He's obviously playing it on easy. The things notorious for giving bad aim to the A.I. and making them weaker! How can people be this stupid... He didn't even show the difficulty so it's obvious he's just full of it.
You know what's even weirder about the cutscenes? They're not even pre-rendered slide shows, they just spawn the characters and objects in and pan the game camera around. I know this because I've had a couple instances of characters not unloading from these scenes so they're still there frozen in time when gameplay starts again.
Exactly, they can't even get a frozen still 3D render right. Look at the water bottle at the beginning of the first one in the firestation, it's just floating like 3 feet in the air
@@guildwarsnerd123 Like, asset flips and college projects, yeah, but I haven't seen any halfway decent games from an actual studio do anything like that in a long time.
@@buggart I'd say Bayonetta... But they were for the less action-y scenes (just dialogue or exposition dumps) with noir film tape grain designs that look nice, while proper cutscenes are for the more... provocative or emotional moments that look amazing.
This is another one of those games that I hope gets an article released about what happened throughout the development process that resulted in a mess like this. Usually though, we only ever get bits and pieces of info about drama behind the scenes. Somebody get on this, I wanna know. It's more interesting to me than the game itself.
@Dusty agreed. The last generation signalled a lot of negative trends for gaming as a whole. It doesn't really apply to broken games at launch, but personally, I lay a lot of blame for many of modern gaming's problems at the feet of the mobile gaming market, or at the very least the publishers who have tried to make the PC/console space more like the mobile market because they're greedy for those sweet whale bucks.
@@fearedjames Xenoblade 3, KH3, Assassins creed Odyssey, One Piece Pirate Warriors 3, Gran Turismo Sport, Ratchet and Clank ps4, Elden Ring, BTD6, FFXV, Spyro Re-Ignited. Not that hard to come up with SOME.
@Kieran Harris Jedi Survivor is great! It just needs a bunch of patches to be good! Come on guys we know games are never finished for the first 5 years of release!
@Kieran Harris Seems to be more of a performance issue rather than the game itself. Nowadays tho I do include performance as a point in rating a game overall.
@@MichaelDoesLife I'm happy for you and the other dozens of people who enjoy this, I really am. But the overwhelming majority of people can't lower our standards to justify a billion dollar corporation charging people for this AA grade 2013 garbage.
@@MichaelDoesLife it's a valid criticism though, this game is in development back in 2017, and this is supposed to be the Xbox exclusive game in the first half of 2023, and you greet the player with a Still Frame cutscene? Where is the work to match up the price tag?
One of the few games where I can actually feel how painful it is to play. It reminds me of one of those 'scam' games, where they throw assets together to make a trailer, get people's money, then ditch town, only a higher level version of that.
You hit the nail on the head. Thats EXACTLY what many many AAA games are today. People constantly complain about asset flip indies, but are somehow okay with AAA studios throwing some assets together with a cookie cutter gameplay mechanic...
@@xXYannuschXx Wow, just looked and it's $70 or $100 on Steam. You know what it reminds me of - a game that you'd see in a movie, or on an episode of Black Mirror. Something where they want it to resemble games of today, but clearly they didn't spend a whole lot of time or effort to actually detail the game. Just a game in the background someone's playing. On the rare occasion I pay full price for a game, I want it to be an experience. That amazing AAA feeling of "I'm in for 40-100 hours of high end entertainment." And yeah, it feels like the AAA devs are getting REALLY content with cutting corners. At least, on a positive note, there are a ton of great indie games that you can get for $20 or under. But still, sometimes I really just want that great AAA experience.
I feel like when Arkane Austin and Lyon are working together, you get games like Dishonored and Prey. Seems to me that Deathloop and Redfall are the result of each studio trying to become solely independent of the other along with incorporating multiplayer elements and a general lack of direction. Effectively not keeping each other in check resulted in ideas thrown into the game where they didn't belong that never get peer reviewed. In Redfall's case it feels like it was being developed as a Live service multiplayer game by Austin while Lyon was off toying around with Deathloop and seeing if they could push out something to hold people over until their Redfall cash cow came in (see early leaked screenshots of Redfall in pre-Alpha where there's a tab in the main menu that literally said "Micro-Transaction Store"). Obviously with so many live service failures its like the game had to be re-tooled with the MTX removed and Arkane Microsoft Bethesda or whoever just said to finish it as fast as possible since it wouldn't be a live service money-maker anymore. What we received was merely the pushed out afterbirth of a game that they knew would fail. That's all my theory at least.
@@HumanTimeCapsule A couple artists worked on this from Lyon?! Wow, imagine my surprise that developers involved in the earliest part of game design would be moved around to different studios to assist with other projects while the lead staff, gameplay designers and directors from both studios remain on their own projects instead of collaborating to make a better game. Theory obliterated lol.
I think Colantonio's departure from the studio is showing. A bunch of good artists and developers without strong direction can still put out a pile of shit
Redfall's minimum GPU requirement is 2.5x more powerful than Titanfall 2's minimum GPU requirement, and Titanfall 2 looks twice as good, with less than half of the GPU power.
AC Unity has much better graphics and lighting than this game. And it released in 2014. And it runs smoothly on modern PCs and the Series X. Fuck modern coders.
@@ryanvandoren1519 id Tech does wonders… so does Frostbite when used properly. Unreal 4 has proven to be quite unreliable at this point. It’s now two games that that can’t handle it in this current generation. Yes, Dead Space and RE4 had some issues but they were okay, RE4 being the most stable by comparison.
If, at launch, Starfield is even close to the state that Redfall is right now, Xbox is over. Both games are going to be directly compared to FF16, Spider-Man 2, and Tears of the Kingdom, and I think that there is no way that these 3 games are not going to launch extremely polished and receive glowing reviews from both critics and gamers.
The Game Complainers channel just basically said the same thing last week and they're huge xbox fans. You'd imagine Sony seeing this happening right now that theyre going to want to make sure their exclusives run seamlessly just because they know its going to get rubbed badly in Xboxs face online
@joceja23 all those games are on basically every other platform. And if you’re playing only those games then you might as well just buy them at that point. Paying 120-180 every year just to be able to keep playing those games and not even own them is retarded and financially stupid asf. It’s not worth gamepass for that especially when most of those games you’re going to play once or twice and then stop excluding cod and overwatch etc. But again, spending 120-180 a year just for a few games every year when you can just buy them and never have to pay again is dumb asf. For gamepass to be worth it, IT NEEDS a good library of good games that are exclusive to it or that are good in general. Not just copy and paste cod and overwatch 2 which is a ftp game btw lol. Also wow isn’t on gamepass.
Tried multiplayer with some friends. The safehouse in the fire station loaded in before we even cleared the area and killed the vampire. So we were stuck unable to pull out our guns or melee while the vampire was just in the air, frozen and floating. Took us playing separately to figure out what had gone wrong. My roommate almost broke his laptop from how frustrated he was about the situation
The weird thing about redfalls cutscenes is that microsoft studios has done it well before. They put out one of those telltale like story games where nothing was animated in motion and it looked and felt just fine to me. They know when it works, so what made them think it would be received well in such a tonally opposite game?
The *ONE GAME* where u could have used fog to hide the wide and far areas and actually kinda be accurate to the lore that vampires can turn into fog. They dont do that? Wtf man , they could have made shader & texture optimization so much easier if they did that.
So my theory about this game is that it went through multiple direction changes over the course of its development and never really figured out what it wanted to be in terms of gameplay until very very late, which gave the team less time to iron out a lot of the fundamental issues and optimize the game before launch. A lot of the promotional material and early trailers seem to sell this game as something akin to Dying Light with massive enemy populations and a big open world to explore with plenty of side missions. In practice though it seems to be just a cookie cutter looter shooter with a mission table. Even with all the graphical issues and the... weird gameplay design choices, I feel like this game could still be great with a little bit of TLC and A LOT of dedication... It's now just a matter of whether Bethesda and Arkane are prepared to put in the resources to fix it or if they will just write it off as a failure and move on... EDIT: It would seem that Microsoft has announced that they are committed to seeing Redfall through and fixing it so... here's hoping they listen to community feedback and take the game to a state that it SHOULD have been in on release or maybe even better.
You know, usually games that have some issues have something that will kinda make up for the issues like if the story sucks at least the graphics and gameplay is good. Redfall looks like the studio didn’t even try. This looks like a patchwork of random stuff from 2014.
All of their games use the same exact engine. Deathloop felt like an FPS slapped on top of the UI from Dishonored. They are incapable of making a different game.
@@nailinthefashion dude, BulletStorm and Too Human were better games than this and those games were not huge successes for xBox if I remember correctly.
I took a break from gaming for almost a decade. I’m actually shocked what conditions games are in nowadays on release. Back in the day they were finished when they released. Now they need five patches to run properly. I downloaded a 35GB patch for a game yesterday. It’s insane.
the thing about nostalgia. is you filter out the memory of all the broken games from back than. the amount of bad ps2 games I played back in the day was too many
Yeah, it is the Prey team. What I truly believe is that games nowadays are a message from the developers that they are not fine. It is really drawing attention to the bad culture of game development and how much hard work goes into video games with little to no recognition of the wide public. Game developers are true artists and the amount of effort it takes to make a good game is superior to what most 'artists' produce.
This is what happens when a dev is forced to make a game that doesn’t fit their strengths or style in the least. It’s like taking the most brilliant kid in class and expecting them to be a great basketball player. It makes no sense.
