pretty solid reskin of simpsons hit and run. i like all the birds a lot
After 80+ hours of Red Dead Redemption 2, a question pops up in one’s mind:
In the process of making a game that examines the fall of the American frontier and the decline of the Wild West, did the irony register at all with Rockstar that they were also making a game about the end of the triple A design structure that has plagued the medium ever since the birth of the 7th gen?
Regardless of what pre-established biases one might come into RDR2 about the value of graphical fidelity and closeness to real life and focus on cinematic design and film language in games, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Rockstar’s commitment to the simulation of realism. Your character will meticulously grab each item he loots and place it in his satchel, craft each new tonic or bullet one at a time with detailed animations, remove and place his weapons on his horse whenever you switch them up, shuffle dominoes and grab each piece one by one in every game, and skin every hunted animal with gruesome detail and carry them on his back to his horse every single time. NPCs all have their per-determined schedules that happen regardless of your presence or not, wild animals behave accordingly to their nature and even hunt other species, and every mundane action, be it taking a shower, mounting a camp, cleaning your guns, or brushing your horse, carry a level of detail and weight never before seen in a blockbuster game. It also boasts one of the most beautiful environments to walk around, filled with detail and big expansive nature landmarks, frequently creating moments of awe as you ride around the mountains and landscape.
This level of realism is further elevated in the gang’s camp, where you have a group of misfits you can deal with daily and who all have their respective quirks, goals and actions. Rarely will you hear the same line of dialogue from these characters in the course of 80 hours, and the impressive amount of scenes and conversations that occur not only between your character and them, but also between themselves, means that you will finish the game without experiencing half of the camp scenes that happen dynamically and without feeling like scripted events. When you find yourself around a campfire with your gang after a well succeeded mission, being able to join in the singing and festivities with them, suddenly all the effort in creating a realistic world comes together and for a few seconds the immersion is achieved and one feels like he is a part of a fully realized world and that these characters are tangible and real.
It’s unfortunate then that each time you get into a story mission, that effort is collapsed and you are thrown back into the videogame. What was once acceptable in RDR1 now feels incredibly dated and restrictive, with the usual design structure of having you ride to the mission on horseback and having a chat with an NPC while you follow a yellow line, following every single instruction the game tells you without any chance to deviate from it, waiting for something to inevitably go wrong, and then shooting a comical number of enemies that spawn out of nowhere like a NES game until everyone is dead. Rinse, and repeat. The level of realism found in the open world aspects of RDR2 only serves to call attention to how detached and out of touch the story missions are, leading to incredibly absurd scenes where the main character chastises a crew member for killing too many people during a story cutscene, when you the player yourself have been forced to kill 50 people during a house robbery just the previous mission.
What ends up happening is that most of the stuff you will be doing in the open world won’t matter at all because that would be stepping on the story’s toes. Regardless of how much money you have or how much you have contributed to the camp and NPCs, nothing will have effect on how the story will progress, with the exception of a very simplistic and outdated Honor system. This in turn inevitably leads to the open world map feeling like just a bunch of lines between check marks to fill, with the occasional scripted event to deviate you, but not much!, from the beaten path, and the rare exploration quest that happens when the game decides you should. Even the act of hunting an animal in the wilderness is affected by Rockstar’s grip on your hand, having a highlighted line on the ground that flashes and leads perfectly to your prey. The simulation aspects end up being surface level mechanics used to visually impress the player, not really influencing in any meaningful way either the gameplay or the story. It’s all shallow spectacle.
Which is a shame, because RDR2 has one of the most compelling videogame characters ever created. Arthur Morgan’s story takes a very contemplative and introspective direction in it’s final act, as he finds out he doesnt have much time left in this world, and it leads to some of the most interesting and emotional moments that Rockstar has ever created. Arthur’s effort in making something out of the few life he has left ends up influencing the player’s action outside of the story, and in one of the most poignant and humane moments in the whole game, you are forced to lay down your controller for a few secs, as Arthur requests a moment from you so he can catch his breath, something that makes the player care and empathize with a bunch of polygons much more than any cutting edge cutscene in the whole game could. Even the act of playing the last stretch of the game mimics Arthur’s new perspective, the missions feeling like a slog to go through, Dutch becoming increasingly frustrating, repetitive and annoying to be around, and the creativity being lesser and lesser, which would have been an interesting and insightful direction, had that actually been the intention by Rockstar. But RDR2 is adamant in separating the story from the gameplay, even bafflingly inserting black bars on top and bottom of the screen each time control is removed from the player, as if to signal that it’s now movie time and no time for interactivity. Regardless of all the issues with the story and gameplay, Arthur’s story is enough to carry the whole game on it’s back, and any player invested in his tale will have a hard time not getting emotional at the gut-wretching ending.
But then the game continues. For 5 more hours. And it’s at this point that the dam breaks and the flaws of the game become full center and aren’t easy to ignore anymore. The epilogue, which lacks any self awareness as it presents itself as a two parter, drags it’s way into a fan pandering ending, filled with needless shooting, redundant subplots, and characters that completely undermine the impact of the actual ending of the game. We can’t have a simple mission about just herding some sheeps, shopping with a friend, or fly a hot air ballon. No, every mission has to have a bloody battle with a body count that would make Stalin jealous, because Rockstar cannot bear the idea that some players might be bored if there isnt anything to shoot at. During an exchange between Morgan and an NPC the screen fades to black as they start talking about their lives, as if to spare the player from all those “boring details”, instead leading straight to the action once more. Rockstar can’t bear the thought of giving more opportunities for normal interactions between the player and the NPCs, while I sit here thinking about how one of my favorite missions was when I crossed the whole map to see a character I was fond of, only to get a kiss and that being the end of the mission.
RDR2 is a bloated game that can’t read a room on when’s it’s time to bow down and stop the show, deciding instead to outstay it’s welcome for an absurd amount of time, like an old frail man clawing at the last moments before his time to move on. And maybe it’s also time for Rockstar to move on, and let ideas of cinematic grandeur and realism in videogames finally lay rest once and for all.
In the process of making a game that examines the fall of the American frontier and the decline of the Wild West, did the irony register at all with Rockstar that they were also making a game about the end of the triple A design structure that has plagued the medium ever since the birth of the 7th gen?
