Arkane’s games offer a special kind of tactical agency, and with Redfall, Arkane Austin’s Studio Director and Redfall Co-Creative Director Harvey Smith says that'll remain true. "Solo is very much a classic Arkane experience," he promised – but so is its four-player co-op multiplayer mode, which is faster paced and offers a different kind of challenge as the dangers escalate.
Redfall follows four characters as they fight for their lives after an experiment gone wrong results in a swarm of vampires in the eponymous Massachusetts town. The sun is blocked out and a water wall surrounds the island, seemingly preventing anyone from leaving. Of course, knowing the story is just the beginning. From confirming Redfall will only have one ending to detailing some important customization mechanics and its plan for a lasting endgame, Smith shared plenty of new information about Arkane's 2023 vampire game. You can also watch a select portion of this interview in the video below.
Shining a Light On Big Details
Does the story change based on who you play?
No, but the dialogue does. Ricardo Bare and the writing team, the narrative design team, have put a lot of work into dynamic systems. And I should give the programmers credit there since they wrote those systems. Ricardo and Andrew Brown, our lead programmer, have worked a lot on dynamic VO systems. They worked on Prey together. A lot of work has been put into the narrative layer, the readables, the briefings, the dynamic conversations, the AI barks, all of that stuff that you'd expect in an Arkane game. We've gone a little deeper on a couple of them, but the characters, they talk a lot alone to comment on the world or with each other, depending on who you're playing. [For example] if you and I are playing Devinder and Layla, they have a different relationship than, say, Remi and Jacob would.
We'll be talking more about those dynamic narrative systems later. One thing I do want to say is there was just an overwhelmingly positive response to the announcement trailer that we released a year ago – the cinematic. Then today, the response to the gameplay trailer has been very positive. In those comments, once in a while, I see somebody like, "I hope they don't talk this much during the game. They're very chatty." And that is true, they don't. For marketing purposes, we just double down on the amount of dialogue that's in that trailer otherwise there's long moments of silence.
Arkane games are usually big on player choice and consequences. In Redfall's announcement, it was said that our actions change Redfall's setting. Are there many branching paths or major choices with consequences?
Multiple endings and stuff like branching missions are less important to Redfall. Although in truth, I think we have more elective missions, actually. There is the campaign, but there are also some side mission spurs that you can do or not do in the campaign. What it really influences is how a certain character's outcome happens or how they feel about you. Then we have the Nest, and we have the Safe House missions, and then we just have the random exploration of the world and the spawns and vignettes out there. But the overall plot itself, we don't do a lot of branching stuff with that.
Are there multiple endings in Redfall?
No.
How will we get to learn more about each of the characters? Are there specific character missions, or do we learn about them primarily through banter and cutscenes?
It's mostly through the banter and through the cinematics – they're all character-based. So if I have a briefing for this one mission and I'm playing Layla, I get Layla's perspective on that mission. But if I play again through that same mission and I'm playing Jacob, I get his perspective on it and then all of his banter. If we're playing together and I'm playing Layla, you're playing Jacob, they have their own unique banter back and forth as two characters that get to know each other.
A big question: can we change characters after we've started the game?
No, you cannot. You start the campaign with Layla, for instance, you're bound to Layla through the campaign mission, side missions, the whole flow of the game, to the endgame. And then after that, you can play again with Layla and keep advancing her or you can start a new character, but you can't switch characters mid-track. Currently, we have no plans to re-spec either. You can start a new playthrough and try a different set of powers, a different set of weapons, et cetera, but currently, when you start the campaign with a character, you're committed all the way through.
How will progression work? Do I have to level each character individually, or will there be an overall account level with some resources allotted to use across characters?
[It's] all per-character. So as you level up your Layla – you might have three Laylas going because maybe you just love Layla or you love Devinder. You might have one Layla you play alone and one you play with some other friends because they're all level 20. Then you have a Jacob you play with somebody else. Early on, we had the decision to make like, "Can I play in one party, if the three of us or the four of us are playing, can we all be Devinder? Can we all be Remi?" At first, we were like, "No, let's lock out the roles so that there's always a Devinder, always a Layla, if you have four people."
