After Almost 2 Months Of Radio Silence, Is It Safe To Call Redfall (Un)Dead?

Hey gang. Remember Redfall? You know. Arkane Austin and Bethesda’s vampire shooting game set in a small town in Massachusetts? We definitely talked about it a lot earlier in the year. We even wrote about it up until update 1.1 was released in mid-June, bringing fixes to several of the game’s issues.

The update had increased spawn rates, improved aim, made changes to combat, and more. Ideally, it should have resulted in an increase in players. It did not. At best, it seemed to cause the player base to level off a bit, into a slower decline, dropping from a couple of hundred players to a double-digit count that can’t seem to make its way above 50, currently.

That probably shouldn’t be too surprising. The game’s reviews – both all-time and recent – are “Mostly Negative” on Steam. (Granted, Steam isn’t the only way to play the game, but it’s always a pretty solid metric and Metacritic for PC and Xbox aren't much better.) In both cases, only 31% of the reviews are positive.

Perhaps the more interesting thing, though, is that while the Redfall community team is posting on social media like the site formerly known as Twitter, there hasn’t been a true update since June 22 when they posted the v1.11 Hotfix notes. It’s been just as long since any updates have been posted on the game’s official site as well.

Everything else on Twitter has been filler stuff that seems intended to just keep the feed alive. It actually feels more like the feed of a TV show that just dropped in its entirety on a streaming platform and is expected to lose interaction once interest in the show has died down (or it passes the time period where the platform stops caring about views). What it doesn’t feel like is the Twitter feed of a healthy, active game – or one that’s actually really alive or one that's even making an attempt at being saved.

What IS still alive is the game’s subreddit. There are people sharing images and videos, but what most of the posts consist of are players discussing the less-than-ideal state of the game and asking for updates. One direct request was for a roadmap and a patch that adds 60fps (remember that being absent on consoles at launch and deemed to be "coming later"?) and matchmaking. Another simply asked if any of these things had been done and when told no said they’ll be back in three months to check again. As one reply put it, “just checking in to see if you ain’t dead, honey”. Kinda seems like it might be at this point.