Regardless of what pre-established biases one might come into RDR2 about the value of graphical fidelity and closeness to real life and focus on cinematic design and film language in games, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Rockstar’s commitment to the simulation of realism. Your character will meticulously grab each item he loots and place it in his satchel, craft each new tonic or bullet one at a time with detailed animations, remove and place his weapons on his horse whenever you switch them up, shuffle dominoes and grab each piece one by one in every game, and skin every hunted animal with gruesome detail and carry them on his back to his horse every single time. NPCs all have their per-determined schedules that happen regardless of your presence or not, wild animals behave accordingly to their nature and even hunt other species, and every mundane action, be it taking a shower, mounting a camp, cleaning your guns, or brushing your horse, carry a level of detail and weight never before seen in a blockbuster game. It also boasts one of the most beautiful environments to walk around, filled with detail and big expansive nature landmarks, frequently creating moments of awe as you ride around the mountains and landscape.
This level of realism is further elevated in the gang’s camp, where you have a group of misfits you can deal with daily and who all have their respective quirks, goals and actions. Rarely will you hear the same line of dialogue from these characters in the course of 80 hours, and the impressive amount of scenes and conversations that occur not only between your character and them, but also between themselves, means that you will finish the game without experiencing half of the camp scenes that happen dynamically and without feeling like scripted events. When you find yourself around a campfire with your gang after a well succeeded mission, being able to join in the singing and festivities with them, suddenly all the effort in creating a realistic world comes together and for a few seconds the immersion is achieved and one feels like he is a part of a fully realized world and that these characters are tangible and real.
It’s unfortunate then that each time you get into a story mission, that effort is collapsed and you are thrown back into the videogame. What was once acceptable in RDR1 now feels incredibly dated and restrictive, with the usual design structure of having you ride to the mission on horseback and having a chat with an NPC while you follow a yellow line, following every single instruction the game tells you without any chance to deviate from it, waiting for something to inevitably go wrong, and then shooting a comical number of enemies that spawn out of nowhere like a NES game until everyone is dead. Rinse, and repeat. The level of realism found in the open world aspects of RDR2 only serves to call attention to how detached and out of touch the story missions are, leading to incredibly absurd scenes where the main character chastises a crew member for killing too many people during a story cutscene, when you the player yourself have been forced to kill 50 people during a house robbery just the previous mission.
What ends up happening is that most of the stuff you will be doing in the open world won’t matter at all because that would be stepping on the story’s toes. Regardless of how much money you have or how much you have contributed to the camp and NPCs, nothing will have effect on how the story will progress, with the exception of a very simplistic and outdated Honor system. This in turn inevitably leads to the open world map feeling like just a bunch of lines between check marks to fill, with the occasional scripted event to deviate you, but not much!, from the beaten path, and the rare exploration quest that happens when the game decides you should. Even the act of hunting an animal in the wilderness is affected by Rockstar’s grip on your hand, having a highlighted line on the ground that flashes and leads perfectly to your prey. The simulation aspects end up being surface level mechanics used to visually impress the player, not really influencing in any meaningful way either the gameplay or the story. It’s all shallow spectacle.
Which is a shame, because RDR2 has one of the most compelling videogame characters ever created. Arthur Morgan’s story takes a very contemplative and introspective direction in it’s final act, as he finds out he doesnt have much time left in this world, and it leads to some of the most interesting and emotional moments that Rockstar has ever created. Arthur’s effort in making something out of the few life he has left ends up influencing the player’s action outside of the story, and in one of the most poignant and humane moments in the whole game, you are forced to lay down your controller for a few secs, as Arthur requests a moment from you so he can catch his breath, something that makes the player care and empathize with a bunch of polygons much more than any cutting edge cutscene in the whole game could. Even the act of playing the last stretch of the game mimics Arthur’s new perspective, the missions feeling like a slog to go through, Dutch becoming increasingly frustrating, repetitive and annoying to be around, and the creativity being lesser and lesser, which would have been an interesting and insightful direction, had that actually been the intention by Rockstar. But RDR2 is adamant in separating the story from the gameplay, even bafflingly inserting black bars on top and bottom of the screen each time control is removed from the player, as if to signal that it’s now movie time and no time for interactivity. Regardless of all the issues with the story and gameplay, Arthur’s story is enough to carry the whole game on it’s back, and any player invested in his tale will have a hard time not getting emotional at the gut-wretching ending.
But then the game continues. For 5 more hours. And it’s at this point that the dam breaks and the flaws of the game become full center and aren’t easy to ignore anymore. The epilogue, which lacks any self awareness as it presents itself as a two parter, drags it’s way into a fan pandering ending, filled with needless shooting, redundant subplots, and characters that completely undermine the impact of the actual ending of the game. We can’t have a simple mission about just herding some sheeps, shopping with a friend, or fly a hot air ballon. No, every mission has to have a bloody battle with a body count that would make Stalin jealous, because Rockstar cannot bear the idea that some players might be bored if there isnt anything to shoot at. During an exchange between Morgan and an NPC the screen fades to black as they start talking about their lives, as if to spare the player from all those “boring details”, instead leading straight to the action once more. Rockstar can’t bear the thought of giving more opportunities for normal interactions between the player and the NPCs, while I sit here thinking about how one of my favorite missions was when I crossed the whole map to see a character I was fond of, only to get a kiss and that being the end of the mission.
RDR2 is a bloated game that can’t read a room on when’s it’s time to bow down and stop the show, deciding instead to outstay it’s welcome for an absurd amount of time, like an old frail man clawing at the last moments before his time to move on. And maybe it’s also time for Rockstar to move on, and let ideas of cinematic grandeur and realism in videogames finally lay rest once and for all.
I've honestly lost count of how many hours I put into this. Putting aside the gargantuan and awe-inspiring open world and the epic story, the reason why this game became my favorite game of all time is because of Arthur Morgan, who is the greatest protagonist I've ever seen in a video game. I loved playing as him and his redemption is so powerful. I've rarely cried in a video game, but everytime I play this, I cry my eyes out. Rockstar made a masterpiece and for me it's going to be hard to top this one.
For as much as I love this game, I can't help but wish they had gone even harder on making a game that completely throws action-packed missions to the wayside in favor of making a cowboy slice-of-life. If I had spent 33% less time mowing down dudes and 33% more time with Mary Linton, 33% more time breaking into a slave catcher's foreclosed house, 33% more time learning about the cholera outbreak affecting one of the game's towns, I'd be even more in love with it. The guns are fun, I like them, but I think their presence could be significantly reduced without feeling like the violence has lost its thematic weight.
Not every game should be like this, of course, but Rockstar proved that they can make something interesting with all the money they pumped into this product, so I can only wonder what would've happened if they tried a little harder to break with convention.
Not every game should be like this, of course, but Rockstar proved that they can make something interesting with all the money they pumped into this product, so I can only wonder what would've happened if they tried a little harder to break with convention.
A game that's been perfectly crafted in all regards.
This review contains spoilers
There's a lot that I could talk about when it comes to my experience with Red Dead Redemption 2. But every time I try to write this review, I just want to talk about the character that has impacted me the most, Arthur Morgan.