Don't apologize for you "complaining" about the game. You have every right to, when a game costs $70 it should work. I'm glad to see you, as well as other UA-camrs not giving a 1 sided review and being blatantly honest. If it's good it's good, if it sucks it sucks
Yeah, its become an standard nowadays. Being more patient and not giving a shit if you have to wait a year or so to buy and play a game really pays off. Saves you a good sum in most cases aswell
The reason why some studios struggle so much to get serviceable PC port is because people competent enough to port a game to PC quickly are already working for tech companies that pay waaaayyy better than any gaming company would for their skills. Since they don't want to pay their workers adequate wages, and since they can't delay a PC port because money, they take the last option: releasing rushed PC ports
@@bigdigclutch No. When people get impatient it's usually the result of a bad marketing campaign. Either because they were unable to properly handle communications about delays, or because they led people to believe the game was something it wasn't. When a game release is rushed, it's because the studio/publisher/shareholders can't delay it any more because they fear it will impact their profit margin (more dev time = more money put into the dev cycle = less profit). But a bunch of other reasons can lead to that, for example no good release date later in the year, or deals with other companies for merchandising, or other contractual obligations. Long story short: No, people's expectations and outrage rarely come into consideration when delaying a game. It's all down to business decisions based on objective data like what other games are coming out and how much money the game is expected to make versus how much it cost.
If rumours about the original founders and most of the team responsible for the classic Arkane games leaving the company sometime between PREY and Deathloop it would explain this drastic decline in quality. The talent that made this studio so great simply isn't there anymore.
My acting teachers calls the insufferable performers with the drawn out moments “new actor laughs” and they’re used to pad time and ATTEMPT to add life to what they’re saying. It is especially common in theatre and voice over!
9:42 What is the fixation among writers these days to always have these snarky, post-ironic kinda characters? I swear to god, Life is Strange ruined a generation of video game character writers.
@@Tsukino1011 Agreed, when a triple A game turns into a development disaster for whatever reason, publishers should accept the loss and release it at a low price instead of trying to trick people. I'm a huge BGS fan but now I'm going to wait on Starfield since these people can't be trusted.
It is funny to me because the pre orders for fromsofts armored core 6 is 60 usd which is apparently humble nowadays despite that studio becoming extremely reputable
@@MichaelDoesLife Nah, not at all. If a publisher declines to let ANY reviewer get their hands on it before the general public and/or they willfully prevent the public from finding out about it before release, they should be viewed with extreme scepticism.
It hurts b/c I was hopeful this would be good. Luckily I don’t preorder anymore and even if I did the price for this was shockingly high. This whole situation feels just like what happened with Back 4 Blood.
Arkane is made up of two studios (Austin (Prey) and Lyon (Dishonored 2)) and Lyon were the ones behind Deathloop while Austin put out Redfall. Hence why it doesn't seem like many lessons were learned from Deathloop, it was two different studios under the same Arkane banner. But it does make this release hurt even more. Dishonored 2 and Prey were both phenomenal games, with REALLY amazing amounts of focus, creativity and polish. Both studios, having worked together to make Dishonored 1, really did some magic to make those two games simultaneously and to a really, really high standard. But they didn't sell as well as ZeniMax wanted, so it doesn't seem like we're going to see the best of Arkane for a long time. Redfall and Deathloop are the results. Like Deathloop was originally a Mooncrash style expansion that got turned into a full-game. And Redfall being what it is kinda feels like more of the "Make a big game with as few assets as possible" mentality. It's highly representative of a crash in standards and it's killing insanely talented studios. Arkane know how to make games, amazing games and clearly something is going seriously wrong at the top. Edit: A note on the director, it was Harvey Smith (Deus Ex (2000) AND all of Dishonored!) Seriously, Google him if you don't recognise the name, he is a VERY competent director and has been in charge of the Lyon studio since Dishonored 1 and has been with Arkane even longer than that in a leadership capacity. Seriously, something has gone very wrong between Deathloop and Redfall.
Yes, and that something is Bethesda's management during the 2018-2020 period. Prey and Dishonored 2 weren't as successful as they hoped. So they asked for more mainstream games from Arkane which ended up being Deathloop and Redfall. Hopefully they are now going back to form. With Microsoft's backing, I don't believe it is necessary to worry about the financials.
Harvey Smith was lead designer of Deus Ex 2000 but don’t let that make you forget he was the DIRECTOR of invisible war (arguably the worst Deus Ex). Personally Prey was the last arkane game I found myself being truly interested in. Deathloop got wayyy too much praise imo for it honestly being a pretty mediocre game
@@_dibbs Tbf, Invisible War may have been a bad Deus Ex, but it was still a good game by any other standard. Especially because Deus Ex fans tend to have pretty high standards for what they expect in immersive sims (I think that’s mostly because the bar was just set so unbelievably high by the first game.) But Harvey Smith was also the creative director of Dishonored 2, which I actually preferred to the original in many ways. Especially as an immersive sim. But alongside Prey, I definitely think that was when Arkane hit their creative peak with both of their studios. Both Prey and Dishonored 2 just had so much creativity and ambition behind them both and a publisher that let them polish those games to an absurd degree. They both deserved more contemporary recognition.
It would be cool to know what they the developers thought about the game while developing it at the end. It's a shame and embarassing that it came out like this
@@MichaelDoesLife might wanna re think that, Bethesda just said Starfield won’t be good enough to get ps5 players to buy a Xbox to play it. Why would they do that, they just killed expectations
Luke got me thinking about what is a "mid tier" rig. What do we call mid tier? Is it what's in the middle between the best and the worst hardware? Or is it what most people will be playing on? Because I think these are two different things.
I think the latter. For example, when NVIDIA released the 40 cards, I don't think "mid tier" immediately shot up a generation. After a couple of years of people buying the new generation, then yeah probably.
@@Rodrigo-rr6ym not op but i would say that 60 series GPUs are the true mid tier gaming experience. The 1070 is certainly more in line with the realm of budget cards now, but it launched targeted at being budget 1440p. The newest console generation will often render games in 1440p and upscale to 4k, or something along those lines, and the 3060 itself also can quite easily do 1440p, so i feel there's some level of feature set connection between consoles and 30 series. So I would say it goes sort of like this; Budget Gaming; cut down consoles, handhelds, & sub-50 series gpus Entry Level Gaming; Entry Level consoles, 50 series gpus Mid-Tier Gaming; Flagship consoles, 60 series gpus High End Gaming; 70 Series Enthusiast Gaming: 80 series+ EDIT: To respond to your point specifically, the 3060 basically has the same performance as a 1080, just with some RT cores. So the 1070 would probably be entry level in the modern age.
@@Rodrigo-rr6ym i would say 2070 and up. The 1070 is the minimum requirements Dead Space and Jedi Survivor and RE4, so it is the new for AAA singleplayers. So it is the bare minimum now.
@@Rodrigo-rr6ym the Steam hardware survey is a good source for this, it shows the fraction of users with various GPUs. The top 5 most common GPUs are the GTX 1650, GTX 1060, RTX 3060, laptop 3060, and RTX 2060. So yeah I'd agree that 1070 is around the mid tier.
On the plus side, if you're curious as to how truly bad Redfall can look, try playing it on Steam Deck. Oh, it runs fine, I can lock the framerate at thirty with FSR applied, but the end result is muddled and long-range firefights (my personal bread and butter) are mostly illegible. I'm shooting at jerking pixels on my screen and have to sort of hope that it's actually an NPC and not just some moving part of the scenery. Things are much improved at mid and close ranges, but I've never personally enjoyed playing shooters while relying primarily on shotguns.
Great video, thanks for the info! A part of me still wonders if all these “suboptimal” releases as of late are tied to development time lost during the pandemic. Having been subject to many a corporate project timeline, this has the feel of releasing near schedule, quality be damned, since there’s corporate milestone’s/goals that need to be hit. And when you’ve got your corporate overlords breathing down your neck, you submit what you’ve got and move on. Timeline’s can only be pushed so far. It sucks, and it’s bad for business, but so is missing your next year’s Q1 deadlines. Big business and art, oil and water.
This game came from a company with 1 trillion dollar, with 36 studios and this is their biggest first party game for almost 2 years. This is the company people wanted to buy activision. They need to manage what they have first before they can run more studios into the ground.
I agree. Microsoft should have stepped in and told Bethesda that this game was clearly not ready. Granted the gameplay still sucks but they could at least patch most of the bugs and try to fix the crappy ai.
@Cezar Stefan 'SEGHTER' Jucan 🇹🇩 the gamepass model for one. Quantity over quality. When studios have to sell their games to make money, their incentive is to make the best game possible so more people will buy it. They make a great game, they make a lot of money. Simple. With gamepass, the incentive is to give you the cheapest game they can get by with. Like Netflix has done for TV and Movies. The second big reason is King. King is the part of AB I think Microsoft is REALLY interested in. They've made all these garbage mobile games that nickel and dime people with predatory tactics .They've made billions doing it. If Microsoft isn't going to sell their games for profit, introducing these predatory practices designed to make you spend money is the next step. Microtransactions into trash games that are addictive is a great way to make money. Which is what this merger is all about. Then, once Microsoft starts raking in all this money from zombies that play this garbage, it's gonna put pressure on all these publishers, like Sony for example, who make high-quality single player experiences with no microtransactions, to try and compete. The only way to compete with mobile game tactics are to implement them. If Sony caves to the pressure from investors, then the smaller publishers have no chance. Then, in a few years, every game is just a cheap cash grab, live service, or full of microtransactions.
