could be a wakeup call for Arkane. Times change and people move around the game industry, that’s normal. But it’s not normal for a respected studio to abandon its core identity the way Arkane has with Redfall. Returning to Dishonored and Prey may not be in the cards, but there’s still hope that the studio will get back to making the kind of systemic, immersive games it’s known for.