Between titles like the Dishonored series and last year’s Deathloop, Arkane Studios has offered players many large and intricate maps to explore to their liking. With Redfall, however, the developer is going fully open-world and creating its first truly seamless locale, and with that increase in scale comes an increase in map size. So much so that just one small part of Redfall’s map is bigger than the entirety of Talos 1, the spaceship that serves as the setting for Arkane’s 2017 Prey reboot.
For the uninitiated, Redfall takes place in the titular small island town under siege by vampires created by science experiments gone awry, and tasks players with fighting back using a mix of firearms and supernatural abilities that’ll be familiar to fans of Arkane’s past titles. This time, though, players will be able to play together in four-player co-op, and they’ll be able to explore Redfall and the surrounding island, the largest setting Arkane has created yet.
During a panel at Quakecon 2022, some of the game’s developers explained just how much larger the map is from past titles, using Talos 1 from Prey as an example. According to art director Karen Segars, Talos’ size equates to “five football fields” while Redfall’s map is “kinda ‘hold my beer’ on that one.” Arkane Austin studio director Harvey Smith then recalled a moment during development when one of the developers took Talos at scale and placed it in a farm in Redfall’s second district area. “And the district just eats the whole space station, of course. It’s gigantic.”
That’s pretty wild, and as lead producer Aaron Carter clarified, the farm area that Talos 1 takes up in Redfall’s map is “just one mission.” While this comparison does an excellent job conveying how Redfall dwarfs its predecessors in sheer size, it’s not immediately clear how the depth of its gameplay compares. Prey is no small game, after all, and manages to do a lot with its relatively constrained setting. Whether Arkane is able to maintain that amount of gameplay depth across a far larger setting remains to be seen.
Then again, Arkane has made it clear that it’s not simply aiming to make the largest map possible. As Smith explained, Redfall’s open world is “based on foot,” meaning players will only be walking and running instead of having the option of speeding around in vehicles. While this means players won’t be covering ground as quickly as in other open-world games, it should make it possible for Arkane to condense a similar amount of content into a smaller setting. This in turn should enable the developer to take the intricateness of its past games’ settings and spread it across its largest playground to date.
Redfall will launch in 2023 for PC and Xbox Series X/S.