Long anticipated and repeatedly delayed - descriptors which apply to many major gaming titles releasing this year - open world vampire hunter shooter Redfall yesterday announced a firm (probably) May 2 release date.

Also showing us more gameplay. Following that up today is their official pre-order trailer to let us all know that we can start throwing money at them.

Pre-order / Xbox Game Pass bonuses include several weapon skins and a stake attachment.

The Bite Back (i.e. collector's) edition includes one outfit for each playable character, a different weapon skin and stake attachment, and two new (upcoming) playable characters.

Visual customisation (outfits) is something they had previously revealed.

When are the new characters coming? Those we didn't expect and are noteworthy.

The reigning king of looter shooters is Borderlands and several years back its developers informed us that they would not release additional characters for Borderlands 3 because their data from previous games showed that they weren't played much.

Most commonly players would level the new character a little bit then return to their original main.

Levelling and gearing up new characters typically requires a lot of time and effort.

That's developers attempting to cheaply - relative to creating new story content - prolong the game's longevity.

This also factored into their decision to abandon pre-made characters and implement a flexible multi-classing system in Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.

In this way they could introduce new classes and players could simply add the new class to an existing character - the game allows one fixed and one changeable class - and / or level up the new class.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands didn't take off to the extent that many had hoped but this change was widely appreciated.

Progression in Redfall is purely character based and changing your character won't be an option.

They don't even have plans for respeccing existing characters (i.e. changing skill point choices).

If players want to try something different, they need to start over with a new character.

So it's interesting to see Redfall potentially regressing in design.

Maybe it'll work if levelling a character to max isn't an absolutely enormous task?

We'll have to wait and see.

Redfall releases on PC (Steam and Epic) and Xbox X|S on May 2.

[ Main Image: Redfall pre-order trailer. Credit: Bethesda via YouTube. ]

Bethesda Softworks (January 26, 2023). Redfall - Official Gameplay Deep Dive. YouTube.

Bethesda Softworks (January 26, 2023). Redfall - Official Pre-Order Trailer. YouTube.

Young, Rory (September 21, 2019). Borderlands 3 Will Not Be Getting DLC Characters. GameRant.