Ultimately, we decided not to do that. If you really want to play Remi and I really want to play Remi, then we should both be able to play Remi. We have character costumes that change, so you can be Remi in her rescue outfit or her hiking and camping outfit or her default outfit. I can be in a black ops Remi version. And then the way you build out your skills, the way I build out my skills, which weapons you have, which weapons I have, which Remnants you found, which Remnants I've found, it will feel different even if we're both playing Remi.
How flexible are the character builds, speaking of not being able to re-spec? Is there a specific class type per character? The gameplay segment during the 2022 Xbox Showcase showed a weapon that mentioned "support value." What does that mean and how does that impact how we play?
Our characters are very baked in terms of their personalities and their voices. What you're talking about is a shot, which we knew people would stop, where as Devinder, you have his power tree up – it's an early alpha version of it. Every hero is made up of a bunch of choices you can make through the trees. They all have three primary active powers that you can upgrade in a bunch of different ways. Then they have some passive powers. And then there is a set of skills that are kind of common across all the characters. Like, can I carry more medical resources or more lock picks?
In Devinder's case, he has a power called Black Light which you saw, where he held it up and the UV light petrified all the vampires around, which is temporary. They start to thaw out, basically, but you can stake them while they're petrified. There are hazards in the world like where somebody sets up a tripod with some UV light and if a vampire moves through it dynamically, they get petrified. You can sneak up and turn it off. Let's say an enemy faction is walking around those petrified vampires – you can use that to your advantage. But he has a power actively where he goes, "You shall not pass." He flashes [the UV light] and they petrify. You can upgrade that in different ways; bigger radius, longer effect, etcetera.
No actual class types, then? It's just more so you choose how you want to play, build it, then you can run with it regardless of whether you're playing solo or with others?
Devinder has a set of skills, active and passive, and some that are kind of common with everybody. And then also the weapons you choose because you're constantly leveling and so your weapons are leveled, so you need a higher-level weapon. Then the weapons come with rarities, so they have all these different traits on them that affect gameplay. And then on top of that, you have a few other equipment items that affect gameplay.
We have the concept of these things called Remnants, which are like objects the vampires were around. When one of them becomes a vampire and the world warps around them psychically, it will imbue something, like the rabbit's foot on their keychain or some object they're carrying can be a Remnant, now psychically charged. You can find those and carry them and they modify gameplay in some way. They're basically magic items.
Can you tell us more about the Ward Remnants, the Blood Remnants, and the Soul Remnants shown briefly on the trailer's weapon screen?
Some types of those Remnants will be in the base game and then some will probably come out shortly thereafter. One is more defense-oriented, one is more health-oriented, one affects how your skills work or how your weapons work, things like that.
Do Remnants get weird with how they modify the game?
Some of them get weird. Yeah. Give me an example of “weird.” What do you mean?
Hm, like Big Head mode. Just like weird modifiers that change the game.
They don't get weird like that. (Laughs) We don't have Big Head mode.
Yeah, I don't want that, actually. That's just the first example, but I think if you have a modifier that makes better defense generally or just, is it more stats-based modifiers?
Some are. That's the easiest thing to do, obviously. And then some are a little more grandiose. It's also a system we'll be playing with over time.
What was the most challenging part of developing Redfall?
As a developer, I would say the multiplayer piece during the pandemic. It was a super-challenging game, our most challenging game ever. You always want to challenge yourself at some level or you're just painting by numbers or something. And so it's like, can we take these values that we love at Arkane and put them in an open-world, co-op environment? So the multiplayer has changed everything. It's changed the kinds of missions we can do. It's changed what kind of physics we can do. We're doing everything we can, we love our game, but it's a new challenge at every step. Technically and creatively, it's a new challenge. And then the pandemic hit and everything got even more challenging. So this project has been difficult in a lot of ways. It's been complex.
And what do you think will be the most challenging gameplay aspect for players in Redfall?
As a player, the hardest thing to do… I guess that depends on final tuning, things that are coming down the road. Ideally, the boss fights will be very hard – the vampire gods. You see a glimpse of one of them in the gameplay trailer if you slow it down. That would ideally be the tough situation. Maybe getting separated from the group, maybe playing on a higher difficulty. When the storms kick off and the Rook shows up, that should be very difficult as well. [The Rook] is one of our special vampires.
