Early on in your mission to drive the vampire occupiers from the New England town of Redfall, you’re approached by the local doctor. He presents you with a pocket watch that once belonged to his mother, and asks you to leave it on his father’s grave. A thematically vivid setup, certainly – but for an activity that, in the event, proves to consist entirely of walking up to a trigger point, pressing a single button, then schlepping back to base. At which point he hands you another mission of the exact same variety, and then another. These are not side quests, we should stress, but mandatory steps along the critical path. As Arkane missions go, it’s not exactly A Crack In The Slab.
It’s indicative of the kind of minor disappointments we keep bumping up against in opening hours. No player could fail to notice the emptiness of its openworld map, nor the plethora of bugs which persist through to the game’s launch. Yet more painful, perhaps, are those disappointments likely to be felt most keenly
