Redfall faced a disastrous launch on May 1, 2023, and the game was bombarded with bad reviews soon after. Although Bethesda is trying their best to fix the mess, some fans wonder if it’s too little too late.
Developed by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda, Redfall sets you in the eponymous Massachusetts town, which has been run over by an army of bloodthirsty vampires. While a failed scientific experiment led to the vampire outbreaks, the creatures of the night have completely taken over the town and cut off all contact with the rest of the United States. In such a setting, the game allows the player to choose between four survivors as they fight to free Redfall and bring the perpetrator behind the disaster to justice.
Although the game was massively anticipated by many, it received overwhelmingly negative reviews upon release. While most reviewers were shocked by Redfall’s unstable performance on both the PC and Xbox, the game was plagued with visual glitches, bad frame-pacing, and game-breaking bugs, which made it almost unplayable. Moreover, an uninspiring story and repetitive gameplay mechanics did not help Redfall’s case. Nevertheless, with the latest patch seemingly fixing most issues, let’s find out how it will affect the game in the long run, shall we?
Redfall’s latest update hopes to make the game more playable
Being an Xbox exclusive, Redfall’s launch was such a disaster for the company that CEO Phil Spenser had to put up an apology for the way the game performed on all systems. At the same time, reviewers claimed that it was a chore to play through, and IGN even gave it a rating of 4/10, insisting that Redfall had repetitive missions, broken AI, and far too many bugs for a full AAA release. Soon other reviewers began mirroring IGN’s views, and it became apparent that Redfall was just another game that suffered from a broken and rushed release.
The publishers were quick to respond to the criticism and they promised to roll out patches that would fix the issues. However, even though Bethesda began selling a DLC pack, there was no sign of the promised updates, including a much-awaited 60 fps fix. In fact, the DLC pack also came under controversy since the publisher had not detailed a proper content roadmap, and gradually, Redfall’s concurrent player count on Steam went into the dreaded single digits.
However, the latest patch aims to fix every single issue, and the biggest highlight is the 60 FPS performance mode on the Xbox Series X and S. Along with it, Bethesda has improved stability and performance on the PC, while players can use the benefits of AMD FSR 2.1 upscaling to further boost their frames per second. Additionally, the update also fixes several glitches that came up after changing the resolution on AMD GPUs, and Bethesda claims to have tweaked several Hero weapons and abilities that used to cause an issue with performance in the past.
Other points that the negative reviews harped upon were Redfall’s glitchy AI uninspiring combat, and messy user interface. The AI was so broken that it couldn’t even make its way around an obstacle when aggroed on the player. However, this latest patch will seemingly fix such issues as Bethesda claims they have made improvements to the AI. They have also put in new encounters for players to experience, and increased the enemy population in free-roam mode, intending to make Redfall more interesting. Additionally, players will finally be able to use Stealth takedowns, and the improvements to the gameplay and combat will make missions much more engaging and challenging than before.
While players can go through the entire list of changes in the patch notes, we cannot blame fans for wondering if it’s too little too late. Moreover, the future for Redfall does not bode well since fans have already shifted away from the game to older and much more successful Arkane titles like 2017’s Prey. Still, Bethesda pushing such a massive update is truly commendable, although only time can tell if this will finally let Redfall experience glory days.
