Redfall update breathes new life into the game’s open world

pcgamesn.com:

Redfall had me unbelievably excited almost as soon as it was first announced. An Arkane Studios and Bethesda Softworks game all about vampires? Sign me up, or so I thought. Unfortunately, the game’s launch didn’t go as planned and many of us were underwhelmed with the empty open world, lack of combat, performance, and other issues. Since that initial release, the developer has been hard at work to improve gameplay and more in Redfall with patches. Arkane Studios’ recent major update addresses a lot of these problems, breathing new life into the game.

This new Redfall update is a sort of second wind for the FPS game, giving us a fresh incentive to hop back into the open world with friends. If you spent most of your time in-game looting rather than engaging in chaotic combat against bloodthirsty vampires, you likely found yourself wishing for more enemies and fleshed-out battles with them. The Redfall patch notes detail a greater “enemy population and mission encounter balancing,” which targets the lack of frequent, fun fights.

Objectives should be a bit more tedious to complete now, albeit in a good way. Many games have succumbed to the open-world trap of going from point A to point B without much happening along the way, but it seems like the developer is combating this in the big patch. Arkane also writes that the new update fixes “several scenarios where enemies could become stuck in an idle state and stop engaging with the player,” which will also help make the world feel more alive.

Boss fights are also changing with the update as Arkane works to improve “combat behavior” in such big fights. On top of those combat and enemy AI changes, it looks like we’re also getting an interesting stealth mechanic. The dev says