All those games were trash. Prey was riddled with bugs and was very unfinished. Deathloop had terrible AI just like Redfall. Stop with the revisionist history
@@MichaelDoesLife it's not revisionist, how manny games with expansive physics interaction and creative game mechanics like the Gloo Canon is being made today? It's rare and extremely difficult do make something like prey, that one of the reasons games like botw or totk are so impressive; hell even fallout 4 has some stuff you can't find elsewhere.
I didn’t know you could kill that first vampire. When I got to that point I shot him a few times then he lunged over me and disappeared… thought it was intentional lol
Went to an art school in a major city a decade ago. All too familiar with your experience with theatre at college. What we see in the entertainment industry at large tracks closely with what I observed from peers in school. Self absorbed, self indulgent, simple minded, and their resulting work is soulless and disjointed.
The sidenote about the self indulgent voice acting is really interesting. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that actively repulsed me with some performances, but I think you nailed it.
How is this the same studio that made Prey? Prey is one of my top 5 games ever. The atmosphere and exploration in Prey was amazing. The enemies were brutal on the hardest difficulty, you had to carefully plan out a fight before you engaged the enemy. The AI always kept you on your toes, due to their unique abilities.
Its not. There are 2 Arkane's The first is Arkane Lyon which made Arx Fatalis (my fav game) Dark Messiah, Dishonored&2, Prey. And Arkane Austin which made this game.
@@0Synergy While there are two arkane studios. Prey was made by Arkane Austin, the makers of this game. Arkane Lyon was developing Dishonored 2 in the meantime. What is missing from this game is Raphaël Colantonio, who was present at Prey's development. He left the company to start his own studio which released Weird West recently. Just wanted to clarify. It is indeed unbelievable that the creators of Prey could make this mess.
The very first notion of trouble I had with this game was at 2:33 That suspended water along that wall and in the corner. I thought, hehe I wonder if I can crouch in that water and blub blub and watch my screen go all wet but instead....you walk up the water blob like it's a solid slope
Game developer here solving the mystery of the tree. In games when you sprint, the camera properties usually change to denotate speed. These changes can include the position or field of view. I bet that the sprint camera settings have a different distance for LOD (level of detail - technique used to render lower resolution meshes for objects that are far away from the player) such that the distance to the tree falls into a lower level of detail threshold.
@@MichaelDoesLife It is hard to tell as I'm not sure what is the size of the team and how deep are the problems but I would easily give it one more year.
@@ByteBarista one year?? Lmao game's dead on arrival, should just focus on a damn Dishonored 3 ffs and not this trash, Rocksteady is in the same boat with Suicide Squad
Fellow game dev here, it seems like the setting was overcorrecting something. It almost seems like the camera FOV change could have been cancelled out with a sort of zoom in. But it seems strange that the order of the LOD meshes was inconsistent such as those bushes going straight from a billboard to the highest poly mesh.
@@MichaelDoesLife two shitty Pc ports from triple devs. and console fanboys swear PC gaming is trash meanwhile you guys are paying for subscription services to play online and 30 FPS.
My theories... 1) most likely scenario. Arkane has lost almost all it's senior staff and creative leads. It is without direction. Deathloop atleast had direction before key figures left but this had none. 2)possible other scenario: this was a project that was not a prioty and only done to sure up the studio to assist with the zenimax sale. During development of fallout 4 Arkane hired a lot of multi-player focused devs. Deathloop concelt impressed Sony (which suggests Sony may have considered buying zenimax) and they got a timed exclusive. Either redfall was made to show off to Sony, made by request but not signed, or they passed. Regardless it's clear once Microsoft acquired them no one gave a shit about it and resources were cut. 2A)This means a skeleton crew continued development on the project and Microsoft okaydd them working on another one the devs are more excited about. 2B) some outside developer or even a QA studio finished development and none of Arkane was really invovled after a milestone 2C)two people in a basement finished the game. 3)The unlikely one: Respawn and Arkane are huge Zelda simps and purposely ruined their games so botw2's frame rate would look amazing by comparison.
Harvey Smith (the creative director behind Dishonored 1 and 2) was the creative director of this game. So it definitely isn't the first scenario, the most probable scenario is the second.
Ooor the studio was always an incompetent mess but got lucky with pray. If you have to write a poem about an alternative universe about red fall maybe the devs aren’t as competent as you’d like to believe.
5:00 seems like the AI is programmed to always miss their first few shots to give the player a chance to detect where they're being shot at from. Like in Gears of War, but done badly.
I've played both and in no way is Redfall as badly optimized or buggy as Jedi Survivor was at launch. Jedi Survivor is a better game at its core but it was a way worse technical release at launch than Redfall.
My favorite part about all of the accessibility the Xbox provides is that I just deleted Redfall off my Xbox from my phone after watching this video on my lunch break. Thanks for playing it so I don't have to after working all day.
The checkerboarding is unreals dithered translucency, it's a cheaper way to do translucent surfaces instead of using a blend mode (basically just draw a bunch of dots on top of a surface instead of taking the colour of the pixel underneath and blending it with the semitransparent texture). It's often used for performance reasons.
im not even remotely surprised all the footage i had seen leading up to the games release did little to drum up so much as a fleeting murmur of excitement
slowly I have started to appreciate these reviews more and more they continue just due to the fact that Luke gives me guidance counselor that you can trust.
Wait a second - I thought this is a loading animation or so, are these pictures the actual cutscenes telling the story? Arkane had some of the best cutscenes in gaming history in Dishonored 2, what happened.
yea they didnt even have an intro for your character they just threw you on the map and gave like 2 sentences in the slide show where they tell you the setting
I think people need to remember that just because it's the same studio, it doesn't mean they're the same people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the gaming industry has a lot of coming and going of employees. So it's Arkane, but I don't know how many people who made Dishonored 2 are still around.
@@octavianpopescu4776 Yeah but the standard of quality shouldn't change. We should always expect as good or better. Never settle for low quality. New people should not automatically mean low quality.
I don't know much about video game ai, so someone please explain to me how Half-Life - which is now a quarter of a century old - has better ai than a game that came out this year? How is that possible?
If I had to guess it could be because valve developed the engine they used to make half life. So it was probbably easier for them to code on and get the exact result they wanted
Changing fidelity when sprinting is actually logical, because you are moving and for a smooth running experience they drop down textures hoping that you won't be looking into those trees on horizon. The problem is is that it still kinda obvious because they only have 2 states - the blob and full texture, nothing in between.
Even with all the video's showing all the problems this game suffers from I still see a lot of comments of people saying "The game is not as bad as everyone is saying" or " Everyone's just being haters" or I'm/Me and my friends are having fun with it" or "Playstation users are jealous because it's not on the PS4/PS5". It's like just because some claim to be having fun with the game doesn't mean the criticisms aren't valid.
wow i was actually pretty interested in this, the trailers made it seem neat, thought the artstyle was nice and the game concept seemed interesting sad to hear it's not very well put together :(
@@acardenasjr1340 "Try it yourself" Everything I've heard says it's bad. Honestly, I'm beginning to think anyone defending this game is a bot. No way anyone thinks this game is acceptable.
It feels like things like model animations and enemy AI should be just getting better and better as we have tens of thousands of games that had to code them, how are so many recent AAA games coming out with AI comparable to enemies in the original DOOM? The game engine for Redfall is Unreal 4. How are there not standard cheap scripts you can plug in to give enemies complexity??
I've been also wondering this myself. Then I look at Zelda TotK and reminded that quality animations and enemy AI can exist as well as physics and interactivity with the environment. With all the advancements with motion matching, I thought animations would be more of a focus. They seem to be regressing and AI is as basic as can be.
"How are there not standard cheap scripts you can plug in to give enemies complexity??" - Guess what, thats what they are doing. People may complain about "asset flip indies", but what many AAA games are doing these days isnt so different.
i grew up fantasizing about having a high end pc so i can play everything maxed out, cuz at the time games were built for PC and ported to console. Now im older with disposable cash and own a high end pc, games are built for console and suck donkey dick on PC... fuck my life.
Damn, that's crazy. I actually feel a bit priviliged, watching all those new realeses burn while playing through 10 years worth of cRPG backlog xD I would've been a bit depressed If I had nothing else to play aside from 2023 ones.
My shit pc hasen't been able to play any AAA game or with any decent graphics for the last 6 years, the only game i can play is classic wow on 40 fps xD Getting my new pc next week i'll be able to play any game released in those 6 years on max settings I can't wait to play rdr2 etc :D i'm set for years haha
The issue with the AI could be because its the very beginning of the game, but I definitely get the immediate frustration over that. They will most likely fix that quickly, decrease response time and increase accuracy seems like a simple fix.. that should have been fixed before launch, like who is testing these games? The graphically issues.... lol. yeah. With the still frame cut scene, I appreciate the art style, so not too upset at that. The game runs on Unreal engine 4 so definitely agreeing on the standards that should be met that aren't. Thanks for the review, I am going to hold off on getting the game until some patches are put in.
I love the Dishonored games, I LOVE Prey (2017) however, I only kinda liked Deathloop and was still let down. Redfall may be the only Arkane game I don’t buy or play. I love immersive sims and I hope that the big wigs in charge will let Arkane make something that is Arkane, y’know? Anyway, I haven’t lost hope for Arkane yet, great video!
thank you for reviewing this game i had high hopes for this game. Its like they did'nt even test out their final product, how can companies release unfinished products like this and think its ok.