From the start, Arthur is a man who denies himself good, acutely aware of the crimes he has committed in the past. We never see what goes on before the start, but we don't need to. The guilt and burden Arthur carries with him is felt in the voice performance, the group dynamic and surrounding dialogue. Through tragedy, be it through the gang's own doing or not, brings the Van der Linde gang closer together and they start to feel like a family.
This family is bound together by a single man's ideology. An ideology to seek something greater, a life of freedom. Dutch raised Arthur and those around him to believe in that, but as the story progresses, as the family loses its members, that dream starts falling apart. Seen through Arthur's eyes, Dutch is spiraling down a deep and dark road, while he tries to do better by the people that have done him good. Between Arthur and Dutch, a rift slowly opens itself. Every clash between the men develops a deeper resentment for one another.
Towards the end, Arthur and some of those he holds dear, stand up against Dutch. They had lost too much, Dutch had changed too much and they had caused too much. The Van der Linde gang is broken up and so are its people. Arthur's story ends where Red Dead Redemption 2's story doesn't. In the end, he found peace and love in his heart where someone like Micah or Dutch couldn't. He gave it his all.
Through Arthur's kindness, John is saved. John is left to pick up the pieces, to live a life Arthur was destined to only dream of. He is Arthur's legacy. As he deeply affected the lives of those he touched, he is now deeply affecting mine and I'm grateful to have seen his story. You're a good man, Arthur Morgan.
"Take a gamble that love exists, and do a loving act."
From the start, Arthur is a man who denies himself good, acutely aware of the crimes he has committed in the past. We never see what goes on before the start, but we don't need to. The guilt and burden Arthur carries with him is felt in the voice performance, the group dynamic and surrounding dialogue. Through tragedy, be it through the gang's own doing or not, brings the Van der Linde gang closer together and they start to feel like a family.
This family is bound together by a single man's ideology. An ideology to seek something greater, a life of freedom. Dutch raised Arthur and those around him to believe in that, but as the story progresses, as the family loses its members, that dream starts falling apart. Seen through Arthur's eyes, Dutch is spiraling down a deep and dark road, while he tries to do better by the people that have done him good. Between Arthur and Dutch, a rift slowly opens itself. Every clash between the men develops a deeper resentment for one another.
Towards the end, Arthur and some of those he holds dear, stand up against Dutch. They had lost too much, Dutch had changed too much and they had caused too much. The Van der Linde gang is broken up and so are its people. Arthur's story ends where Red Dead Redemption 2's story doesn't. In the end, he found peace and love in his heart where someone like Micah or Dutch couldn't. He gave it his all.
Through Arthur's kindness, John is saved. John is left to pick up the pieces, to live a life Arthur was destined to only dream of. He is Arthur's legacy. As he deeply affected the lives of those he touched, he is now deeply affecting mine and I'm grateful to have seen his story. You're a good man, Arthur Morgan.
"Take a gamble that love exists, and do a loving act."
The fictionalized West of Red Dead Redemption 2 finds itself being constantly pulled between the forces of pastoral freedom and ordered law, pushing this conflict through not only the main storyline of Dutch's gang, but reflecting it within the game design as well.
Once the game finally spits you out of the tutorial area, the player is granted an immense amount of freedom - the world is yours. Taking full advantage of this, I ran around trying to experience everything possible and was fully rewarded with an amazingly immersive world. I hunted down gunslingers, found buried treasure, rescued hostages, took no prisoners, bought and customized my own guns and horse, fell victim to a kidnapping, and had so many other unique and memorable experiences off of the beaten path that I was truly in love with everything I was experiencing. I had freedom in how I interacted with the world, and the world actually responded to my choices in how I wanted to handle things, while still remaining mysterious and massive.
The geography available to explore is breathtaking and provides much variation while still holding true to realism. It's surprising how you can ride from snow covered mountains to fictional New Orleans and still feel like the world around you is cohesive and tangibly real. Rockstar perfectly blended the environments into one another both visually and through gameplay, as so much of this cohesion owes itself to the random encounters being flavored for whatever part of the wilderness you are in - you may run into fierce wolves and mountain men in the snowy peaks, or people panning for gold in the western reaches, or southern moonshiners in the swamp. All of it blends together and you are able to live in it, riding your horse back and forth, meeting people, exploring, and just being a cowboy supporting your gang.
Running side-quests with the array of characters are also rewarding experiences with depth and complexity, especially in the ways the game fleshes them out compared to their presence in Red Dead Redemption 1. They do a fantastic job of characterizing Arthur as well, while still giving the player agency in how to handle situations both in and out of combat. The side-stories are often made up of more intricate, down-to-earth style dilemmas and storytelling, which again makes the world and your choices as a player feel more tangible and real.
This was my experience through the early game chapters, and if I had stopped here, you would see several more stars above this review, as I absolutely adored my time with the game. I was hooked. Then, the main plot took over and my feelings toward this game plummeted.
Dutch's gang finds themselves lost in a world that doesn't want them anymore. They seek freedom and excitement, but can't escape the law which seems to be ever looming over their shoulder. As the presence of law becomes stronger in the game, the structure of the game becomes more strict as well, and my frustration began to mirror the characters' frustrations - the game didn't want me to have freedom or play the way that I wanted to anymore either.
Red Dead Redemption 2's main narrative and story-based missions are set on train tracks, and unfortunately rather than being the outlaw able to pilfer through the train for nuggets of excitement and happiness, the player is tied to the tracks and forced to watch the obvious conclusion approach steadily with the realization that this train actually moves at a snail's pace. I understood what was happening very early on (as anyone who played the previous game would), and rather than expand or deepen the ideas presented to make me question things or alter my perspective, the game insists on hammering down the same point over and over again at every possible opportunity.
The game doubles down on this during story quests, inhibiting even gameplay. Over and over again the game took away my customized weapons that I paid for, upgraded, and spent time making look exactly how I want, and replaced them with generic guns it wanted me to use. In one mission, I already brought a scoped rifle, and the game forced me to use another rifle because it had a scope. Other times, antagonists would disappear, teleporting out of existence for the sole reason that they were needed to advance the plot later. The player is constantly forced to play the story missions in the exact way that the game wants, down to the exact guns it wants you to equip, despite large portions of gameplay and themes of the game being based on viewing freedom as a good virtue.
This causes such incredible disconnect that Red Dead Redemption 2 seems a game at war with itself. Much like the narrative within, the game can't decide which virtue to extol - freedom of the world or control of the narrative. In the end, this is an unnecessary choice to try and make, as many games have shown it is possible to embrace both by creative framing of the central narrative around player agency. Red Dead's failure to understand this is the biggest flaw in an otherwise excellent game.
