With its new vampire shooter, it looks like Arkane is chasing trends, not setting them.
Last week, Arkane released a story trailer giving a closer look at Redfall, the upcoming shooter from its Austin studio. I keep hoping that something I see will change my mind about the vampire action game, but it looks like the team behind Prey has sanded off most of its interesting edges.
The most recent trailer does reveal some cool stuff, like the idea that the vampire takeover began from the blood-related experimentation of Aevum, “a company of parasites with a thirst for immortality.” Tying vampirism to the ultra-wealthy’s documented obsession with the purported power of transfusions from young, healthy donors seems like fertile ground for a studio with as sharp an eye for satire as Arkane, so that’s encouraging.
But as fascinating as I find that idea, other things in the trailer don’t inspire much confidence. One shot shows a cultist on a compound wall preaching into a megaphone. And the trailer’s narrator later says that the cultists regard certain powerful vampires as gods. At this point, many games both good — Wasteland 3, Night in the Woods — and less good — Borderlands 3, Far Cry 5 — have used cults as enemies, and none of them have really broken new ground. I’m interested in the psychology that makes people blindly follow charismatic leaders, but games haven’t found any novel angles to tackle this subject. It mostly seems to serve as a way to excuse the protagonists’ violence, in the same way zombies do. If they’ve been fully brainwashed, what good would nonviolent means be?
The trailers have repeatedly appeared derivative of other popular games, and that’s the opposite of what Arkane has made its name doing. The studio drew on the Thief series for its 2012 breakout, Dishonored, but it was looking to a genre that had always been relatively niche and doing it with a big, modern, triple-A budget and production value. Instead of going where the money was, Arkane went where its interests were and the money followed. The first Dishonored was a deservedly big hit, which can be easy to forget given the indifference its sequels met in the marketplace.
With Redfall, Arkane appears to be doing the opposite — pursuing a genre with broader appeal than the immersive sims it has historically made. The looter shooter was popularized by Borderlands and its sequels and has served as the template for many of the live-service games of the last decade. Destiny, The Division, Anthem, and the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League are all built on the framework that Borderlands established for this kind of shooter. That formula finds you and your friends squadding up, going out on missions, leveling up and getting better gear, then going on more difficult missions (or running the same missions again at a higher difficulty level) to repeat the loop.
The triple-A space feels increasingly homogenized, and after watching Crystal Dynamics make the pivot, be met with indifferent reviews and underwhelming sales, and already start preparing for the game to shut down, it seems ill-advised for so many other studios to be chasing the same trends.
In the Official Gameplay Deep Dive that Bethesda rolled out last month, we see evidence that Redfall will be the same kind of game. Though I dig the New England island setting, I can’t get over the idea that the loop of this game mainly seems to revolve around the pursuit of weapons with bigger numbers. In describing the game’s vampire nests, studio director Harvey Smith says that “these deadly lairs change each time you step inside.” The gameplay shows the squad of players fighting their way through vampires to reach the nest’s glowing red heart, destroying it, then collecting as much loot as they can on the way out. As an Arkane fan, procedurally generated dungeons that you fight through to earn better loot just isn’t what I want from the studio behind Prey and Dishonored.
I don’t hate this kind of game. I enjoyed Anthem more than most and thought that The Division 2 was one of the best third-person shooters of the last generation. If another studio, says Gearbox, was making Redfall, I would be stoked. But more and more triple-A studios are moving away from the things that made them unique to chase this trend. After seeing Crystal Dynamics move on from Tomb Raider to make an Avengers forever game, after seeing Rocksteady pivot away from the single-player Arkham games to make a live-service Suicide Squad, and after seeing Arkane Austin pivot away from the single-player Prey to make a class-based co-op shooter, I just feel kind of bummed out.
