Redfall Will Be a Classic Arkane Single-Player Game (Even When You’re Playing in Co-Op)

ign.com:

When Arkane Austin announced its vampire-slaying shooter Redfall last year, it was understandable that a portion of its community was a little skeptical. Why were the creators of Prey and Dishonored moving away from meticulous, hand-crafted precision in favour of the messy chaos of co-operative open worlds? A year later I’ve learned that, well, they haven’t. The minds behind Redfall are determined to translate Arkane’s trademark smarts into a game that can be enjoyed by four cooperating players, and that begins with what the studio has always done best: single-player.

“We put an inordinate amount of work into making the single-player feel right,” says Harvey Smith, studio director at Arkane Austin. With no desire to make solo and multiplayer separate modes, Smith and his colleagues set about creating a game that worked as a satisfying single-player game just as much as it did a great co-op experience.

“It was very important to us that we allow you to play the game alone,” says Smith. “So you can pick your way along very slowly, play at your own pace, observe things at a distance, plan, formulate, harvest resources, do all those things that you probably like doing in an Arkane game.”

Fans of the studio’s previous work will no doubt be relieved that all those elements are accounted for and that Redfall isn’t, as some feared, a Left 4 Dead replica. Those fears weren’t baseless either; with Arkane’s history of critical success but commercial struggles, it was easy to believe a co-op shooter was the studio’s attempt to make something more mainstream. But that’s not the case. “We set out to do the most ambitious thing we possibly could,” Smith assures me.

That said, Smith recognises that the experience is transformed when