Please someone make a mod that turns all the enemies into storm troopers with how much the AI misses

Man what a time to be alive that both pc and consoles are now united under the banner of "modern gaming"

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.

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 😅

The frequency of bad games is really stunning nowadays. I can hardly keep up.

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.

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.

I’ve never even heard of this game. Man it feels good to not be wrapped up in gaming news/drama.

I thought Luke was being nit picky at first, and then characters starting powergliding across the screen and I realized he has a point. 😂

Modern gamers: "Older gamers are just blinded by nostalgia, gaming now is better that it's ever been!" Modern gaming:

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.

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 fact that you need internet to play a game with sinlge player content was an immediate red flag

My most anticipated Xbox release is quickly becoming the inevitable documentary about what the hell happened this console generation.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 KZfaqrs not giving a 1 sided review and being blatantly honest. If it's good it's good, if it sucks it sucks

Imagine playing a game in 2023 without a character creator. lol. Even friggin STREET FIGHTER lets you create your own avatar.

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.

"Let's release a broken game and fix it later." Every Gaming Publisher Welcome to Modern Gaming

This looks like such a fun and interesting world to explore. Such a shame it just doesn't work

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.

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.

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.

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!

At this point we should have an award for worst/shittiest game of the year in the next Game Awards.

On the bright side, this should go a long way to killing the $70 price tag that they are trying to push.

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.

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

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

Luke, I think your computer knew how bad the game was going to be and was spending those 3 hours trying to spare you.

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.

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.

Any game with no review codes or a post release review embargo should be instantly avoided.

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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It's sad to see this happening to arkane, prey and the dishonored games are so good.

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.

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

13:22 They got the old Storm Trooper shooting skills 😂

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

"HAY GUYZ THIS CHARACTER HAS STUDEN LOANS LMAO ISN'T THAT RELETABLE!?" I don't know what they're teaching in these universities, but it sure as hell isn't "game design fundamentals".

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!!!

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.

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.

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.

The fact that the CoD and BF2042 have proper stealth finishing moves and Redfall does just have the elbow punch is ridiculous 😂

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.

Digital foundry was hasty when they named jedi survivor worst PC port of 2023🤣.

Dead Island 1 didn't even have a load screen from home base areas to the open world, this kinda stuff now, in 2023?! Is unacceptable.

I'm surprised you didn't talk about the awesome stealth takedown animation :)

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.

Hi Fi Rush was truly the best thing they had for awhile.

When this game was first revealed I knew it would turn out exactly like this.

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.

The guy at 13:30 busting out the heelies was pretty epic. lmao

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?

The game launched np with my 6950xt. It runs at about 100fps with high settings. It definitely feels like an unpolished budget title but I don't think it is quite as bad as some people are saying. Dissapointing but still worth a shot if you have gamepass.

I am concerned about the frame rate drops that occur in this game when playing on the Xbox Series X. Despite being somewhat enjoyable but the inconsistent frame rate is causing unease.

oh boi, what a time to be a PC gamer

When they are charging $70 a game now they must do better. Period

This game looks so lifeless; it looks less like you're stopping an invasion of the undead, and more like you're some asshole shooting up a quaint seaside vampire village.

It's insane to me a Studio like Arkane produces one of my favourite franchises in Dishonored and follows it up with two turds in Redfall and Deathloop.

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.

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.

Redfall is not all that bad to me I'm loving it

Yeah, the AI in this is ridiculous. You can shoot and kill someone who is standing directly in front of another enemy and all that will happen is they get a question mark over their head for two seconds, then go back to just standing there as if nothing happened.

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 :(

This was an amazing game testing session Luke😂

Why do most AAA games look worse now than they did a few years ago?

Once again I'd like to thank you for your service Luke, playing these awful games for us so we don't have to.

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??

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.

30 minutes into this video you mention maybe the people who made Prey left for other studios during this development. Turned out to be very accurate

The studio knows how to make game you can’t tell no one there didn’t see how bad it is.. its just really strange

This looks like an alpha version for a game mod from 2008

And remember folks, they're charging 70 bucks for this.

The only think I think I like is that you can seemingly go into most of the houses. But that's kind of a thing that grows with newer and newer games- more options for exploration.

You should have tried using the DLSS updater tool to update the version of DLSS in the game. Minor versions and even downgrading can sometimes have major impact on the quality and performance.

I appreciate that you check performance on different platforms. Even if it's for something like Redfall.

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!

It must've been a miracle that I downloaded this on pc using gamepass a day before release and it actually booted up

Just wondering if the long frametimes you were seeing on PC is in part because you turned on frame generation?

Oh yeah, starfield will definitely break all records this year in terms of problematic launches

Maybe after this, Gotham Knights, and Suicide Squad publishers will figure out that we are kind of tired of them shoehorning live service BS into every AAA release? It's to the point for me where I see color-tiered loot in a game and nope out.

Pre-downloaded it yesterday and played for around two hours today. No matter how much I tried, couldn't get adjusted to the graphics and the glitches. Uninstalled.

If you look at the animations of enemies shooting they face you and then cant their weapon off to the right by like 30 degrees with some elevation. It's really noticeable like they look at you, face you and then deliberately blast at space 4 feet to the side of you. We're literally in unsavable territory with Redfall, Arkane is great but someone new has gotten inside and has made some very fucking weird changes and decisions.

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.