Jumping forward, what’s the endgame like? What are the player goals? Is it better stats for optimization, higher character levels, or something else entirely?
We have some stuff we're working on that's new for us, honestly, but we're not really ready to talk about it yet because it's underway. We support all of our games for a period of time after they come out with DLC or with enhancements. You can look at our past and see all of that, ranging from Knife of Dunwall and Brigmore Witches [for Dishonored and Dishonored 2] to Mooncrash for Prey.
We'll talk more about the endgame stuff and the sort of, "I've already finished the campaign once. What can I do?" Play in a harder difficulty mode, keep leveling my character, additional ways to play, additional characters, etcetera. Our goal is, with all of our projects, to stay with them for a while, while we ramp up on something new in the background.
Co-op vs Solo
Will it be harder for players who choose to go it alone? Or is it balanced so that it's more challenging with more people?
All of our games make a Venn diagram. If you lay them on top of each other, they overlap heavily but, you know, Dishonored is still focused. Prey is a seamless contiguous environment with a continuous flow of time and it's physics-focused. Deathloop added multiplayer – that's done by the Lyon Studio. Mooncrash added roguelike elements. Redfall falls on that same Venn diagram. It'll have a lot of the same Arkane creative values; narrative-rich space, the location is a character – we put a lot into the history of the place – immersive movement through the body, through the action, through the climbing, the sliding, all of that stuff. And then of course, game mechanics that interact in interesting ways, ways that sometimes surprise us.
At its heart, one of our games is part shooter, part RPG, about exploration of a world and all of that. That's the important part, and Redfall is made so you can play through the campaign solo and you don't have bots with you for the other characters or whatever. You're just purely solo. You pick Layla, Jacob, Devinder or Remi. You're alone, you go through the world.
It's not a super-hardcore stealth game, but stealth is a factor. The AI is based on awareness with sight and sound. You can use stealth to get an advantage on people or to bypass the conflict or whatever to avoid fighting if you're wounded or weak. So that is the way the single player just goes through the campaign, and there's no special mode for multiplayer or any of that. If you play with other people, one other person, two other people, three other people for a total of four, it becomes more and more party-like, of course. It's probably our closest to being a "party game." But solo is very much a classic Arkane experience.
Is story progress in a co-op round saved for each individual player or is progress only kept for the party leader?
As soon as you add open-world, as soon as you add co-op, you have to re-ask a bunch of questions about things that we [normally] take for granted, that this is the way we do them, this is the way all of the Arkane games work. We're still going back and forth on a bunch of stuff – final tuning and all that. We're just about to hit content lock and then we've got nothing but enhancing, bug fixing, polishing, [and] tuning from that point forward. And that's often where games go from like, "God, I can't stand looking at our game," to like, "Oh my God, I kind of like it." Dishonored was like that.
Our current answer is whoever hosts the session – initiates the session – their progress is persistent for them, but [for] other people, it's not. Your character progress is, like any weapons you find, any levels you gain, all of that is persistent. But in terms of what missions you've unlocked and such, the host, their progression matters. If you sign on with your friend and they're halfway through the game and you play the second half of the game with them, and then you need to go back and you want to play on your own, you'll be starting at the beginning of the campaign with a character.
When we started talking about [campaign progression] and working on it, we imagined a scenario where every mission you played, we checked the box that you got credit for that. You've done that one. But then you end up with this weird problem where like, "Okay, I've been playing with you, but now I'm going to play on my own." So I start playing through the campaign, but then I start hitting missions that I've already done? For the flow of things, you want to have to redo those. The story would be very confusing if you got to mission eight and it said, "Skip this one because you've already done it." Your hero and your gear and your experience points, that stuff is always persistent but your mission flow is persistent if you're the host.
What's the benefit of co-op other than having a good time with a friend and getting extra character banter? Was there a particular reason Arkane wanted to make a co-op campaign story rather than another single-player adventure?
When we started Redfall, I had just done eight years of Dishonored. Ricardo had done four years of Dishonored, four years of Prey. We felt like we needed some kind of creative risk or some kind of change. We always wanted to work on an open-world [game]. We just talked about the narrative systems that would be involved with multiplayer, with co-op, with characters that would get to know each other over time. We'll talk more about those systems later. There are some very dynamic systems with that. But really, these four personalities who are having to work together, because our vampires are kind of metaphors. They kind of represent the like 0.01% of predatory people out there who already have everything by draining the life out of most of the people in the world, even as the world burns down around them. They kind of already were vampires. They're already soulless or lacking in human empathy.
