New games are better than sequels, or Why I’m glad about the announcements of Redfall and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy

At the last E3, Arkane Austin and Eidos Montreal presented their new projects: the cooperative open-world shooter Redfall and the single-player story game about the Guardians of the Galaxy.

These are not at all the games you expect from the creators of Deus Ex, Dishonored and Prey. It’s not entirely clear why the publishers contracted Arkane and Eidos, masters of a completely different genre, to develop them. These are perhaps the only studios capable of creating amazing high-budget “immersive sims” and it’s a shame when they are put in charge of developing some, at first glance, mediocre action games.

If certain conclusions can already be drawn about Guardians of the Galaxy, since the developers talked quite a lot about the game and showed gameplay, then there are many more questions about Redfall. Apart from a rather mediocre CGI trailer, we weren’t shown anything, and judging by this trailer, the game looks exactly like a typical co-op shooter.

Bethesda VP of Marketing Pete Hines tried to dispel this first negative impression. According to him, Redfall is still a true Arkane game, which will not be a typical cooperative shooter and will retain the variability of gameplay and thoughtful approach to battles that are familiar to the studio’s games.

Some media even dubbed https://overloadcasino.co.uk/ RedFall an "immersive" co-op shooter. I don’t understand at all how a co-op shooter can be “immersive”. After all, “immersive” means immersing you in action, providing a full effect of presence. Agree that such an effect cannot be achieved when each team member mumbles something in the voice chat and at the same time adheres to his own style of play: someone rushes ahead, someone plays in stealth, and someone just likes to leisurely study locations and read notes. Therefore, I would not create illusions on this score and would not try to tie the term “immersive” to a cooperative shooter.

But let’s still look at these announcements on the positive side. I’m not a Guardians of the Galaxy fan, but they look pretty interesting. A purely single-player game without microtransactions and DLC – at least this is attractive and inspires hope, even despite the fact that visually it looks more like an addition to the failed Marvel’s Avengers than a new game.

Graphically the game is not impressive, but overall it looks good. Still, you need to take into account that this is a cross-gen game. In the end, if the developers still manage to make a solid, rich adventure with humor and an interesting plot, then I’m ready to forgive them even a boring combat system.

The game is not directly related to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, comic books, or other games. So if you’re for some reason unfamiliar with Guardians of the Galaxy, this might be a good reason to check it out.

As for Redfall, here Arkane is creating a new IP, and this is much more complex and interesting than another sequel. What if they manage to create a new subgenre of cooperative shooters?? Either way, it’s impossible to judge a game based on just one CGI trailer. But for most players, the phrase “cooperative game in an open world” obviously evokes negative associations. And they can be understood.

But Arkane hasn’t made bad games yet and there’s a lot of credibility in it. But this is already the second serious departure from what the company did before. The first is Deathloop, being developed by Arkane’s Lyon division, which so far looks like an interesting experiment. I’m looking forward to its release with caution, but I believe that something truly interesting and unique can come out.

To one degree or another, we are characterized by a fear of change. Subconsciously we experience discomfort from everything that differs from what has become familiar. Therefore, we often follow the same route, order the same dish in a cafe, play games that are already familiar to us, missing the opportunity to explore new genres and get new positive emotions.

The Deus Ex, Dishonored and Prey series are great, but that doesn’t mean that now developers should only develop these franchises or do only something very similar. Many people don’t realize how difficult it is to make a sequel that doesn’t disappoint audiences. Thus, in an interview with the NoClip channel, the developers of Dishonored 2 told how difficult it was to surpass the original and develop its ideas. At that moment, Arkane Lyon employees faced perhaps the most difficult challenge of their careers. Agree, it is impossible to endlessly raise the quality bar. You need to be able to stop in time.

I am sure that nothing will happen to the above-mentioned series and we will definitely see their continuation, but only a little later. Now I’m glad that instead of releasing regular sequels, with which, by and large, everything is clear in advance, the developers are experimenting in new directions. I think this should be encouraged. And who knows, maybe these experiments will lead to the creation of games that will be more interesting than all their previous works.