@dannyswe1235 exactly they are responsible party since they PUBLISH. Which means they gotta gatekeep it before its released. And since they are the investors who rely on the return it's on them considering they mostlikely rushed the design and decided to release this dogshit.
I'm an Xbox fan. Left Playstation after the ps2. And I'm honest enough to admit that the ps4 shit on the xbox one but I stayed loyal, I own two xbox series s's so I can play with my girlfriend on any co-op game even the ones that don't support split screen or cross platform (cus we both have PC's too) But man it really sucks to watch xbox exclusives continue to fail again and again and again.... really sad. I hoped redfall would be good but I was never impressed by the pre release footage or trailers.... UGH. Please starfield.... deliver PLEASE
Thank you Stephen for making an effort to review these awful ports. You save a lot of people headaches and money by being brutally honest. I really value people like you and ACG when it comes to reviews.
i really, really want to see a take on why this game is even happening... i can't see any single think that someone would see in that game when compared with any other option with similar characteristics.
10:10 THIS IS SO TRUE OMG ive always thought this but didnt know exactly how to word it but that is exactly it lol. like its such a main character voice i dont know haha
Capcom is the only studio i actually have faith in they never release a broken game like yeah theres usually alot of glitches but like casual people will rarely get those on accident Edit: and fromsoft
Well, I'm at least glad that Arkane got their obligatory "meh" game out. Squeeze out the bad stuff so we can get more of the good stuff in the future games. Thank god for copium.
I noticed something else in the reticle. Your character periodically didn't walk straight ahead. He walked slightly to the right. The developers were unable to make the player character WALK IN A STRAIGHT LINE!!!
Uh isn't the TLoU PC port a Sony product? Didn't Hi-Fi Rush, an Xbox product, launch in a polished state? This is not a Playstation Vs Xbox issue, it's a AAA gaming issue, so don't let AAA publishers off the hook by saying this is an Xbox problem. Edit: At the end he flat out says unpolished game releases are an Xbox issue and not a Sony issue.
I watched this video all the way through, and I have to say the final statement you made couldn’t have been worded better. Great look into this game. What the hell are they doing over at Xbox?
I think what might happen with the running and lower LOD is maybe an optimisation for the lower memory of the Xbox Series S. If you go too fast, you load in stuff faster and take more memory to do so. So by making the running change the LOD distance, it can help in the loading in memory the assets. That's just a guess.
11:45 thank you for mentioning this, i don’t want to sound rude but i wasn’t quite picking up what was being put down but this was such a simple and elegant way of saying what’s wrong
It's like a team of interns made it and had no one with any experience giving them any direction. Literally a husk of a game. I got it on series x , locked at thirty fps. An actual joke. It's not your erratic movement, it's the dead zone being half your controller sweep
Please someone make a mod that turns all the enemies into storm troopers with how much the AI misses
Even stormtroopers are tons better than enemies in here. Try playing Jedi Survivor and the storm troopers there can actually give you hard time.
All that effort for a game nobody would play? A little optimistic there!
He's obviously playing it on easy. The things notorious for giving bad aim to the A.I. and making them weaker! How can people be this stupid... He didn't even show the difficulty so it's obvious he's just full of it.
@@Adventist1997 I played on hard and the aim is the same
@@Adventist1997 4:50 just say you didn't pay attention bro
You know what's even weirder about the cutscenes? They're not even pre-rendered slide shows, they just spawn the characters and objects in and pan the game camera around. I know this because I've had a couple instances of characters not unloading from these scenes so they're still there frozen in time when gameplay starts again.
Exactly, they can't even get a frozen still 3D render right. Look at the water bottle at the beginning of the first one in the firestation, it's just floating like 3 feet in the air
lots of games do cutscenes that way
@@guildwarsnerd123 What games do it that way that are actually successful?
@@guildwarsnerd123 Like, asset flips and college projects, yeah, but I haven't seen any halfway decent games from an actual studio do anything like that in a long time.
@@buggart I'd say Bayonetta...
But they were for the less action-y scenes (just dialogue or exposition dumps) with noir film tape grain designs that look nice, while proper cutscenes are for the more... provocative or emotional moments that look amazing.
Man what a time to be alive that both pc and consoles are now united under the banner of "modern gaming"
You forgot the rainbow font and the “WOWWWW” behind modern gaming bro
Can't wait for a game that will save all these shit and trash launches. The game I am talking about is Street Fighter 6
For real. Love playing on my series X . Pc player for the last 20 years.
@@crysave The game you're talking about is sex 2.
You should know by now if anything has "modern" in it. It's crap.
This is another one of those games that I hope gets an article released about what happened throughout the development process that resulted in a mess like this. Usually though, we only ever get bits and pieces of info about drama behind the scenes. Somebody get on this, I wanna know. It's more interesting to me than the game itself.
This!
What happened is its a Microsoft / Xbox exclusive. Automatically means its dog shit. Stick to Playstation and you wont be disappointed.
@@11bravo1789 stick to PlayStation with failures like failspoken, psvr2, death stranding? Lmao
@@11bravo1789 this game was being made before dmb fk
@@11bravo1789 ori 1 and 2 exist
I'm loving the commitment that the AAA industry is trying to go back to the year 2010 with all these broken games and ports 😅
@Dusty agreed. The last generation signalled a lot of negative trends for gaming as a whole. It doesn't really apply to broken games at launch, but personally, I lay a lot of blame for many of modern gaming's problems at the feet of the mobile gaming market, or at the very least the publishers who have tried to make the PC/console space more like the mobile market because they're greedy for those sweet whale bucks.
@@Tyler_W It actually started with TF2 which happened to be a Valve game.
@@Tyler_W I unironically struggle to name 10 games by larger studios worth buying last gen. Easily the worst generation.
@Dusty AAA devs going back to 2014 with game quality and 2012 with writing I guess☠️
@@fearedjames Xenoblade 3, KH3, Assassins creed Odyssey, One Piece Pirate Warriors 3, Gran Turismo Sport, Ratchet and Clank ps4, Elden Ring, BTD6, FFXV, Spyro Re-Ignited.
Not that hard to come up with SOME.
The frequency of bad games is really stunning nowadays. I can hardly keep up.
The only objectively bad games this year so far, have been forspoken and redfall.
There is like one bad game this year
@Kieran Harris Jedi Survivor is great! It just needs a bunch of patches to be good! Come on guys we know games are never finished for the first 5 years of release!
@Kieran Harris Seems to be more of a performance issue rather than the game itself. Nowadays tho I do include performance as a point in rating a game overall.
@@lazyaaron1240 forspoken isn’t a bad game just has bad voice actors
I really hate the freeze-frame cutscenes, but I hate them even more when they suffer from noticeable texture pop-in on every scene change.
Sheesh. Complain about everything, eh?
@@MichaelDoesLife
Why do you feel the need to comment on other's opinions?
Scarlet nexus did this shit too. It feels cheap and doesn’t look good.
@@MichaelDoesLife I'm happy for you and the other dozens of people who enjoy this, I really am. But the overwhelming majority of people can't lower our standards to justify a billion dollar corporation charging people for this AA grade 2013 garbage.
@@MichaelDoesLife it's a valid criticism though, this game is in development back in 2017, and this is supposed to be the Xbox exclusive game in the first half of 2023, and you greet the player with a Still Frame cutscene? Where is the work to match up the price tag?
One of the few games where I can actually feel how painful it is to play. It reminds me of one of those 'scam' games, where they throw assets together to make a trailer, get people's money, then ditch town, only a higher level version of that.
You hit the nail on the head. Thats EXACTLY what many many AAA games are today. People constantly complain about asset flip indies, but are somehow okay with AAA studios throwing some assets together with a cookie cutter gameplay mechanic...
and it's made by ARKANE, how did they fall SO hard from Dishonored to this mess, holy SHIT
@@tmnttiny Apparently A LOT of devs left the studio between Prey 2017 and Deathloop.
@@xXYannuschXx even deathloop, while being just boring, was nowhere near as bad as redfall
@@xXYannuschXx Wow, just looked and it's $70 or $100 on Steam. You know what it reminds me of - a game that you'd see in a movie, or on an episode of Black Mirror. Something where they want it to resemble games of today, but clearly they didn't spend a whole lot of time or effort to actually detail the game. Just a game in the background someone's playing.
On the rare occasion I pay full price for a game, I want it to be an experience. That amazing AAA feeling of "I'm in for 40-100 hours of high end entertainment." And yeah, it feels like the AAA devs are getting REALLY content with cutting corners.
At least, on a positive note, there are a ton of great indie games that you can get for $20 or under. But still, sometimes I really just want that great AAA experience.
I’ve never even heard of this game. Man it feels good to not be wrapped up in gaming news/drama.
I feel like when Arkane Austin and Lyon are working together, you get games like Dishonored and Prey. Seems to me that Deathloop and Redfall are the result of each studio trying to become solely independent of the other along with incorporating multiplayer elements and a general lack of direction. Effectively not keeping each other in check resulted in ideas thrown into the game where they didn't belong that never get peer reviewed. In Redfall's case it feels like it was being developed as a Live service multiplayer game by Austin while Lyon was off toying around with Deathloop and seeing if they could push out something to hold people over until their Redfall cash cow came in (see early leaked screenshots of Redfall in pre-Alpha where there's a tab in the main menu that literally said "Micro-Transaction Store"). Obviously with so many live service failures its like the game had to be re-tooled with the MTX removed and Arkane Microsoft Bethesda or whoever just said to finish it as fast as possible since it wouldn't be a live service money-maker anymore. What we received was merely the pushed out afterbirth of a game that they knew would fail. That's all my theory at least.
