It’s with a depressing sense of inevitability that Redfall arrives on PC in a poor state. Like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Redfall has troubling performance problems on PC, along with a number of serious graphical presentation issues. It does get some things right, but once again, we’re looking at an experience with an unacceptably high CPU requirement and – yes – stuttering issues.
There’s the sense that the game just isn’t finished, that’s it more like a beta, and that starts with the lack of tweakable options on the settings menu – which is essentially the barebones Unreal Engine 4 set-up. The user has few indicators of what the settings actually do as there are no meaingful descriptions, preview images or hints as to what the performance impact might be when changing a setting. The default UE4 settings are simply not good enough – and it’s not just down to the lack of transparency with the user. The lack of utility is also a problem.
So, for example, one setting may actually change multiple aspects of the game. Post-processing can turn off various elements you may want to change individually, including motion blur, depth of field and ambient occlusion. The generic UE4 menu is a bad fit in other regards – the low volumetric setting, for example, completely ruins the effect. It’s a far cry from the likes of Days Gone and Returnal, also running on UE4, but deliver real-time previews, great descriptions, frame-rate counters that dynamically adjust with settings adjustment and much more. Arkane really should have done better here.
