To say that the release of Redfall was a failure for Xbox and Microsoft is an understatement. Arkane’s game struggles to convince on several aspects, and in particular its technical part. Digital Foundry today delivers its complete analysis of the Xbox Series X | S versions, and details the many problems plaguing the game.
More than 20 seconds to load some textures
Redfall runs under the Unreal Engine 4, and the latter seems to have a lot of trouble supporting the open world of the game. Digital Foundry first highlights a problem loading textures, which causes some of them to more than 20 seconds to appear correctly.
This is the case of graffiti, blood, various inscriptions on the vehicles of the game, or even simply certain materials of the ground and the walls. Digital Foundry evokes the worst popping textures since the game Rage, an ambitious project from ID Software sadly famous for this very marked phenomenon.
The expert explains that this problem is associated with textures that are not the most polished, taking for example a tree whose texture is of lower quality than in Halo Anniversary.
If he also specifies that certain assets, such as grass, are very successful, it happens far too often that the player is distracted by poor quality textures and that it is important that this be corrected by the studio.
Bugs Galore and Strawberry AI
Besides the visual part, Redfall also suffers from many bugs. Whether collision, animation, scripting, or visuals, these bugs make the game feel like it’s not finished at all and can sometimes even jeopardize player progress.
The artificial intelligence also leaves something to be desired and some situations highlighted by Digital Foundry are really painful to see for a 2023 game. It is not uncommon to see enemies ignoring the player and his blows, not attacking him despite their state of alert, or failing to react after the murder of an ally.
Good image resolution and a rather satisfying framerate
When it comes to image quality itself, Redfall fares much better and offers a 4K image on Xbox Series X, and 1440p on Xbox Series S. If dynamic resolution is probably used, the expert from Digital Foundry explains that it did not find any fluctuations during its analysis.
As for the differences between the Xbox Series X and Series S versions, we note that the effects of SSR (reflections) are deactivated on Xbox Series S and that the shadows are also of lower quality on the small console from Microsoft. The latter are also singled out on both media for their average quality, and the distance at which they appear.
In terms of framerate, the game offers only one graphics mode at 30 frames per second. For an FPS, it would obviously have been better to be able to take advantage of the 60 FPS, but the performance mode will only arrive later. If the game is generally stable at 30 FPS, Digital Foundry still points out some targeted drops, and big slowdowns when effects like fire or volumetric smoke are on screen on the Xbox Series X version.
Below is the full analysis from Digital Foundry. We obviously hope that patches will come to correct the biggest problems of the game, and that those who wish will be able to enjoy it in better conditions.
Remember that Redfall is available now on Xbox Series X | S and PC as well as in Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.