Cool theory but if you look at the credits it doesn't hold water. This game has amazing artists from both studios who worked on it
@@HumanTimeCapsule A couple artists worked on this from Lyon?! Wow, imagine my surprise that developers involved in the earliest part of game design would be moved around to different studios to assist with other projects while the lead staff, gameplay designers and directors from both studios remain on their own projects instead of collaborating to make a better game. Theory obliterated lol.
I think Colantonio's departure from the studio is showing. A bunch of good artists and developers without strong direction can still put out a pile of shit
Deathloop is a great game!
Why'd you mention deathloop?? Literally on par with previous Arkane games
Redfall's minimum GPU requirement is 2.5x more powerful than Titanfall 2's minimum GPU requirement, and Titanfall 2 looks twice as good, with less than half of the GPU power.
Kinda crazy how good optimization is in some games. Doom 2016 and Eternal were BEAUTIES, and they run so smooth on everything.
AC Unity has much better graphics and lighting than this game. And it released in 2014. And it runs smoothly on modern PCs and the Series X. Fuck modern coders.
@@ryanvandoren1519 id Tech does wonders… so does Frostbite when used properly.
Unreal 4 has proven to be quite unreliable at this point. It’s now two games that that can’t handle it in this current generation.
Yes, Dead Space and RE4 had some issues but they were okay, RE4 being the most stable by comparison.
@scolioreset6669 agreed, ID Tech and DICEs frostbite engine are gems in he gaming industry. DICE themswlves on the other hand...oh boy
@@ryanvandoren1519frostbite is good when it works. Best example is battlefield 1 and worst example is battlefield 2049
I thought Luke was being nit picky at first, and then characters starting powergliding across the screen and I realized he has a point. 😂
The game is trash, yes, but Luke and all the other PlayStation shills would've loved this game had it released on PlayStation
@@MichaelDoesLife why didn’t he love forspoken then? He even talked trash on it in this video lol.
@@MichaelDoesLife love when the xbox fanatics are in denial about the state of their first-party games
He's a troll guys, leave him be
Dudes replying to a bunch of comments trying to stir up shit, just don’t interact with him and he will go away.
If, at launch, Starfield is even close to the state that Redfall is right now, Xbox is over. Both games are going to be directly compared to FF16, Spider-Man 2, and Tears of the Kingdom, and I think that there is no way that these 3 games are not going to launch extremely polished and receive glowing reviews from both critics and gamers.
The Game Complainers channel just basically said the same thing last week and they're huge xbox fans. You'd imagine Sony seeing this happening right now that theyre going to want to make sure their exclusives run seamlessly just because they know its going to get rubbed badly in Xboxs face online
@joceja23 but they may transition into a gamepass only platform which is kinda terrifying.
@joceja23 yeah But they’ll be shit. Gamepass is nice but if the only games on there are shit it’s not worth it
@joceja23 they're not getting Activision bruh. Their appeal is gonna go right down the shitter.
@joceja23 all those games are on basically every other platform. And if you’re playing only those games then you might as well just buy them at that point. Paying 120-180 every year just to be able to keep playing those games and not even own them is retarded and financially stupid asf.
It’s not worth gamepass for that especially when most of those games you’re going to play once or twice and then stop excluding cod and overwatch etc. But again, spending 120-180 a year just for a few games every year when you can just buy them and never have to pay again is dumb asf.
For gamepass to be worth it, IT NEEDS a good library of good games that are exclusive to it or that are good in general. Not just copy and paste cod and overwatch 2 which is a ftp game btw lol. Also wow isn’t on gamepass.
Tried multiplayer with some friends. The safehouse in the fire station loaded in before we even cleared the area and killed the vampire. So we were stuck unable to pull out our guns or melee while the vampire was just in the air, frozen and floating. Took us playing separately to figure out what had gone wrong. My roommate almost broke his laptop from how frustrated he was about the situation
The weird thing about redfalls cutscenes is that microsoft studios has done it well before. They put out one of those telltale like story games where nothing was animated in motion and it looked and felt just fine to me. They know when it works, so what made them think it would be received well in such a tonally opposite game?
Oh, do you remember the name of that game?
The *ONE GAME* where u could have used fog to hide the wide and far areas and actually kinda be accurate to the lore that vampires can turn into fog.
They dont do that? Wtf man , they could have made shader & texture optimization so much easier if they did that.
The fact that you need internet to play a game with sinlge player content was an immediate red flag
Such a moot point. Do you not have internet?
@@MichaelDoesLife it may surprise you that some people don’t have Wi-Fi
@@MichaelDoesLife 54 comments on this channel
@@thehoodhipster6018 What's your point?
@@MichaelDoesLife Weren’t you the one bashing Survivor for the same thing? Hypocrite much?
My most anticipated Xbox release is quickly becoming the inevitable documentary about what the hell happened this console generation.
Idk what you’re talking about, my PS5 is doing fine this generation 😎🤡
@@DeedgeS Cringe
@@DeedgeS bro is forgetting about Forspoken and Destruction AllStars
It still feels like the generation hasn't even started yet.
Curious to know what hyped you up for this game? I’ve always thought it was mid when first revealed last year.
So my theory about this game is that it went through multiple direction changes over the course of its development and never really figured out what it wanted to be in terms of gameplay until very very late, which gave the team less time to iron out a lot of the fundamental issues and optimize the game before launch. A lot of the promotional material and early trailers seem to sell this game as something akin to Dying Light with massive enemy populations and a big open world to explore with plenty of side missions. In practice though it seems to be just a cookie cutter looter shooter with a mission table.
Even with all the graphical issues and the... weird gameplay design choices, I feel like this game could still be great with a little bit of TLC and A LOT of dedication... It's now just a matter of whether Bethesda and Arkane are prepared to put in the resources to fix it or if they will just write it off as a failure and move on...
EDIT: It would seem that Microsoft has announced that they are committed to seeing Redfall through and fixing it so... here's hoping they listen to community feedback and take the game to a state that it SHOULD have been in on release or maybe even better.
I expect it’ll be like Brink.
This looks like such a fun and interesting world to explore.
Such a shame it just doesn't work
You know, usually games that have some issues have something that will kinda make up for the issues like if the story sucks at least the graphics and gameplay is good. Redfall looks like the studio didn’t even try. This looks like a patchwork of random stuff from 2014.
We're in an era where the minimum viable product is a lot lower than it used to be lol
Dragon rage on ps2 was more thought out and emotional lol
All of their games use the same exact engine. Deathloop felt like an FPS slapped on top of the UI from Dishonored. They are incapable of making a different game.
@@nailinthefashion dude, BulletStorm and Too Human were better games than this and those games were not huge successes for xBox if I remember correctly.
@@obliviousmetal321 Bulletstorm is a fucking banger, still such a good shooter
@@funtourhawk it is! I had a lot of fun with that game back in the day!
Modern gamers: "Older gamers are just blinded by nostalgia, gaming now is better that it's ever been!"
Modern gaming:
I took a break from gaming for almost a decade. I’m actually shocked what conditions games are in nowadays on release. Back in the day they were finished when they released. Now they need five patches to run properly. I downloaded a 35GB patch for a game yesterday. It’s insane.
Nostalgia blinds, though I'd say the last gen of gaming was the best, it saw the best video game releases.
This current gen, is dog crap.
Indie games are the last hope
This is true but also false at the same time...
the thing about nostalgia. is you filter out the memory of all the broken games from back than. the amount of bad ps2 games I played back in the day was too many
Jesus Christ... Prey (2017) is one of my favorite games. Seeing Arkane go from Prey to Deathloop, and to this... It just breaks my heart.
It's even more tragic when you know the team behind Redfall is the PREY team...
Yeah, it is the Prey team.
What I truly believe is that games nowadays are a message from the developers that they are not fine.
It is really drawing attention to the bad culture of game development and how much hard work goes into video games with little to no recognition of the wide public.
Game developers are true artists and the amount of effort it takes to make a good game is superior to what most 'artists' produce.
This is what happens when a dev is forced to make a game that doesn’t fit their strengths or style in the least. It’s like taking the most brilliant kid in class and expecting them to be a great basketball player.
It makes no sense.
@@nickkaraschdeathloop was subpar.
I just wanted a new Dishonored.
Just makes me appreciate half life 1 and 2. The first has superior ai and the second even has superior graphics, especially the character models.
Don't apologize for you "complaining" about the game. You have every right to, when a game costs $70 it should work. I'm glad to see you, as well as other UA-camrs not giving a 1 sided review and being blatantly honest. If it's good it's good, if it sucks it sucks
"Let's release a broken game and fix it later." Every Gaming Publisher
Welcome to Modern Gaming
Third parties sure, but Sony and especially Nintendo dont release first party bullshit like this
Yeah, its become an standard nowadays. Being more patient and not giving a shit if you have to wait a year or so to buy and play a game really pays off. Saves you a good sum in most cases aswell
@@ricardomeijer7164 yeah I was really psyched to play 40k darktide but modern gaming got in the way, still haven't bought it yet
Yeah, which is stupid why he's making fun of it, because this is average gaming. They fixed most of these problems anyway.
