Redfall's second major patch continues to make its open world more alive with vampires

Redfall was a disappointment upon release, thanks to its open world which felt - as Ed wrote in his Redfall review - like "playing through an already abandoned live service."

Yet though its sparsely populated world made it feel that way, Arkane haven't abandoned Redfall. Yesterday they released its second major patch with a spate of fixes and attempted improvements.

Several of those changes seem designed to make Redfall's world feel more alive. The update increases the open world enemy population and "mission encounter balancing", for example, and adds unique open world enemy encounters to certain areas. It also adds new behaviours to enemy AI and increases the opportunities for stealth takedowns.

On the performance side, stability has allegedly been improved "across a wide range of hardware configurations", alongside fixes for memory crashes, performance improvements made to abilities and weapons, and a fix for a graphical corruption issue connected to AMD GPUs.

The full patch notes are pretty lengthy, and also include improvements to screen narration, aim-assist, and visibility improvements for enemies in low light.

It remains to be seen whether these changes will make a substantial difference to Redfall's issues - or, even if they do, whether it's enough to cause players to give it a second chance. Either way, I do think it's important that developers stick with their games and continue to patch them after release. Not every game is going to have a No Man's Sky-style comeback, but those who did buy Redfall deserve to have a functioning game whether they play it or not.