A trip into Redfall’s open world of vampires | Ricardo Barre interview

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I recently attended an event at a Microsoft space in San Francisco, and I walked out with a cookie that said “Bite Back” on it.

That’s precisely what you’re supposed to do in Redfall, the anti-vampire game coming on May 2 from Microsoft’s Bethesda division and Arkane Austin. It’s story-driven shooter set in the open world of an island town called Redfall, Massachusetts.

An evil company called Aevum did some research on matters it shouldn’t have, and now vampires who are more like gods are terrorizing the once-sleepy town, which has been cut off from the mainland and must rescue itself.

Microsoft recently launched its story trailer and it let the press get a preview of the gameplay in the open world. I played the game and then interviewed Ricardo Barre, co-creative director at Arkane Austin, about the game.

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Redfall is coming out May 2 on the Xbox Series X/S and the PC. Players can pre-order now or play day one with Game Pass.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: It’s an ambitious project. When you were conceiving this, what did you want to deliver in the experience?

Ricardo Barre: If you look at the trajectory of the games that we’ve been making at Arkane for a while now, we try to stretch ourselves a little bit more with each game. We try to do something a bit different each time. You can look at Dishonored and see it’s very stealth-focused. It has a more traditional mission structure. But then you go to