Despite it, the studio wanted to keep its signature elements in the game, which will no longer be coming to PlayStation 5.

In an interview with IGN, Redfall production designer Ben Horne explained how it was a challenge for them to stay true to “Arkane’s DNA”: “Left 4 Dead is an awesome game, but we wanted to make something different. We wanted to make something that we feel has the Arkane DNA we’ve made in games from the past, like Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Prey, and, most recently, Deathloop. You can think of all those games almost like a Venn diagram, where they overlap in critical areas—that we like to tell stories in games. We like to make games with a rich, coherent story and systems that players can exploit and use to their advantage, maybe in surprising ways. For Dishonored, we went a little stealthy, and for Prey, we focused on physics. For Redfall, we wanted to focus on world-building. We wanted to focus on that narrative story. That was one of the exciting parts of starting a game like this. It was something new. I think it’s natural to make games, and maybe you’ve made a few that are in a certain mold and to say, ‘We want to take what we love here, and we want to break the mold.’

Making a large, open-world game that was breaking the mold for us. We wanted to maintain the things about Arkane’s DNA that we love, something about our games in the past that we appreciate: environmental storytelling, intense kind of narrative through-put in the world, so the world feels lived-in, feel worth saving. And so, as we took on this challenge to make such a vast open world, we wanted to ensure that every home that players walked into, or convenience store, had “readables.” When you play single-player in Redfall, you are playing by yourself. There are no AI squadmates. And then you can add friends up to a four-player squad, and what we found is that as you add more and more friends, the game takes on almost this party mode when you’re playing. There’s a lot of fun, a lot of action, a lot of ways that your skills and abilities can play with your squadmates,” Horne said.

There’s also a trust mechanism in the game, similar to the coherence system in Warhammer 40K: Darktide, where if players can stay together, they get buffs. Horne says it’s an incredible system because players can be self-expressive in their playstyle with their friends. You don’t have to hang out, but it can be helpful, and that’s why Arkane tries to encourage players to play together.

Redfall is coming to Xbox Series and PC on May 2 and will be available immediately through Xbox Game Pass.

Source: PCGamer