@@focusfailing2831 downvoting your ridiculous xbox fanboy comment
The reason why some studios struggle so much to get serviceable PC port is because people competent enough to port a game to PC quickly are already working for tech companies that pay waaaayyy better than any gaming company would for their skills.
Since they don't want to pay their workers adequate wages, and since they can't delay a PC port because money, they take the last option: releasing rushed PC ports
It's truly shocking how little game devs are paid in comparison to other companies in the tech industry doing roughly the same work.
the game still sucks on XBox...a bad PC port doesn't absolve the already low quality of the game.
@@jaimespencer837 CEOs neeeeeed their huge bonuses, bro!
Are people somewhat to blame for being impatient.
@@bigdigclutch No. When people get impatient it's usually the result of a bad marketing campaign. Either because they were unable to properly handle communications about delays, or because they led people to believe the game was something it wasn't.
When a game release is rushed, it's because the studio/publisher/shareholders can't delay it any more because they fear it will impact their profit margin (more dev time = more money put into the dev cycle = less profit).
But a bunch of other reasons can lead to that, for example no good release date later in the year, or deals with other companies for merchandising, or other contractual obligations.
Long story short: No, people's expectations and outrage rarely come into consideration when delaying a game. It's all down to business decisions based on objective data like what other games are coming out and how much money the game is expected to make versus how much it cost.
If rumours about the original founders and most of the team responsible for the classic Arkane games leaving the company sometime between PREY and Deathloop it would explain this drastic decline in quality. The talent that made this studio so great simply isn't there anymore.
That seems to be a common theme with a lot of the legacy developers.
My acting teachers calls the insufferable performers with the drawn out moments “new actor laughs” and they’re used to pad time and ATTEMPT to add life to what they’re saying. It is especially common in theatre and voice over!
9:42 What is the fixation among writers these days to always have these snarky, post-ironic kinda characters? I swear to god, Life is Strange ruined a generation of video game character writers.
I think it’s called the millennial writing, there are some videos about it on UA-cam
On the bright side, this should go a long way to killing the $70 price tag that they are trying to push.
This should Be 30 at best
@@Tsukino1011 Agreed, when a triple A game turns into a development disaster for whatever reason, publishers should accept the loss and release it at a low price instead of trying to trick people. I'm a huge BGS fan but now I'm going to wait on Starfield since these people can't be trusted.
@@Tsukino1011are you crazy? 10 dollars at best
It is funny to me because the pre orders for fromsofts armored core 6 is 60 usd which is apparently humble nowadays despite that studio becoming extremely reputable
@@Tsukino1011 Lol I played the game for "free" at Game Pass and I still want a refund 😂😂
Any game with no review codes or a post release review embargo should be instantly avoided.
Bad take
@@MichaelDoesLife Nah, not at all. If a publisher declines to let ANY reviewer get their hands on it before the general public and/or they willfully prevent the public from finding out about it before release, they should be viewed with extreme scepticism.
@@Martial-Mat All the big reviews shilled this game in their previews about a month or so ago
Doom had both of those
@@MichaelDoesLife Yeah, but not as reviews.
It hurts b/c I was hopeful this would be good. Luckily I don’t preorder anymore and even if I did the price for this was shockingly high. This whole situation feels just like what happened with Back 4 Blood.
Imagine playing a game in 2023 without a character creator. lol. Even friggin STREET FIGHTER lets you create your own avatar.
Arkane is made up of two studios (Austin (Prey) and Lyon (Dishonored 2)) and Lyon were the ones behind Deathloop while Austin put out Redfall. Hence why it doesn't seem like many lessons were learned from Deathloop, it was two different studios under the same Arkane banner.
But it does make this release hurt even more. Dishonored 2 and Prey were both phenomenal games, with REALLY amazing amounts of focus, creativity and polish. Both studios, having worked together to make Dishonored 1, really did some magic to make those two games simultaneously and to a really, really high standard. But they didn't sell as well as ZeniMax wanted, so it doesn't seem like we're going to see the best of Arkane for a long time.
Redfall and Deathloop are the results. Like Deathloop was originally a Mooncrash style expansion that got turned into a full-game. And Redfall being what it is kinda feels like more of the "Make a big game with as few assets as possible" mentality. It's highly representative of a crash in standards and it's killing insanely talented studios. Arkane know how to make games, amazing games and clearly something is going seriously wrong at the top.
Edit:
A note on the director, it was Harvey Smith (Deus Ex (2000) AND all of Dishonored!) Seriously, Google him if you don't recognise the name, he is a VERY competent director and has been in charge of the Lyon studio since Dishonored 1 and has been with Arkane even longer than that in a leadership capacity. Seriously, something has gone very wrong between Deathloop and Redfall.
Yes, and that something is Bethesda's management during the 2018-2020 period. Prey and Dishonored 2 weren't as successful as they hoped. So they asked for more mainstream games from Arkane which ended up being Deathloop and Redfall.
Hopefully they are now going back to form. With Microsoft's backing, I don't believe it is necessary to worry about the financials.
Harvey Smith was lead designer of Deus Ex 2000 but don’t let that make you forget he was the DIRECTOR of invisible war (arguably the worst Deus Ex). Personally Prey was the last arkane game I found myself being truly interested in. Deathloop got wayyy too much praise imo for it honestly being a pretty mediocre game
@@_dibbs Tbf, Invisible War may have been a bad Deus Ex, but it was still a good game by any other standard. Especially because Deus Ex fans tend to have pretty high standards for what they expect in immersive sims (I think that’s mostly because the bar was just set so unbelievably high by the first game.)
But Harvey Smith was also the creative director of Dishonored 2, which I actually preferred to the original in many ways. Especially as an immersive sim. But alongside Prey, I definitely think that was when Arkane hit their creative peak with both of their studios. Both Prey and Dishonored 2 just had so much creativity and ambition behind them both and a publisher that let them polish those games to an absurd degree. They both deserved more contemporary recognition.
Deathloop is a nice game
@@REDDEADANDGTACLUBoh man this aged terribly
It would be cool to know what they the developers thought about the game while developing it at the end. It's a shame and embarassing that it came out like this
Who cares. Starfield is going to be bigger than ANY game this year. Even Zelda.
@@MichaelDoesLife going to be fun to revisit this comment when Starfield flops lol
I knew this game was going to be garbage.
@@MichaelDoesLife might wanna re think that, Bethesda just said Starfield won’t be good enough to get ps5 players to buy a Xbox to play it.
Why would they do that, they just killed expectations
Considering 70% of the team left they obviously didn't want to be making the game.
Luke, I think your computer knew how bad the game was going to be and was spending those 3 hours trying to spare you.
Hahaha love it
4090 ai
It's like the sif fight in DS 1 or 2 I can't remember
Luke got me thinking about what is a "mid tier" rig. What do we call mid tier? Is it what's in the middle between the best and the worst hardware? Or is it what most people will be playing on? Because I think these are two different things.
I think the latter. For example, when NVIDIA released the 40 cards, I don't think "mid tier" immediately shot up a generation. After a couple of years of people buying the new generation, then yeah probably.
@@hyperbrug9328 So, if that's the case, then a mid tier GPU nowadays would be something close to a 1070. What do you think?
@@Rodrigo-rr6ym not op but i would say that 60 series GPUs are the true mid tier gaming experience. The 1070 is certainly more in line with the realm of budget cards now, but it launched targeted at being budget 1440p. The newest console generation will often render games in 1440p and upscale to 4k, or something along those lines, and the 3060 itself also can quite easily do 1440p, so i feel there's some level of feature set connection between consoles and 30 series. So I would say it goes sort of like this;
Budget Gaming; cut down consoles, handhelds, & sub-50 series gpus
Entry Level Gaming; Entry Level consoles, 50 series gpus
Mid-Tier Gaming; Flagship consoles, 60 series gpus
High End Gaming; 70 Series
Enthusiast Gaming: 80 series+
EDIT: To respond to your point specifically, the 3060 basically has the same performance as a 1080, just with some RT cores. So the 1070 would probably be entry level in the modern age.
@@Rodrigo-rr6ym i would say 2070 and up. The 1070 is the minimum requirements Dead Space and Jedi Survivor and RE4, so it is the new for AAA singleplayers. So it is the bare minimum now.
@@Rodrigo-rr6ym the Steam hardware survey is a good source for this, it shows the fraction of users with various GPUs. The top 5 most common GPUs are the GTX 1650, GTX 1060, RTX 3060, laptop 3060, and RTX 2060. So yeah I'd agree that 1070 is around the mid tier.
On the plus side, if you're curious as to how truly bad Redfall can look, try playing it on Steam Deck.
Oh, it runs fine, I can lock the framerate at thirty with FSR applied, but the end result is muddled and long-range firefights (my personal bread and butter) are mostly illegible. I'm shooting at jerking pixels on my screen and have to sort of hope that it's actually an NPC and not just some moving part of the scenery. Things are much improved at mid and close ranges, but I've never personally enjoyed playing shooters while relying primarily on shotguns.
Great video, thanks for the info! A part of me still wonders if all these “suboptimal” releases as of late are tied to development time lost during the pandemic. Having been subject to many a corporate project timeline, this has the feel of releasing near schedule, quality be damned, since there’s corporate milestone’s/goals that need to be hit. And when you’ve got your corporate overlords breathing down your neck, you submit what you’ve got and move on. Timeline’s can only be pushed so far.