So our bases, our missions, are launched from civic buildings, like a fire department or a maritime center, for instance. It's all about neighborhoods, capturing neighborhoods, and taking them back for the people. At first, the four heroes come together, if you're playing co-op and they don't know each other at all, but they build bonds. There are gameplay and narrative benefits to that. It's just a new space for us to explore and it was an interesting challenge; what would the Arkane DNA look like in the open world? The way we do resources, scrounging for ammo and medical stuff and lock picks, and the way we approach buildings, there are multiple entries and problems to gameplay encounters, there are multiple ways you can approach it.
And what would it be like to work together? Because if you play solo, it's a lot spookier, it's a lot more atmospheric, it's more slow-paced. As soon as you add another person, you're not really afraid anymore because you have a friend there, but there's got to be something to make up for that. So the social aspect, the narrative changing in terms of the banter between the characters, just the fun of playing with another person… Layla drops the elevator and everybody can get on the roof or get up to a higher vantage. There are lots of little synergies like that that are good.
Having an open world and optional co-op creates different narrative challenges from games Arkane has worked on in the past. What were some key development ideas you wanted to carry over from past projects into Redfall?
We still believe in the same things. Environmental storytelling so that players can make inferences. It's less driven to them, but they're inferring it. Whether it's graffiti or scene placement, or the way a body is [placed], some loot and blood marks on the ground, that sort of thing. Just the way a house was set up, you tell something about the people that live there. That's important in all of our games. The place – like Redfall as a community and the way that people talk, and the way the community was set up, and the way they're banding together is storytelling in and of itself. Our AI systems being sight-driven, sound-driven, coming to search for you, not giving up, and not having perfect information is very important to us. The sort of hybrid of first-person shooter and RPG, not quite either, but somewhere in the middle, with a lot of exploration is important to us. Advancing RPG powers, feeling immersive in the movement and the shooting and the sliding and the climbing, all that's important to us. So what we really tried to do with Redfall was take all the core pieces of Arkane games and just make it work in an open-world game.
Will players have the freedom to leave their group in co-op and explore on their own, encountering enemies and things to do on their own? Or is there something tying everyone together?
In different builds along the way, we've had different answers to that question. At one point, we just let you wander to the opposite sides of the world, but the game is tuned such that the game gets harder with more people. [Due to] your chances of survival, you're encouraged to come back together. We may ship with tethering, but it will be pretty generous. Maybe a few hundred yards or something, I hope. Most of the time you probably wouldn't notice it anyway but it becomes a different thing. The way our world is set up, it's better if you gravitate back to the group.
There's still a lot of exploration in the game the more you play. Then the more solo you are, obviously, the pace slows down, stealth is more of a factor. Exploration, inferring stuff from the environment, storytelling, all becomes more important. And the more people you add to your group of up to four, the more sort of fast-paced and zany it becomes, of course.
How open is the open world? What are our limitations? Is it more like a Breath of the Wild where you can go anywhere wherever, or do we have to stick to certain areas until we're ready for the next challenge?
It's very open. For what it's worth, it's made to be an on-foot game. [With] people talking about the square footage, what's appropriate is different based on whether you're just running and walking or whether you have vehicles or you fly on a dragon or whatever. Ours is an on-foot, urban-exploration game, so it's the right size for that, I think. It's mostly very open. In fact, at first it was too open. It was like there was not enough blocking you or channeling you, but it's very, very open rooftops and alleys and streets of this small town – Redfall, Massachusetts – which is like a fishing community, a tourist community. Quaint, historic New England stuff with this stealthy takeover by vampires.
The one thing that we do in terms of that gating pretty heavily is we divided the world into two districts. District one is the first half of the missions and it's the downtown part of Redfall, and District two is more rural. It's farms, lighthouses, churches, things like that.
What happens when I'm in a party and I find an audiolog or other collectible? Do we all instantly have it, or does everyone have to pick it up to add it to their collection?