Once the game finally spits you out of the tutorial area, the player is granted an immense amount of freedom - the world is yours. Taking full advantage of this, I ran around trying to experience everything possible and was fully rewarded with an amazingly immersive world. I hunted down gunslingers, found buried treasure, rescued hostages, took no prisoners, bought and customized my own guns and horse, fell victim to a kidnapping, and had so many other unique and memorable experiences off of the beaten path that I was truly in love with everything I was experiencing. I had freedom in how I interacted with the world, and the world actually responded to my choices in how I wanted to handle things, while still remaining mysterious and massive.
The geography available to explore is breathtaking and provides much variation while still holding true to realism. It's surprising how you can ride from snow covered mountains to fictional New Orleans and still feel like the world around you is cohesive and tangibly real. Rockstar perfectly blended the environments into one another both visually and through gameplay, as so much of this cohesion owes itself to the random encounters being flavored for whatever part of the wilderness you are in - you may run into fierce wolves and mountain men in the snowy peaks, or people panning for gold in the western reaches, or southern moonshiners in the swamp. All of it blends together and you are able to live in it, riding your horse back and forth, meeting people, exploring, and just being a cowboy supporting your gang.
Running side-quests with the array of characters are also rewarding experiences with depth and complexity, especially in the ways the game fleshes them out compared to their presence in Red Dead Redemption 1. They do a fantastic job of characterizing Arthur as well, while still giving the player agency in how to handle situations both in and out of combat. The side-stories are often made up of more intricate, down-to-earth style dilemmas and storytelling, which again makes the world and your choices as a player feel more tangible and real.
This was my experience through the early game chapters, and if I had stopped here, you would see several more stars above this review, as I absolutely adored my time with the game. I was hooked. Then, the main plot took over and my feelings toward this game plummeted.
Dutch's gang finds themselves lost in a world that doesn't want them anymore. They seek freedom and excitement, but can't escape the law which seems to be ever looming over their shoulder. As the presence of law becomes stronger in the game, the structure of the game becomes more strict as well, and my frustration began to mirror the characters' frustrations - the game didn't want me to have freedom or play the way that I wanted to anymore either.
Red Dead Redemption 2's main narrative and story-based missions are set on train tracks, and unfortunately rather than being the outlaw able to pilfer through the train for nuggets of excitement and happiness, the player is tied to the tracks and forced to watch the obvious conclusion approach steadily with the realization that this train actually moves at a snail's pace. I understood what was happening very early on (as anyone who played the previous game would), and rather than expand or deepen the ideas presented to make me question things or alter my perspective, the game insists on hammering down the same point over and over again at every possible opportunity.
The game doubles down on this during story quests, inhibiting even gameplay. Over and over again the game took away my customized weapons that I paid for, upgraded, and spent time making look exactly how I want, and replaced them with generic guns it wanted me to use. In one mission, I already brought a scoped rifle, and the game forced me to use another rifle because it had a scope. Other times, antagonists would disappear, teleporting out of existence for the sole reason that they were needed to advance the plot later. The player is constantly forced to play the story missions in the exact way that the game wants, down to the exact guns it wants you to equip, despite large portions of gameplay and themes of the game being based on viewing freedom as a good virtue.
This causes such incredible disconnect that Red Dead Redemption 2 seems a game at war with itself. Much like the narrative within, the game can't decide which virtue to extol - freedom of the world or control of the narrative. In the end, this is an unnecessary choice to try and make, as many games have shown it is possible to embrace both by creative framing of the central narrative around player agency. Red Dead's failure to understand this is the biggest flaw in an otherwise excellent game.
This review contains spoilers
For half a decade, I resisted diving into Red Dead Redemption 2, troubled by the circumstances surrounding its genesis. Learning about the reports of labor exploitation and crunch leading up to its release left me deeply disheartened by the working conditions endured by its developers.
Despite my lingering reservations, I eventually found myself pulled towards the game during a lull in recent releases. Now, having finally immersed myself in Red Dead Redemption 2, I'm grateful for the experience as it is one of the medium’s crowning achievements and a grand, maximalist work of art with one of the most fully realized worlds and some of the best character writing the medium has to offer.
While much has been said about Red Dead Redemption 2's expansive world and its protagonist, Arthur Morgan, I deliberately distanced myself from discussions about the game, allowing my experience to remain fresh.
Describing the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 as "alive" might seem cliche, but it truly embodies a sense of authenticity rarely achieved in open-world games. The world feels genuinely inhabited and organic, surpassing the typical interactive environments found in most games.
This authenticity is the result of numerous intricately woven elements. From the ambient soundtrack and immersive sound effects to the dynamic interactions between characters, coupled with captivating locations and meticulously crafted topography, every aspect harmonizes to create an unparalleled level of immersion.
Simply navigating this game’s environments was a delightful sensory experience. What's more, the world often responds to the player in subtle yet meaningful ways.
In one instance early in the game, I encountered a man in distress, crying out for help after being bitten by a snake. Offering him a health tonic saved his life and earned me his gratitude.
Hours later, while wandering through Valentine, I unexpectedly crossed paths with him again outside the gunsmith's shop. He thanked me for my earlier assistance and generously offered to cover a purchase at the shop.
This encounter was just one of numerous instances where the game acknowledged my actions and later rewarded me with interactions that reflected them, further enhancing the authenticity and believability of its world.
In that sense, it’s one of the least “videogamey” video games I have ever played. Rarely do things in the open world feel prescribed or like you’re tackling checklists, even when you are, such as when you’re hunting one of the game's dozen or so legendary animals or legendary fish.
Some may malign the microsystems in the game that lend a light simulation feel, such as the need to sleep, cook, and eat food. But they all tie back to how you engage with this world.
All of this starkly contrasts the game’s biggest flaw, its mission design. I understand that Rockstar wants to create these bombastic, cinematic, setpiece-driven missions for the player to experience. However, they are seemingly terrified of the player missing out on the carefully choreographed moments. The result is often a frustratingly restrictive mission design that penalizes even slight deviations from the intended experience.
Despite its unnecessarily rigid structure, the mission captivates players with its cinematic presentation, drawing them into the heart of the action.
One example of this is near the end of the game, where I was escorting John Marston during an ambush. Some enemies popped up atop a nearby hill, and I wanted to charge into them with my shotgun to make their little Pinkerton heads explode like overcooked pizza rolls.
Then came the frustration of encountering a fail state that seemed entirely unjustified. The game abruptly informed me that John had perished because I had strayed too far from him, even though I was just a mere 15 feet away.