It sucks, and it’s bad for business, but so is missing your next year’s Q1 deadlines.
Big business and art, oil and water.
Sad! But an important perspective.
This game came from a company with 1 trillion dollar, with 36 studios and this is their biggest first party game for almost 2 years. This is the company people wanted to buy activision. They need to manage what they have first before they can run more studios into the ground.
I feel like the AB merger would push the entire industry in the wrong direction.
@@YeOldeMachine seriously activision is already worse now now imagine them with microsoft
I agree. Microsoft should have stepped in and told Bethesda that this game was clearly not ready. Granted the gameplay still sucks but they could at least patch most of the bugs and try to fix the crappy ai.
@@YeOldeMachine How?
@Cezar Stefan 'SEGHTER' Jucan 🇹🇩 the gamepass model for one. Quantity over quality. When studios have to sell their games to make money, their incentive is to make the best game possible so more people will buy it. They make a great game, they make a lot of money. Simple. With gamepass, the incentive is to give you the cheapest game they can get by with. Like Netflix has done for TV and Movies. The second big reason is King. King is the part of AB I think Microsoft is REALLY interested in. They've made all these garbage mobile games that nickel and dime people with predatory tactics .They've made billions doing it. If Microsoft isn't going to sell their games for profit, introducing these predatory practices designed to make you spend money is the next step. Microtransactions into trash games that are addictive is a great way to make money. Which is what this merger is all about. Then, once Microsoft starts raking in all this money from zombies that play this garbage, it's gonna put pressure on all these publishers, like Sony for example, who make high-quality single player experiences with no microtransactions, to try and compete. The only way to compete with mobile game tactics are to implement them. If Sony caves to the pressure from investors, then the smaller publishers have no chance. Then, in a few years, every game is just a cheap cash grab, live service, or full of microtransactions.
It's sad to see this happening to arkane, prey and the dishonored games are so good.
All those games were trash. Prey was riddled with bugs and was very unfinished. Deathloop had terrible AI just like Redfall. Stop with the revisionist history
@@MichaelDoesLife prey was still insanly good, and deathloop wasnt as bad
@@MichaelDoesLife it's not revisionist, how manny games with expansive physics interaction and creative game mechanics like the Gloo Canon is being made today?
It's rare and extremely difficult do make something like prey, that one of the reasons games like botw or totk are so impressive; hell even fallout 4 has some stuff you can't find elsewhere.
@@macvadda2318 Both games were buggy and broken on launch
@@MichaelDoesLife we get it, you bought a ps5
I didn’t know you could kill that first vampire. When I got to that point I shot him a few times then he lunged over me and disappeared… thought it was intentional lol
Must have been a bug lmao
I think your spot on with the optimisation, I'm suffering so bad with jedi survivor especially around water I've noticed it is particularly bad
At this point we should have an award for worst/shittiest game of the year in the next Game Awards.
Went to an art school in a major city a decade ago. All too familiar with your experience with theatre at college. What we see in the entertainment industry at large tracks closely with what I observed from peers in school. Self absorbed, self indulgent, simple minded, and their resulting work is soulless and disjointed.
The sidenote about the self indulgent voice acting is really interesting. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that actively repulsed me with some performances, but I think you nailed it.
How is this the same studio that made Prey? Prey is one of my top 5 games ever. The atmosphere and exploration in Prey was amazing. The enemies were brutal on the hardest difficulty, you had to carefully plan out a fight before you engaged the enemy. The AI always kept you on your toes, due to their unique abilities.
They did what every company does, sell out.
Its not. There are 2 Arkane's The first is Arkane Lyon which made Arx Fatalis (my fav game) Dark Messiah, Dishonored&2, Prey. And Arkane Austin which made this game.
@@0Synergy While there are two arkane studios. Prey was made by Arkane Austin, the makers of this game. Arkane Lyon was developing Dishonored 2 in the meantime. What is missing from this game is Raphaël Colantonio, who was present at Prey's development. He left the company to start his own studio which released Weird West recently. Just wanted to clarify. It is indeed unbelievable that the creators of Prey could make this mess.
Prey was made before Microsoft purchased the company my friend. There is a reason Sony continues to dominate the console and PC world.
@@jimjones9900 Ah yes the PC world with hit titles like The Last of Us that run great! Oh wait...
At this point, I feel insulted that devs keep thinking that games in this state are remotely acceptable to sell.
The very first notion of trouble I had with this game was at 2:33 That suspended water along that wall and in the corner. I thought, hehe I wonder if I can crouch in that water and blub blub and watch my screen go all wet but instead....you walk up the water blob like it's a solid slope
Game developer here solving the mystery of the tree. In games when you sprint, the camera properties usually change to denotate speed. These changes can include the position or field of view. I bet that the sprint camera settings have a different distance for LOD (level of detail - technique used to render lower resolution meshes for objects that are far away from the player) such that the distance to the tree falls into a lower level of detail threshold.
As a dev, how much more time do you think they needed to "fix" this game?
@@MichaelDoesLife It is hard to tell as I'm not sure what is the size of the team and how deep are the problems but I would easily give it one more year.
@@ByteBarista one year?? Lmao game's dead on arrival, should just focus on a damn Dishonored 3 ffs and not this trash, Rocksteady is in the same boat with Suicide Squad
Yeah I remember Resistance 2 turning into a low resolution mess whenever Hale would sprint, almost made it unusable
Fellow game dev here, it seems like the setting was overcorrecting something. It almost seems like the camera FOV change could have been cancelled out with a sort of zoom in. But it seems strange that the order of the LOD meshes was inconsistent such as those bushes going straight from a billboard to the highest poly mesh.
oh boi, what a time to be a PC gamer
It’s a spicy time aye?
PC gaming is the absolute worst
@@MichaelDoesLife Said nobody ever, this is just typical AA/AAA dross; don't bother with that shite. The best games are still on PC.
@@Grandmastergav86, I’m predominantly a console gamer, but your statement is 100% true.
@@MichaelDoesLife two shitty Pc ports from triple devs. and console fanboys swear PC gaming is trash meanwhile you guys are paying for subscription services to play online and 30 FPS.
My theories...
1) most likely scenario. Arkane has lost almost all it's senior staff and creative leads. It is without direction. Deathloop atleast had direction before key figures left but this had none.
2)possible other scenario: this was a project that was not a prioty and only done to sure up the studio to assist with the zenimax sale. During development of fallout 4 Arkane hired a lot of multi-player focused devs. Deathloop concelt impressed Sony (which suggests Sony may have considered buying zenimax) and they got a timed exclusive. Either redfall was made to show off to Sony, made by request but not signed, or they passed. Regardless it's clear once Microsoft acquired them no one gave a shit about it and resources were cut.
2A)This means a skeleton crew continued development on the project and Microsoft okaydd them working on another one the devs are more excited about.
2B) some outside developer or even a QA studio finished development and none of Arkane was really invovled after a milestone
2C)two people in a basement finished the game.
3)The unlikely one: Respawn and Arkane are huge Zelda simps and purposely ruined their games so botw2's frame rate would look amazing by comparison.
Harvey Smith (the creative director behind Dishonored 1 and 2) was the creative director of this game.
So it definitely isn't the first scenario, the most probable scenario is the second.
Ooor the studio was always an incompetent mess but got lucky with pray. If you have to write a poem about an alternative universe about red fall maybe the devs aren’t as competent as you’d like to believe.
5:00 seems like the AI is programmed to always miss their first few shots to give the player a chance to detect where they're being shot at from.
Like in Gears of War, but done badly.
Hi Fi Rush was truly the best thing they had for awhile.
Definitely the best Xbox Title of this generation
fr were 3 years into the generation and ms barely giving us anything :(
To bad it's a low budget 30 dollar game cuz it doesn't help sale xbox consoles or rentpass smh 🤦
If you are a x box owner, I would not be confident about starfield….at all
Even then, not the killer app that the Xbox brand needs.
Digital foundry was hasty when they named jedi survivor worst PC port of 2023🤣.
Imagine watching Digital Foundry
@@MichaelDoesLife imagine getting a cs degree and thinking df is actually ok for people who arent that into actual game development, oh wait i do!
Lol , atleast redfall manages to hit 60 fps unlike Jedi Survivor
Also Jedi survivor drops to 648p on ps5 performance mode 😂
So much for the definitive way to play Jedi Survivor
I've played both and in no way is Redfall as badly optimized or buggy as Jedi Survivor was at launch. Jedi Survivor is a better game at its core but it was a way worse technical release at launch than Redfall.
My favorite part about all of the accessibility the Xbox provides is that I just deleted Redfall off my Xbox from my phone after watching this video on my lunch break. Thanks for playing it so I don't have to after working all day.
The checkerboarding is unreals dithered translucency, it's a cheaper way to do translucent surfaces instead of using a blend mode (basically just draw a bunch of dots on top of a surface instead of taking the colour of the pixel underneath and blending it with the semitransparent texture). It's often used for performance reasons.
im not even remotely surprised all the footage i had seen leading up to the games release did little to drum up so much as a fleeting murmur of excitement
slowly I have started to appreciate these reviews more and more they continue just due to the fact that Luke gives me guidance counselor that you can trust.
