On paper, Redfall sounds like it should be a good game. What’s not to love about an open-world looter shooter that lets players team up to stake their claim in a world overrun by vampires? While the game falls short of greatness, it might actually be pretty good if it weren’t for the bugs. But boy, does Redfall have a ton of bugs.
Across many corners of the internet, gamers are sharing the many bugs, glitches, and unfinished assets they’ve found in Redfall. It almost seems like people find five more every time you look for an update on the state of the game. While many of those bugs are entertaining in their own ways, they are also quite sad in the grand scheme of the game.
The most obvious problems with Redfall crop up during combat. No two ways about it; enemies in the game are dumber than a bag of rocks. Countless content creators, including ACG and GmanLives, have demonstrated that vampires and their mortal minions have some serious pathfinding issues and have difficulty walking around the simplest of obstacles. Other times, enemies run past players, turn around, and then charge players again before attacking them.
Moreover, ranged enemies have some serious aiming problems, as demonstrated by Luke Stephens’ video of basic shotgun cultists that couldn’t hit him even when he stood still. Plenty of gamers have also posted footage of enemies T-posing, not reacting to being attacked, and, possibly worst of all, spawning without any AI or hitboxes. As a result, it’s difficult to take enemies in Redfall seriously. Would you be threatened by a vampire who is just standing there…menacingly or a cultist who grenades himself to death?
Even when you take time to stop and explore the game without firing a shot, you can’t go two steps without noticing another glitch or other problem. Many gamers have reported issues with shadows and lighting, but issues go well beyond those simple bugs. Redfall has some issues loading in textures. For instance, Reddit users Superflyt56 and TheSpartanLion (among others) noticed that some NPCs also have a strange tendency to clone themselves.
It’s not just characters, though. Even simple aspects of the environment are not properly implemented into the game. For instance, players have noticed doors without doorknobs, climbable door frames that make them clip into the ceiling, and, in one truly bizarre visual bug, chimneys that aren’t attached to rooftops.
While all of the above problems stare gamers in the face, some of Redfall’s more insidious bugs hide under the hood. For instance, the game’s inventory lies to you constantly. Noisy Pixel noted that many weapon icons stated guns had stakes when they actually didn’t and vice versa. Some Twitter users even pointed out that they looted weapons that penalize your movement while aiming down sights despite claiming otherwise. Other weapons have “bonuses” that defy both in-game and actual logic:
You better hope you find a broken gun that works in your favor, because aiming in Redfall is a roll of the dice even during the best of times. At worst, the game’s glitches can make shooing even more cumbersome. For instance, Redfall suffers from a glitch that applies sniper scope to every other weapon you wield, including weapons with their own scopes. None of these problems even touch upon the game’s most fatal glitches such as a reported memory leak that makes the game chug the longer it is played and eventually crash. And since the game’s multiplayer boots everyone if one player crashes, this issue can affect players whose games don’t crash on them.
Redfall falls short of what fans of Arkane Studios’ previous work expected. To make matters worse, we were just recovering from the burn of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, but while a great experience hides under that game’s performance issues and glitches. The same can’t be said for Redfall.
Many gamers are left wondering what happened to the Arkane that developed Prey and Dishonored. Redfall’s issues reek of a rushed product and have thrown the future of Xbox exclusives into question. Is this the level of quality (or lack thereof) we can expect from those exclusives in the future?