It's different. If it's a plot thing that advances the [story] or you found a note or key or whatever, the group advances with that, but if it's loot it's individualized. If something dies and has some medical resources or lock picks or Remnant or some ammo or something like that, everybody's got to get their own.
Can I bring my endgame character into another person's game, regardless of how far along they are in their adventure?
You can. There were so many times we started getting into the weeds of deciding “how should this work,” or “what rules should we put on?” And more and more, we just came back to “let the players do what they want.” Like if you are hosting and your character is level 40, and my character's level 3 and I come into the game with you, I'm going to have a real hard time. You're going to be saving me a lot, but I'm going to level up faster because we're earning more experience. And counter to that, if we're all level 3 and I'm hosting and you've got a level 40 character, you're not going to have much fun, I think, because your character can just insta-kill everything, basically. But maybe that's cool. Maybe you want to guide us. Maybe you're not going to fight unless we get in trouble. People will do all kinds of things, so putting the power in the hands of the player, I think, is the right call.
Redfall's Vampires and Our Tools to Kill Them
We've had a neat variety of vampires in media, from What We Do In The Shadows to the recent resurgence of Twilight, plus the many beautiful gothic video game vampire designs. What was the design theory behind Redfall's more monstrous vampires?
Vampires are always good. They're always a metaphor. Monsters are a metaphor. As I've said, ours are a metaphor for predatory people, soulless people that prey on [others] to aggrandize themselves or make themselves richer or more comfortable. They put a large number of people in a very stressful, drained position. Our vampires are not aspirational – you don't want to be them. They're horrible. They're monsters. There's also a lot of rich vampire lore out there. It's funny – our vampires blotted out the sun. One of the main vampire gods is called the Black Sun, and she blocked the sun out and she rolled the tides back from the island so you're land-bound on the island, trapped there.
We did a lot of research into vampires and vampires in media – Nosferatu and Dracula and all that, but also Near Dark, Lost Boys, Interview With The Vampire, Twilight, What We Do In The Shadows, and all of that. For a while, the team was having a weekly pizza vampire watching party before the pandemic. We'd all gather in one of the conference rooms and we'd bring pizza in and turn out the lights and somebody would host, "I picked this one, we're going to watch it together." And, "Oh God, I forgot how cheesy this was," or, "I forgot how cool this was." 30 Days Of Night is a really good example of a good one.
In terms of the design, we started out saying they should look like idealized predators in some way. They're tall and athletic and powerful. The more they ascend in the vampire ecology, the more they become monstrous. The specials like the Rook or the Siphon or the Angler, they have bizarre properties. The vampire gods themselves have even weirder aspects. The design was just back and forth with our concept team and our art director, Karen [Segars]. We love the movie 30 Days Of Night. We love parts of the book called The Passage, which was about modern, science-based vampires. But we deviated, too, in a lot of ways. Our vampires aren't [harmed by] garlic and crosses and things like that. They're not bat-derived. At the end of the day, they need to be afraid of the sun, drink blood, and have fangs to be vampires, really.
There are parallels you discover here and there. We didn't intend it, but there are some myths that vampires can't cross running water. So, by virtue of the vampire gods pushing all the water away from the island, there's a water wall suspended around the entire island that's kind of creepy and psychic. If you get close to it, it makes odd noises and has things floating in it. It looms over you. We end up going like, "Oh yeah, vampires, can't cross running water." That kind of like is an almost parallel to the vampire mythology that we didn't plan, but it just ends up that way.
What's that door shown in the trailer? Is that the “psychic nests?” Are these replayable if you miss something in them, like a collectible? Are these required to complete or an optional challenge?
We have a lot of different ways to play the game. Like a campaign mission, or you can just wander the world and level up and look at environmental storytelling scenes and fight things and collect loot. We also have a bunch of very dynamic systems like where storms can happen. This one special type of vampire shows up. We have these vignette scenes, which we'll go into detail at some point, which are full-on scenes with characters and loot and you can approach them in different ways. We have Safe Houses for this neighborhood-capture system where you go neighborhood by neighborhood, capturing different parts of the town, taking them back, making them safe again. We'll go into that, too.