Another exasperating moment occurred during a covert infiltration of an Army fort alongside Charles. The game instructed me to eliminate soldiers using a bow and arrow silently, but I opted to employ my tomahawk for stealth takedowns instead. Yet, when I approached a lone soldier facing away from me and dispatched him, the game unexpectedly triggered a fail state, citing my supposed detection.
These examples may sound trivial and arbitrary–because they are– but they highlight a significant flaw in the game's design. While many missions and setpieces are undeniably captivating, the underlying structure is marred by these inexplicable constraints, undermining the sense of freedom that the open world otherwise offers to players.
So, if half of the game is so compromised, why am I giving this five stars? Because Red Dead Redemption 2’s biggest triumph is its thought-provoking narrative and incredible character writing.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is ultimately about the death of the yeoman fantasy at the hands of Manifest Destiny and a crumbling way of life for the characters within this world. These are not “good people” in the traditional sense because they rob and kill to make ends meet. They are outlaws in the truest sense of the word, even if–most–Van Der Linde gang members have a sense of honor.
However, as the American state becomes increasingly powerful at the behest of the advancement of capitalism as the dominant economic system, the walls begin to close around them.
The Van Der Linde gang's evolution is stark; initially targeting outlaws, they shift focus to anyone capable of providing the necessary resources for survival. Dutch, the gang's leader, assumes the role of a paternal figure for many, having rescued them from dire circumstances. He wields his revered authority to shield his chosen family, yet his desperation to evade their looming fate intensifies as the game progresses.
In this changing world, there's no place left for the likes of the Van Der Linde gang. Their options narrow to either conforming to the relentless march of the progressing American state or facing annihilation by it. Consequently, Dutch repeatedly seeks one last job, a final endeavor to secure the gang's escape to distant, almost mythical lands like Tahiti.
Arthur painfully recognizes the gang's plummeting prospects and Dutch's unraveling sanity. With each passing moment, Dutch's decisions grow more reckless, leading the gang on a destructive path as they hop from one place to another, endlessly chasing the elusive promise of "one last job” and leaving chaos in their wake.
Yet Arthur and the others continue to follow Dutch, despite their better judgment, because they all love and feel indebted to him even if they know Dutch is likely and unknowingly leading them all to their demise.
The game also astutely observes that the new order replacing the era of outlaws may be even more rotten and corrupt. Under a regime fueled by unchecked capitalism and rampant labor exploitation, the scant remnants of freedom vanish, leaving individuals ensnared in a system that prioritizes profit over human dignity.
Arthur Morgan may well be one of this medium's most nuanced, endearing, and fascinating characters. I was initially drawn in by his rugged cowboy charisma, but over the course of the game, I found myself deeply attached to this mountain of a man.
The game excels in forging a deep connection with Arthur, immersing players in his internal struggles through poignant monologues and meaningful actions. Few games achieve such a profound insight into the protagonist's psyche as this one does with Arthur Morgan.
From the outset, Arthur grapples with inner turmoil, questioning the trajectory of his life, the morality of his deeds, and his purpose in the world.
It's evident that Arthur carries the burden of his past atrocities, which increasingly gnaw at him as he ages. There is a good man within Arthur, but he’s committed grim acts to persist on a path that feels more like destiny than choice. One poignant example is his relationship with Mary, his love interest, whose presence in various side quests underscores the impossibility for Arthur to break free from his tumultuous past and embrace a semblance of normalcy.
Although the game features a morality system ranging from dishonorable to honorable, portraying Arthur as dishonorable feels at odds with the narrative's portrayal of him in a chivalrous light despite his morally ambiguous actions, such as shaking down poor farmers for debt repayment.
As Arthur struggles with this internal dichotomy, he often pushes it to the back of his mind, focusing solely on the day-to-day struggle for survival. However, everything changes later in the game when he receives a devastating diagnosis: an illness that will inevitably lead to his demise: tuberculosis.
Arthur is then compelled to confront the morality of his past actions and their impact on others in the face of his own mortality. Many of the side quests from earlier chapters climax during this period, with Arthur opting to forego the harmful deeds he once would have committed to ease the burdens of those around him.
A poignant example of this transformation is his interaction with Mrs. Downes, a farmer's widow from whom Arthur extorted money earlier in the game. Mrs. Downes succumbs to the same illness that afflicts Arthur, and their encounter serves as a turning point for him. Witnessing her desperate situation, Arthur is overcome with guilt and decides to provide her and her son enough money to escape their hardships. He refrains from seeking forgiveness, feeling unworthy of it.
Although Arthur uses his diagnosis and finite time to help others, he still feels unworthy of redemption.
This marks a significant shift in Arthur's journey towards redemption. No longer able to justify his past actions, he strives to pursue a more righteous path, even if it means going against his former duties as an enforcer for the gang.
Arthur's resolve to help John, who has a family to care for, symbolizes his commitment to breaking free from the gang's destructive cycle once and for all. By this stage, Arthur's disillusionment with Dutch has peaked, and unquestioning loyalty has been replaced by a clear-eyed recognition of Dutch's reckless and senseless actions.
The tipping point comes when Dutch manipulates a group of Lakota natives into a futile diversion, sparking a needless conflict with the US Army, and publicly executes an oil baron without remorse. These actions further cement Arthur's conviction to sever ties with Dutch and his misguided leadership.
Despite being aware of his inevitable demise, Arthur sees John as a beacon of hope, someone with a future worth fighting for. His terminal diagnosis now brings him a sense of clarity and purpose. Unlike those who are uncertain about their fate, Arthur views his impending death as a gift—a catalyst for self-reflection and embarking on a new, righteous path.
Arthur's journey reaches its climax as he aids John in breaking free from the grip of Dutch's manipulative schemes.
In a climactic setpiece, the Pinkertons, relentless pursuers who have been tracking the gang throughout the game, finally close in on them. Both Arthur and John find themselves betrayed and exploited by Dutch during this chase, mere pawns in his relentless pursuit of escape. This pivotal moment marks Arthur’s final redemption, as he sacrifices the final moments of his life to give John and his family enough time to escape.
Arthur passes his hat on to John moments before his death. Knowing his time has come to an end, he finds solace in the knowledge that John and his family will persevere in the face of his imminent demise.
The game’s epilogue has the player taking control of John, grappling with his own identity crisis as he navigates life on the run with his family, unable to break free from the specter of violence looming over them—a haunting echo of Dutch's legacy.
Yet, amidst the turmoil, John finds solace in the memory of his dear friend Arthur, whose selfless sacrifice is a guiding light. Inspired by Arthur's noble example, John resolves to leave the past behind and forge a new path built on the foundation of peace and family.
Although he has long passed, Arthur's indelible presence lingers throughout the epilogue, his actions shaping the very fabric of John's newfound existence. This touching connection is captured in a scene where the player, controlling John, meticulously constructs a house, each frame infused with the symbolic presence of a Blue Jay—a subtle yet profound homage to Arthur's enduring legacy.