Wait a second - I thought this is a loading animation or so, are these pictures the actual cutscenes telling the story? Arkane had some of the best cutscenes
in gaming history in Dishonored 2, what happened.
yea they didnt even have an intro for your character they just threw you on the map and gave like 2 sentences in the slide show where they tell you the setting
@@ryanl3722 they did have an intro cutscene with gameplay at the beginning actually
I think people need to remember that just because it's the same studio, it doesn't mean they're the same people. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware, the gaming industry has a lot of coming and going of employees. So it's Arkane, but I don't know how many people who made Dishonored 2 are still around.
@@anarche4900 yea didnt make it to the second Mission i Just saw it in the vod.. my bad
@@octavianpopescu4776 Yeah but the standard of quality shouldn't change. We should always expect as good or better. Never settle for low quality. New people should not automatically mean low quality.
I don't know much about video game ai, so someone please explain to me how Half-Life - which is now a quarter of a century old - has better ai than a game that came out this year? How is that possible?
If I had to guess it could be because valve developed the engine they used to make half life. So it was probbably easier for them to code on and get the exact result they wanted
I like that you specified half life and not half life 2 lol
@@100dayGamerclassic fkn valve.
Changing fidelity when sprinting is actually logical, because you are moving and for a smooth running experience they drop down textures hoping that you won't be looking into those trees on horizon. The problem is is that it still kinda obvious because they only have 2 states - the blob and full texture, nothing in between.
Even with all the video's showing all the problems this game suffers from I still see a lot of comments of people saying "The game is not as bad as everyone is saying" or " Everyone's just being haters" or I'm/Me and my friends are having fun with it" or "Playstation users are jealous because it's not on the PS4/PS5". It's like just because some claim to be having fun with the game doesn't mean the criticisms aren't valid.
wow i was actually pretty interested in this, the trailers made it seem neat, thought the artstyle was nice and the game concept seemed interesting
sad to hear it's not very well put together :(
It will be good in a couple of months or 6 😅shame games launch this way now
Well, have you even tried it? Instead of listening to the bandwagon of hate, perhaps try it yourself?
I'm 3 hrs in and loving it.
@@acardenasjr1340 good for you, but I've seen enough to know i won't.
The trailers made it seem godawful, frankly. Major Forspoken vibes.
@@acardenasjr1340 "Try it yourself" Everything I've heard says it's bad.
Honestly, I'm beginning to think anyone defending this game is a bot. No way anyone thinks this game is acceptable.
It feels like things like model animations and enemy AI should be just getting better and better as we have tens of thousands of games that had to code them, how are so many recent AAA games coming out with AI comparable to enemies in the original DOOM? The game engine for Redfall is Unreal 4. How are there not standard cheap scripts you can plug in to give enemies complexity??
I've been also wondering this myself. Then I look at Zelda TotK and reminded that quality animations and enemy AI can exist as well as physics and interactivity with the environment. With all the advancements with motion matching, I thought animations would be more of a focus. They seem to be regressing and AI is as basic as can be.
Two words.
"Bad managment"
"How are there not standard cheap scripts you can plug in to give enemies complexity??" - Guess what, thats what they are doing. People may complain about "asset flip indies", but what many AAA games are doing these days isnt so different.
This was an amazing game testing session Luke😂
i grew up fantasizing about having a high end pc so i can play everything maxed out, cuz at the time games were built for PC and ported to console. Now im older with disposable cash and own a high end pc, games are built for console and suck donkey dick on PC... fuck my life.
Damn, that's crazy. I actually feel a bit priviliged, watching all those new realeses burn while playing through 10 years worth of cRPG backlog xD I would've been a bit depressed If I had nothing else to play aside from 2023 ones.
My shit pc hasen't been able to play any AAA game or with any decent graphics for the last 6 years, the only game i can play is classic wow on 40 fps xD
Getting my new pc next week i'll be able to play any game released in those 6 years on max settings
I can't wait to play rdr2 etc :D i'm set for years haha
The guy at 13:30 busting out the heelies was pretty epic. lmao
I appreciate that you check performance on different platforms. Even if it's for something like Redfall.
The performance on pc is awful and has micro stutters on XBOX
When they are charging $70 a game now they must do better. Period
The issue with the AI could be because its the very beginning of the game, but I definitely get the immediate frustration over that. They will most likely fix that quickly, decrease response time and increase accuracy seems like a simple fix.. that should have been fixed before launch, like who is testing these games? The graphically issues.... lol. yeah. With the still frame cut scene, I appreciate the art style, so not too upset at that. The game runs on Unreal engine 4 so definitely agreeing on the standards that should be met that aren't. Thanks for the review, I am going to hold off on getting the game until some patches are put in.
When this game was first revealed I knew it would turn out exactly like this.
I love the Dishonored games, I LOVE Prey (2017) however, I only kinda liked Deathloop and was still let down. Redfall may be the only Arkane game I don’t buy or play. I love immersive sims and I hope that the big wigs in charge will let Arkane make something that is Arkane, y’know? Anyway, I haven’t lost hope for Arkane yet, great video!
Exact same spot as me.... just give us Dishonored 3 with crazier powers.
thank you for reviewing this game i had high hopes for this game. Its like they did'nt even test out their final product, how can companies release unfinished products like this and think its ok.
Free money from idiots and pre-orders
Nice to see that nothing has changed about bethesda softworks games it's so typical.
Shinji Mikami saw what working with Microsoft would be like and dipped.
its Arkane Austin that developed this game not Bethesda they only publish this game
bethesda did not create this game they are also a publisher
@dannyswe1235 exactly they are responsible party since they PUBLISH. Which means they gotta gatekeep it before its released. And since they are the investors who rely on the return it's on them considering they mostlikely rushed the design and decided to release this dogshit.
I'm an Xbox fan. Left Playstation after the ps2. And I'm honest enough to admit that the ps4 shit on the xbox one but I stayed loyal, I own two xbox series s's so I can play with my girlfriend on any co-op game even the ones that don't support split screen or cross platform (cus we both have PC's too) But man it really sucks to watch xbox exclusives continue to fail again and again and again.... really sad. I hoped redfall would be good but I was never impressed by the pre release footage or trailers.... UGH.
Please starfield.... deliver PLEASE
"Starfield will be bigger, hopefully" didn't age well
05:51 - Luke : "I'm holding a gun to your face and you're puling a loudspeaker...whatever dude..." 😂😂 LMAO!!
Thank you Stephen for making an effort to review these awful ports. You save a lot of people headaches and money by being brutally honest. I really value people like you and ACG when it comes to reviews.
Dude everyone is trashing this game. You needed him to tell you this?
@@staticcharm3808 do you think I needed him to tell me that?
i really, really want to see a take on why this game is even happening... i can't see any single think that someone would see in that game when compared with any other option with similar characteristics.
The fact that the CoD and BF2042 have proper stealth finishing moves and Redfall does just have the elbow punch is ridiculous 😂
10:10 THIS IS SO TRUE OMG ive always thought this but didnt know exactly how to word it but that is exactly it lol. like its such a main character voice i dont know haha
I was legit on steam about to buy it and your video dropped 😂 thanks buddy! 0:53 red flags RED FLAGSSSSS
Capcom is the only studio i actually have faith in they never release a broken game like yeah theres usually alot of glitches but like casual people will rarely get those on accident
Edit: and fromsoft
Yeah Capcom is based af. Of course they have mostly older devs and guys in their 40s still there from the glory days.
and Nintendo. Made In Japan rules.
Well, I'm at least glad that Arkane got their obligatory "meh" game out. Squeeze out the bad stuff so we can get more of the good stuff in the future games.
Thank god for copium.
Deathloop was the "meh" game it was okay but not amazing this is just shit
Why do most AAA games look worse now than they did a few years ago?
I noticed something else in the reticle. Your character periodically didn't walk straight ahead. He walked slightly to the right. The developers were unable to make the player character WALK IN A STRAIGHT LINE!!!
Oh yeah, starfield will definitely break all records this year in terms of problematic launches
13:48
Luke : Ok this is pretty bad
NPC Cultist: You're just making it worse
Uhm idk, AI looks pretty on point to me, voice recognition and everything
This looks like an alpha version for a game mod from 2008
Once again I'd like to thank you for your service Luke, playing these awful games for us so we don't have to.
Uh isn't the TLoU PC port a Sony product? Didn't Hi-Fi Rush, an Xbox product, launch in a polished state? This is not a Playstation Vs Xbox issue, it's a AAA gaming issue, so don't let AAA publishers off the hook by saying this is an Xbox problem.
Edit: At the end he flat out says unpolished game releases are an Xbox issue and not a Sony issue.
I watched this video all the way through, and I have to say the final statement you made couldn’t have been worded better. Great look into this game. What the hell are they doing over at Xbox?
And remember folks, they're charging 70 bucks for this.
I think what might happen with the running and lower LOD is maybe an optimisation for the lower memory of the Xbox Series S. If you go too fast, you load in stuff faster and take more memory to do so. So by making the running change the LOD distance, it can help in the loading in memory the assets. That's just a guess.
11:45 thank you for mentioning this, i don’t want to sound rude but i wasn’t quite picking up what was being put down but this was such a simple and elegant way of saying what’s wrong
13:20 oh my god never mind i just needed to see this then to understand how terrible this game js
It's like a team of interns made it and had no one with any experience giving them any direction. Literally a husk of a game. I got it on series x , locked at thirty fps. An actual joke. It's not your erratic movement, it's the dead zone being half your controller sweep
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