And then, as you guessed, we have a feature called Nests, which are kind of a shared psychic space where the vampires are basically sort of tripping together on what we call the Blood Trance. Different rules exist inside the Nest. That psychic space doesn't have to adhere to normal architectural boundaries. That's why, in the trailer, you see them go to a movie theater and instead of the screen, it transitions into this like wilderness-looking environment. But yes, that's a Nest.
They're not required, per se, but when you get to the center of the Nest there's a heart there that has a powerful psychic Remnant in it that you want, basically. They're replayable, they're fairly procedural. Those Nests are made room by room, different tiles that can be stitched together dynamically, and so it's one of the more procedural parts of the game.
Are there a lot of procedurally generated parts to the game?
Yeah, if you look at which Safe House missions are involved in capturing a given neighborhood, if you look at the vignettes across the world and the ambient spawn of enemies, the sun rises and sets the moon, day and night follow – there are different gameplay rules that happen by day and by night – vampires are more often dormant during the day, etcetera. The storms build up and happen, and then the Nests are procedurally generated room to room, like I said. So there's quite a bit.
On top of that, Arkane is known for AI that is sight- and hearing-based. Even if your game is not a hardcore stealth game, having an AI that's like that just generates gameplay. Like, you're moving across the world and you're moving into an area, you don't realize that you made a sound back there and somebody's following you now. Or you accidentally lead one group of enemies into another group of enemies and they fight. That kind of AI is what we do, whether it's Prey or Deathloop or Dishonored or Redfall. No matter what the rest of the structure of the game is, that gives you a lot of dynamic gameplay right there. It's procedural in nature.
Can you tell me about your favorite weapon?
That probably depends on which character I'm playing at any given time, and the traits and the leveling of the weapons work such that you pretty much have as many weapons as you want to carry, but typically you're switching between three. The way the system works is it's beneficial to have one of the dedicated vampire-hunting weapons, like a flare gun, UV beam, or stake launcher, and then a shotgun, sniper rifle, or machine pistol. There's a lot of different stuff in there. And then it's augmented with your character’s powers, of course.
So depending on the situation, depending on the character, depending on which weapon you find, you find one of a certain level with certain traits, a certain rarity. It depends on how you play as well. If you have a good UV beam and you couple that with something that has a stake on the end or like a flare gun – that's a very powerful combination because you can petrify vampires and then destroy them from a distance.
How does loot work for enemy drops? It'd maybe be a little weird if vampires dropped guns or ammo considering that they don't use those in their attacks.
We've put a lot of thought into that. Most of ours are like environmental storytelling scenes where you come upon a scene and you might see a body on the street and then you look up at the roof and there's a blood streak. It looks like this guy was dragged down the roof and dropped. So if you make your way up to that roof, you find he was hiding up there before someone caught him and threw him off the roof. Therefore, there's a beer bottle and a sleeping bag and some stuff up there, and you loot it. The loot typically feels appropriate to the faction. If you stake a vampire and dig through the ashes, you might find a Remnant or something to that effect – a psychically imbued magic item, basically. Bellwether soldiers will have more likelihood to have military gear. If you lockpick a trunk and open it, it might have a civilian shotgun in it or some flare ammunition or something like that. But as often as possible, we make them environmental storytelling scenes.
Is ammo rare? Or is it easy to find?
I would love to do a mode where it's super rare, but it's somewhere in the middle for this. It's not like you're ammo-starved all the time, but it's also not like you have infinite ammo. Typically, when you fight people, they'll drop some kind of ammo. The stake launcher has “found” ammo. It fires broken broom handles or pool cues or fireplace pokers or something. So there'll be a bundle of stuff like that on the ground that you can load into that. If you're exploring an old boat on the harbor, it might have a first aid kit and flares in it or something to that effect.
It's clear Arkane has a plan for how to keep us busy between its still-to-be-determined launch date and whatever post-release content it has in store. Once those details are announced, you'll find the news here on IGN.
Though Redfall was delayed to 2023 with Starfield, there are still plenty of big games coming out this fall. Be sure to check out this list of 2022 games to see what's in store for the rest of the year.
Miranda Sanchez is the Executive Editor of Guides and is smitten with What We Do In the Shadows. She has high hopes for Guillermo in Season 4. You can chat with her about your favorite vampires, stationery, and beer on Twitter.