As a big fan of Arkane, Redfall was a major letdown. I wrote about why it fails as an openꦗ-world looter shooter at length in my review, but the short version is that the character progression, loot systems, mission design, and narrative fail to come 🐠together in a cohesive way or deliver a worthwhile experience that compels you to stick with it. Even outside of its major gameplay bugs, Redfall just isn’t a particularly compelling looter or shooter. There are glimpses of good ideas, but none of them were given the time and attention they needed to become great ones.
One of those ideas is the vampire nests, a series of procedurally generated dungeons that appear throughout the town of Redfall. Conceptually, vampire nests have a lot going for them. They’re both stronghold-style missions,✱ which every open-world game needs, as well as randomized gear runs, which every looter game needs. They’re also grounded in the narrative of Redfall and offer some great world building for the game’s unique brand of vampires. I can🏅 imagine a version of Redfall that centers these kinds of procedural missions, playing more like Left 4 Dead or Vermintide than an open-world game. Considering how thinly stretched this game is, I can’t help but wonder if Arkane would have been better off limiting its scope and honing on one good idea, and Vampire Nests may have been the best candidate.
Nests start cropping up all around Redfall after you complete the first few introductory missions. They appear as a blue circle on the map, and when you enter the area whe𝔉re they appear you’ll fi🎃nd that the entire area now has a sickly blue tint to it. It’s explained that the vampires draw their power from their nests - a shared psychic dream they enter when they sleep, and any vampires you encounter within range of the nest will have super strength. If you don’t destroy nests as soon as they appear, their influence will continue to grow outward, expanding across the map to power up vampires far and wide.
Somewhere in the area is a magic door, and when you enter it you’re transported into a special instanced mission. These missions are procedurally generated - made up of a variety of tilesets all stitched together to create a n☂ightmarish assembly of familiar locations. You may start on an urban street that twists like a helix leading to a theater, then enter the theater and walk right through the movie screen to continue into a foggy, vampire-filled forest. Eventually you’ll make your way to the heart of the nest, and after untethering the calcified victims that power it, you can destroy the heart, collect your reward, then make a mad dash to th✅e exit before the nest collapses.
I think the vampire nests are one of the coolest parts of Redfall, but to be perfectly clear, these are not well-designed missions. Like the rest of Redfall, vampire nests are underbaked, repetitive activities that lack both rewards and challenge. Though the vampires here are stronger, they’re usually easy to avoid because they’re all asleep. E♓ven if you accidentally wake one up, dispatching them is simple - a couple of point blank shotgun blasts always does the trick. There really aren’t that many tilesets, so after a few nests you’ll start to see repeated elements almost every time, especi♓ally in the final room with the heart.
There’s clearly an element missing from the finale to these missions too. You have to run all around the room untethering the heart, then shoot at it to destroy it, which drops a piece of gear on the ground. Once you pick it up, the countdown 🧸starts, and you h🏅ave to destroy some nearby crystals to find extra loot and the exit door. The first couple times are tense, but you’ll quickly realize there’s a generous amount of time on the clock to find your way out, and no one is trying to stop you from doing it. There’s no boss of vampire wave at the end of these missions to make them more challenging, so the whole thing ends up feeling underwhelming. By my first run through a nest, I just stopped entering them altogether, because there was nothing new to see and no real consequences for ignoring them.
Even so, I think I would have enjoyed Redfall a lot more if it was focused entirely on these next experiences. Arkane clearly has some impressive tech for creating procedurally generated dungeons, and I’d love to see how intricate and elaborate the nests could get if they were built out to be longer and have a lot more variety. Arkane’s unique approach to level design could fit really well in a Left 4 Dead-style game that has more exploration and gives players opportunities to approach enemy encounters from different angles💯 and with different strategies.
The climax would definitely need some work, but there’s a lot of ways to make that the finale more interesting without losing the heart as a thematic centerpiece. Even something as simple as a random boss that emerges from the heart when you destroy it would make things more exciting, and add a lot of tension as you try to dispatch them quickly and make your escape. Vermintide 2 makes the sprint to the exit at the end of each mission exciting by unleashing an insurmountable wave of Skaven that you're forced to run away from, and I can imagine a vampire horde that emerges from rows of coffins along your path serving the same purpose.
There’s probably no saving Redfall at this point, but in another reality, it’s not hard to imagine Arkane running with the🍬 vampire nests instead of the open-world angle. Chasing Left 4 Dead may seem as ill-advised as chasing the flagging open-world looter shooter trend, but the nests prove that Arcane had in mind a unique approach to a mission-based shooter, and I would have much preferred to see that game than the one we actually got.