In certain folklore traditions, Blue Jays hold symbolic significance as protectors or guardians, believed to be spirits of those who have passed on, watching over and safeguarding their loved ones. It’s not the most subtle symbolism, but it is a deeply heartfelt one nonetheless.
The game concludes with John successfully escaping the lifelong turmoil he and his family endured, all thanks to Arthur's profound influence and the lasting impact of his actions on John's life. However, the conclusion is tinged with a bittersweet realization of the tragic events awaiting John in Red Dead Redemption.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a monumental achievement in both vision and execution. Its immersive open world and compelling narrative transcend many of its shortcomings, such as its flawed mission design. However, it also serves as a sobering reminder of failed leadership, given the labor exploitation that marred its creation—an irony that echoes the game's portrayal of the exploitative nature of capitalism.
While I frequently criticize the current landscape of AAA gaming, which often prioritizes production values over innovation, resulting in skyrocketing budgets and an unsustainable model, I still believe there's a place for grand, maximalist experiences like Red Dead Redemption 2 in the industry–ones that use their massive budgets to expand upon the ambition of the creators. However, not every game should aim for this scale or direction, as doing so contributes to many of the issues plaguing the industry today.
Furthermore, it should prompt us to reflect on the significance of productive labor. When employees are pushed to the brink, logging upwards of 90-hour workweeks and even sleeping under their desks, one has to question the true productivity of such extreme measures. How many problems stemmed from overworked staff, necessitating additional labor to rectify issues—a cycle that likely prolonged development timelines and escalated costs?
There were assuredly ways that Red Dead Redemption 2 could have been the same as it is, with better conditions for its workers, and in fact, it could have been better for it. It’s truly a testament to the will of its creators and their collective vision that, unlike many of the games created under similar conditions, it was released as a triumph.
I think that if you’re someone like me who has put off playing Red Dead Redemption 2 because of your disdain for the circumstances surrounding its creation and the current state of AAA gaming, you should still give it a shot because you will experience something that the developers put their literal blood, sweat, and tears into and the result is a deeply moving and unforgettable experience.
After watching the credits roll, I took a few more hours simply to exist in this world. There wasn’t much left to “do,” but even days later, I found myself wanting to return to that world just to live within it. That’s about the highest praise I can give to an open-world experience. It also left me with a giant Arthur Morgan-sized hole in my heart.
Despite my lingering reservations, I eventually found myself pulled towards the game during a lull in recent releases. Now, having finally immersed myself in Red Dead Redemption 2, I'm grateful for the experience as it is one of the medium’s crowning achievements and a grand, maximalist work of art with one of the most fully realized worlds and some of the best character writing the medium has to offer.
While much has been said about Red Dead Redemption 2's expansive world and its protagonist, Arthur Morgan, I deliberately distanced myself from discussions about the game, allowing my experience to remain fresh.
Describing the world of Red Dead Redemption 2 as "alive" might seem cliche, but it truly embodies a sense of authenticity rarely achieved in open-world games. The world feels genuinely inhabited and organic, surpassing the typical interactive environments found in most games.
This authenticity is the result of numerous intricately woven elements. From the ambient soundtrack and immersive sound effects to the dynamic interactions between characters, coupled with captivating locations and meticulously crafted topography, every aspect harmonizes to create an unparalleled level of immersion.
Simply navigating this game’s environments was a delightful sensory experience. What's more, the world often responds to the player in subtle yet meaningful ways.
In one instance early in the game, I encountered a man in distress, crying out for help after being bitten by a snake. Offering him a health tonic saved his life and earned me his gratitude.
Hours later, while wandering through Valentine, I unexpectedly crossed paths with him again outside the gunsmith's shop. He thanked me for my earlier assistance and generously offered to cover a purchase at the shop.
This encounter was just one of numerous instances where the game acknowledged my actions and later rewarded me with interactions that reflected them, further enhancing the authenticity and believability of its world.
In that sense, it’s one of the least “videogamey” video games I have ever played. Rarely do things in the open world feel prescribed or like you’re tackling checklists, even when you are, such as when you’re hunting one of the game's dozen or so legendary animals or legendary fish.
Some may malign the microsystems in the game that lend a light simulation feel, such as the need to sleep, cook, and eat food. But they all tie back to how you engage with this world.
All of this starkly contrasts the game’s biggest flaw, its mission design. I understand that Rockstar wants to create these bombastic, cinematic, setpiece-driven missions for the player to experience. However, they are seemingly terrified of the player missing out on the carefully choreographed moments. The result is often a frustratingly restrictive mission design that penalizes even slight deviations from the intended experience.
Despite its unnecessarily rigid structure, the mission captivates players with its cinematic presentation, drawing them into the heart of the action.
One example of this is near the end of the game, where I was escorting John Marston during an ambush. Some enemies popped up atop a nearby hill, and I wanted to charge into them with my shotgun to make their little Pinkerton heads explode like overcooked pizza rolls.
Then came the frustration of encountering a fail state that seemed entirely unjustified. The game abruptly informed me that John had perished because I had strayed too far from him, even though I was just a mere 15 feet away.
Another exasperating moment occurred during a covert infiltration of an Army fort alongside Charles. The game instructed me to eliminate soldiers using a bow and arrow silently, but I opted to employ my tomahawk for stealth takedowns instead. Yet, when I approached a lone soldier facing away from me and dispatched him, the game unexpectedly triggered a fail state, citing my supposed detection.
These examples may sound trivial and arbitrary–because they are– but they highlight a significant flaw in the game's design. While many missions and setpieces are undeniably captivating, the underlying structure is marred by these inexplicable constraints, undermining the sense of freedom that the open world otherwise offers to players.
So, if half of the game is so compromised, why am I giving this five stars? Because Red Dead Redemption 2’s biggest triumph is its thought-provoking narrative and incredible character writing.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is ultimately about the death of the yeoman fantasy at the hands of Manifest Destiny and a crumbling way of life for the characters within this world. These are not “good people” in the traditional sense because they rob and kill to make ends meet. They are outlaws in the truest sense of the word, even if–most–Van Der Linde gang members have a sense of honor.
However, as the American state becomes increasingly powerful at the behest of the advancement of capitalism as the dominant economic system, the walls begin to close around them.
The Van Der Linde gang's evolution is stark; initially targeting outlaws, they shift focus to anyone capable of providing the necessary resources for survival. Dutch, the gang's leader, assumes the role of a paternal figure for many, having rescued them from dire circumstances. He wields his revered authority to shield his chosen family, yet his desperation to evade their looming fate intensifies as the game progresses.
