YMMV / Redfall

• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: Redfall is not a difficult game. Between the Artificial Stupidity, extremely powerful abilities, and an overall lack of enemies, many players have reported feeling decidedly underchallenged even on high difficulties. While difficulty has been increased in patch 1.1 onwards due to assorted A.I. fixes and balance changes, it's still quite an easy game. About the only times you're ever at risk of dying is getting swarmed by several vampires in a Vampire Nest without a specialized anti-vampire weapon loadout (unless you're playing as Jacob or Remi who have abilities that let them escape mid-combat to heal), trying to fight the Underboss vampires before unlocking your Blood Remnant slot to increase your health, or being unlucky enough to have one or two Special vampires show up to attack you while you're busy fighting an Underboss or the Rook.
• Memetic Mutation: OH NO. ^ExplanationA clip taken from Starfield is Life's playthrough of the game has him yelling this after accidentally causing a car to explode when testing if car windows are breakable or not. Often misattributed to Cyberpunk 2077 due to him wearing a shirt that has the game's logo on it.
• Narm: If you get too much attention from the vampire gods, they will send a Rook after you. For some reason, one of the biggest attention-getters is setting off car alarms.
• Obvious Beta: The game released in a state that was definitely not ready for launch. With technical issues, the Artificial Stupidity of the NPCs (as well as bugs that would make them unkillable), a lifeless open world, and complete lack of any cutscenes whatsoever, it's little wonder the game has received a cold reception.
• Porting Disaster: The PC version got torn apart for having abysmal performance, with machines struggling to run it at decent settings, yet handling other games of similar specs requirements without issue. This seems to have been addressed in the various late 2023 "fix" patches, as the game now currently runs reasonably smoothly (in fact having better performance than other comparable major 2023 games, albeit probably due to having significantly simpler graphics).
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The game requires always online internet connection AND having the infamous Denuvo DRM, something that is clearly redundant.
  • The game jumping straight to New Game Plus after the final mission rather than letting you continue to explore and finish sidequests was frustrating to a number of players, especially as there's no warning this will be the case.
  • Game progress in co-op is only saved for the host, meaning that if you first played the game in co-op and you wanted to continue playing by yourself, you'll have to play the whole game all over again.
  • Once you progress to Burial Point, there's no way to return to Redfall Commons other than finishing the game and going to New Game Plus. This is annoying if you want to go back to look for Gravelocks, get some of the fixed Legendary loot spawns you missed, etc.
• Tainted by the Preview: Redfall has had, to put it mildly, a rough time in the leadup to release.
  • First, it was revealed that Redfall was going to be a co-op, open-world shooter with loot-based progression similar to Far Cry, as opposed to the Immersive Sim games that Arkane are known for.
  • Then it was revealed that the game would have an always-online requirement, even when playing solo, and that when playing co-op, only the Host Player would make progress in the campaign. On top of that, the PC version would launch with the Denuvo DRM software. The decision to include online-always and DRM requirements lead to concerns about game performance and player ownership.
  • Then, the game's official Twitter announced that Redfall would ship without a 60fps performance mode, and that it would be limited to a 30fps quality mode until the performance mode is patched in at a later date. The 30fps mode was especially damning given how it was a first-party Xbox exclusive that should've been able to run with higher framerate on a high-end console, with many critics noting that the game didn't really do anything that couldn't be done on the older Xbox One X. This problem was apparently caught so late in production that official, boxed copies of the game had to have a sticker slapped on the back informing customers of the performance issues.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Many longtime Arkane fans criticize the game for being a co-op, live-service^note it's actually not a live-service game, lacking any sort of real-money in-game store, online-only progression storage, dailies or other log-in incentives, etc. However, the overall design is so similar that the comparison is inevitable, and the game does require an always online connection as even a solo single player game is run on Microsoft's multiplayer servers. looter shooter similar to the likes of Borderlands and Destiny. The emphasis on fighting supernatural hordes also gained unfavorable comparisons to the similarly lackluster Back 4 Blood only with vampires instead of zombies. Furthermore, the game didn't have better map design or progression compared to similar looter shooters, so it was not only copying current trends but also doing so with inferior execution. Likewise, the open world is noticeably less dynamic and engaging compared to other games in the genre such as Far Cry, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., or Fallout 3/Fallout 4, with a much more static environment/ecosystem and less random ambient activity, so it proves inferior on that end as well.

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