Redfall's ugly open world will only look worse once you see how great Prey 2017 still looks

pcgamer.com:

It's a sad day when you have to admit your favorite developer made a bad game, but there's no better way to describe Redfall. As Tyler Colp laid out in his 40-hour review-in-progress(opens in new tab), Arkane's co-op looter shooter is bland, unchallenging, and full of bugs.

At the center of Redfall's disappointing debut is its open world—the Salem-esque town of Redfall and its surrounding mountain trails. It's easily the biggest playable sandbox that either Arkane studio has ever made and it has no loading screens (besides brief loads to enter safehouses and the main fire station hub), which may help explain why it feels so lifeless. Arkane has traded its usual obsessive attention to detail in small environments for huge, sparsely populated city streets and awkwardly assembled interiors that aren't worth exploring.

I wondered if I was being too harsh with Redfall, so I jumped back into Arkane Austin's last project for a quick refresher, the underappreciated Prey 2017. My last save was in the Talos 1 space station lobby, which turned out to be the perfect place to compare one of the most sacred spaces in any videogame: the bathroom.

You can learn a lot about a videogame from its bathrooms(opens in new tab). This Redfall loo is a good example of perplexing interior design that I'm noticing all over the town. It's as if every object in the room has been shoved against the wall to ensure there's room for vampires to suddenly appear (or for co-op players to roam around. Why is there only one stall and a urinal? What's up with the pillar half-fused with the wall? The tiles and walls actually look pretty nice, but the nonsensical layout throws it all out of wack.

Prey's piss palace, on the other hand, has ambiance overflowing