In this changing world, there's no place left for the likes of the Van Der Linde gang. Their options narrow to either conforming to the relentless march of the progressing American state or facing annihilation by it. Consequently, Dutch repeatedly seeks one last job, a final endeavor to secure the gang's escape to distant, almost mythical lands like Tahiti.
Arthur painfully recognizes the gang's plummeting prospects and Dutch's unraveling sanity. With each passing moment, Dutch's decisions grow more reckless, leading the gang on a destructive path as they hop from one place to another, endlessly chasing the elusive promise of "one last job” and leaving chaos in their wake.
Yet Arthur and the others continue to follow Dutch, despite their better judgment, because they all love and feel indebted to him even if they know Dutch is likely and unknowingly leading them all to their demise.
The game also astutely observes that the new order replacing the era of outlaws may be even more rotten and corrupt. Under a regime fueled by unchecked capitalism and rampant labor exploitation, the scant remnants of freedom vanish, leaving individuals ensnared in a system that prioritizes profit over human dignity.
Arthur Morgan may well be one of this medium's most nuanced, endearing, and fascinating characters. I was initially drawn in by his rugged cowboy charisma, but over the course of the game, I found myself deeply attached to this mountain of a man.
The game excels in forging a deep connection with Arthur, immersing players in his internal struggles through poignant monologues and meaningful actions. Few games achieve such a profound insight into the protagonist's psyche as this one does with Arthur Morgan.
From the outset, Arthur grapples with inner turmoil, questioning the trajectory of his life, the morality of his deeds, and his purpose in the world.
It's evident that Arthur carries the burden of his past atrocities, which increasingly gnaw at him as he ages. There is a good man within Arthur, but he’s committed grim acts to persist on a path that feels more like destiny than choice. One poignant example is his relationship with Mary, his love interest, whose presence in various side quests underscores the impossibility for Arthur to break free from his tumultuous past and embrace a semblance of normalcy.
Although the game features a morality system ranging from dishonorable to honorable, portraying Arthur as dishonorable feels at odds with the narrative's portrayal of him in a chivalrous light despite his morally ambiguous actions, such as shaking down poor farmers for debt repayment.
As Arthur struggles with this internal dichotomy, he often pushes it to the back of his mind, focusing solely on the day-to-day struggle for survival. However, everything changes later in the game when he receives a devastating diagnosis: an illness that will inevitably lead to his demise: tuberculosis.
Arthur is then compelled to confront the morality of his past actions and their impact on others in the face of his own mortality. Many of the side quests from earlier chapters climax during this period, with Arthur opting to forego the harmful deeds he once would have committed to ease the burdens of those around him.
A poignant example of this transformation is his interaction with Mrs. Downes, a farmer's widow from whom Arthur extorted money earlier in the game. Mrs. Downes succumbs to the same illness that afflicts Arthur, and their encounter serves as a turning point for him. Witnessing her desperate situation, Arthur is overcome with guilt and decides to provide her and her son enough money to escape their hardships. He refrains from seeking forgiveness, feeling unworthy of it.
Although Arthur uses his diagnosis and finite time to help others, he still feels unworthy of redemption.
This marks a significant shift in Arthur's journey towards redemption. No longer able to justify his past actions, he strives to pursue a more righteous path, even if it means going against his former duties as an enforcer for the gang.
Arthur's resolve to help John, who has a family to care for, symbolizes his commitment to breaking free from the gang's destructive cycle once and for all. By this stage, Arthur's disillusionment with Dutch has peaked, and unquestioning loyalty has been replaced by a clear-eyed recognition of Dutch's reckless and senseless actions.
The tipping point comes when Dutch manipulates a group of Lakota natives into a futile diversion, sparking a needless conflict with the US Army, and publicly executes an oil baron without remorse. These actions further cement Arthur's conviction to sever ties with Dutch and his misguided leadership.
Despite being aware of his inevitable demise, Arthur sees John as a beacon of hope, someone with a future worth fighting for. His terminal diagnosis now brings him a sense of clarity and purpose. Unlike those who are uncertain about their fate, Arthur views his impending death as a gift—a catalyst for self-reflection and embarking on a new, righteous path.
Arthur's journey reaches its climax as he aids John in breaking free from the grip of Dutch's manipulative schemes.
In a climactic setpiece, the Pinkertons, relentless pursuers who have been tracking the gang throughout the game, finally close in on them. Both Arthur and John find themselves betrayed and exploited by Dutch during this chase, mere pawns in his relentless pursuit of escape. This pivotal moment marks Arthur’s final redemption, as he sacrifices the final moments of his life to give John and his family enough time to escape.
Arthur passes his hat on to John moments before his death. Knowing his time has come to an end, he finds solace in the knowledge that John and his family will persevere in the face of his imminent demise.
The game’s epilogue has the player taking control of John, grappling with his own identity crisis as he navigates life on the run with his family, unable to break free from the specter of violence looming over them—a haunting echo of Dutch's legacy.
Yet, amidst the turmoil, John finds solace in the memory of his dear friend Arthur, whose selfless sacrifice is a guiding light. Inspired by Arthur's noble example, John resolves to leave the past behind and forge a new path built on the foundation of peace and family.
Although he has long passed, Arthur's indelible presence lingers throughout the epilogue, his actions shaping the very fabric of John's newfound existence. This touching connection is captured in a scene where the player, controlling John, meticulously constructs a house, each frame infused with the symbolic presence of a Blue Jay—a subtle yet profound homage to Arthur's enduring legacy.
In certain folklore traditions, Blue Jays hold symbolic significance as protectors or guardians, believed to be spirits of those who have passed on, watching over and safeguarding their loved ones. It’s not the most subtle symbolism, but it is a deeply heartfelt one nonetheless.
The game concludes with John successfully escaping the lifelong turmoil he and his family endured, all thanks to Arthur's profound influence and the lasting impact of his actions on John's life. However, the conclusion is tinged with a bittersweet realization of the tragic events awaiting John in Red Dead Redemption.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a monumental achievement in both vision and execution. Its immersive open world and compelling narrative transcend many of its shortcomings, such as its flawed mission design. However, it also serves as a sobering reminder of failed leadership, given the labor exploitation that marred its creation—an irony that echoes the game's portrayal of the exploitative nature of capitalism.
While I frequently criticize the current landscape of AAA gaming, which often prioritizes production values over innovation, resulting in skyrocketing budgets and an unsustainable model, I still believe there's a place for grand, maximalist experiences like Red Dead Redemption 2 in the industry–ones that use their massive budgets to expand upon the ambition of the creators. However, not every game should aim for this scale or direction, as doing so contributes to many of the issues plaguing the industry today.
