Redfall production designer: 'Making a large, open world game, that was breaking the mold for us'

pcgamer.com:

Arkane's co-op vampire looter-staker Redfall recently got another trailer, this time an «official extended gameplay and world exploration trailer» showing off both the ordinary side of its open world Massachusetts city, with a hospital, park ranger station, lobster farm, and amusement park, as well as a few of the stranger locations.

There's a floating island beneath the blacked-out sun reminiscent of the Void from Dishonored, a half-dissolved house, rooms where the gravity's gone wonky, an underground church, and a house that opens up like an oversized version of the creepy doll house seen earlier in the trailer. We're probably going to get trapped inside that thing. It looks haunted as heck.

Production designer Ben Horne spoke to IGN(opens in new tab), re-emphasizing what Arkane's been saying for a while now: Redfall is not like Left 4 Dead. «Left 4 Dead is an awesome game,» Horne said, «but we wanted to make something different. We wanted to make something that we feel like has the Arkane DNA that we've made in games from the past, games like Dishonored, Dishonored 2, Prey, most recently Deathloop. You can think of all of those games almost like a Venn diagram, where they overlap in really key areas or critical areas—that we like to tell stories in games and we like to make games that have a rich, coherent story, systems that players can exploit and use to their advantage, maybe in some surprising ways. For Dishonored we went a little bit stealth, and for Prey we really focused on physics. For Redfall we wanted to focus on world-building, we wanted to focus on that narrative story.»

Horne explained that Redfall was always going to be an open world game, that there was no point in development where it was ever anything