Arkane: Redfall's world was too open at first

Redfall was announced during last year's Microsoft E3 event, and was supposed to be launched this summer. Unfortunately, that won't happen as it was recently revealed that it has been delayed to the first half of 2023 instead, but this hasn't stopped the developer Arkane Austin from talking about the modern vampire adventure.

In a recent interview with IGN, the Studio Director Harvey Smith shared plenty of details regarding both the game and it's development. Amongst other things, Smith explained why the single player focused developer (Dishonored, Prey) suddenly decided to dabble with co-op:

"When we started Redfall, I had just done eight years of Dishonored. Ricardo had done four years of Dishonored, four years of Prey. We felt like we needed some kind of creative risk or some kind of change. We always wanted to work on an open-world [game]. We just talked about the narrative systems that would be involved with multiplayer, with co-op, with characters that would get to know each other over time."

But it turns out doing a game that is open world has its own set of challenges and Redfall initially turned out to bee too open. When asked about the world, Smith says:

"It's very open. For what it's worth, it's made to be an on-foot game. [With] people talking about the square footage, what's appropriate is different based on whether you're just running and walking or whether you have vehicles or you fly on a dragon or whatever. Ours is an on-foot, urban-exploration game, so it's the right size for that, I think. It's mostly very open. In fact, at first it was too open. It was like there was not enough blocking you or channeling you, but it's very, very open rooftops and alleys and streets of this small town - Redfall, Massachusetts - which is like a fishing community, a tourist community. Quaint, historic New England stuff with this stealthy takeover by vampires."

As a result, Smith says the world is now a little bit more gated by dividing it into two distinct districts:

"The one thing that we do in terms of that gating pretty heavily is we divided the world into two districts. District one is the first half of the missions and it's the downtown part of Redfall, and District two is more rural. It's farms, lighthouses, churches, things like that."

As previously revealed, Redfall can be enjoyed both single player and co-op, and will deliver different experiences depending on how you enjoy the adventure. Hopefully we'll get to see more from it during Gamescom next month, as Microsoft announced their participation last week and said they would talk about titles being released withing a 12 month time frame.