Furthermore, it should prompt us to reflect on the significance of productive labor. When employees are pushed to the brink, logging upwards of 90-hour workweeks and even sleeping under their desks, one has to question the true productivity of such extreme measures. How many problems stemmed from overworked staff, necessitating additional labor to rectify issues—a cycle that likely prolonged development timelines and escalated costs?
There were assuredly ways that Red Dead Redemption 2 could have been the same as it is, with better conditions for its workers, and in fact, it could have been better for it. It’s truly a testament to the will of its creators and their collective vision that, unlike many of the games created under similar conditions, it was released as a triumph.
I think that if you’re someone like me who has put off playing Red Dead Redemption 2 because of your disdain for the circumstances surrounding its creation and the current state of AAA gaming, you should still give it a shot because you will experience something that the developers put their literal blood, sweat, and tears into and the result is a deeply moving and unforgettable experience.
After watching the credits roll, I took a few more hours simply to exist in this world. There wasn’t much left to “do,” but even days later, I found myself wanting to return to that world just to live within it. That’s about the highest praise I can give to an open-world experience. It also left me with a giant Arthur Morgan-sized hole in my heart.
3 stars for arthur morgan 1 star for each finely detailed horse testicle
I've got a thousand problems with this game, but I can't bring myself to give it anything but 5 stars. it just does stuff that no other game does, and the best bits of it are so easy to love. I am still surprised by this, but Arthur Morgan is my favorite character in any video game. brilliant writing and tremendous scope.
The Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions
🎜 "The many miles we walked, the many things we learned" 🎝
May possible be one of the biggest and longest open world games I've ever played. Almost 90h worth of mainline content and I can't imagine how much there's left for me when it comes to side content, let alone achievements. It was, for the lack of a better word: "A wild ride" to behold. It's in a whole another league compared to what we currently have in the industry and probably hasn't won't be replicated ever again. Was the sacrifice worth? Yes, to some extent.
Let's start this reading with a simple question...what is Realism? Cambridge Dictionary says: "A way of thinking and acting based on facts and what is possible, rather than on hopes for things that are unlikely to happen". Dictionary.com says: "The tendency to view or represent things as they really are". Why did I bring that up? You see, Red Dead Redemption 2 is full to the brim with details in every department it can cover or be developed on, is it really though? No, of course not is not perfectly "Realistic" but, it's realistic in a way a videogame can be, just before it starts to be annoying. Same goes for the word "Immersion", stranded in a world were you can feel it really exist, and you're part of it. "Realism" and "Immersion" are two sides of the same coin, while not exaclty meaning the same, they are rules that a certain work uses to make a peaceful cohesion in a fictional world. Realism can help a world feel more immersive since it's using real world rules, something that I think everyone knows by now. Immersion can work on it's own and does not need realism to make a world feel "real".
🎜 "..The building of a shrine. Only just to burn" 🎝
Why is Fallout New Vegas as a game more immersive than Red Dead Redemption 2? It's all about being consistent. Fallout's World doesn't aim to be "Realistic" it aims to be immersive, while Red Dead Redemption 2 tries to be both, and sort of fails in both categories. This was just a realisation I had after skinning so much animals in the wild, some had stupidly long animations that I felt were just made for comedic purposes and some didn't even had any animations to begin with. Why just don't go all the way in? Game just shitted the pants in front of me after flexing for so long I could skin an animal in with some very gruesome long animations. It was one of the most shocking aspects of Red Dead Redemption 2 to me, it could've been a perfect game in my eyes if it really want to go all in with it's mechanics. It's inconsistent, for the most part and this isn't immersive nor realistic, it's frustrating. And I can't get over the fact Rockstar did that to themselves, meaning it was intentional. As a game it is still bounded by Rockstar's philosphy.
🎝 "Shine light into darkness" 🎜
Let's just get the possitives out of the way first because this game has a lot of it. First off the story is all around great and enjoyable, really long too probably lasting as much as 90h. Arthur Morgan is a great character, everything you want in a cowboy. But most of all, he's human with all it's flaws and strenghts that comes with it, further elevated by Dutch's actions during the game. It's like you're playing as some sort of innofensive gang of villains all the way through the game surviving the rampant change of times in the middle of nowhere. It's a compelling tale from start to end, even if it drags for way more than needed. I've heard once "Time affects the way you feel towards someone or something" and I think it applies perfectly to this game.
It's not just Arthur, the whole gang adds something of value to the group of outlaws, again with it's flaws and strenghts and no one is absolutely in top of another, except for Dutch. The most important characters in the game are the ones that end going through the biggest changes, or in the words of Arthur: "Just reveal who they really are". The writting takes a huge leap in quality compared to Rockstar's past works as well, I can admire that any day of the week. I think the title of this review encapsulates the story very well too, the wrong sacrifice for a greater good or something like that. The soundtrack, which surprisngly most of it it's original as much as the first game is impecable and captures the feeling and themes of "Desolation", the very last breath of the wild west with Arthur and "Union", the new born man finally living in society with John. I love it.
As the title of this review says "Good Intentions". Most of the negatives I just remarked, are positive for others that aren't me or some of you that didn't like this game personally. It's a sacrifice towards accesibility. I still remember reading a news article saying something like "70yo grandpa has played Red Dead Redemption 2 campaing over 20 times" or so it said. That made me smile a bit, knowing that there are people out there that are willing to play games but can't sink time in something so demanding and hostile towards them. And I'm glad this type of game exist for the right people that love it. But, Why just don't go all the way in? Rockstar is a master of their craft, but can't seem to understand their formula, desing isn't flawless in this day and age. What may have been acceptable in GTA III, in 2001 isn't much in Red Dead Redemption 2, 17 years down the road. It's a philosophy, a way of living such as Dutch said. Even if isn't perfect and they have to stand for it.
🎝 "That's the way it is" 🎝
Even if the story is great and pretty much perfect, it's sadly encapsulated, sealed in a perfectly safe bubble, a world apart from the open world. They're two separated entities working under the same roof. There's story missions Arthur Morgan which tells Dutch that killing people is a big no-no, and there is open world Arthur Morgan which internally disagrees and has commited mass genocide in Rhodes and Valentine in broad daylight, the open world does not mean much to the story and the story does not mean much to the open world itself, aside from some specific occations but they don't work together at all. This has been an issue with Rockstar in general. Specially in something, just to give you an example GTA IV. But in this game is much more aggravating knowing there are more decisions to be made, it either rewards or punishes for your behiavor, since you have more options to interact with the enviroment at your dissposal. You choose the way you want to be in the, that very system is reduced to a serviceable Honor System. The Honor only affects the open world slice of this title and affects the story in very minor key details which are some specific cutscenes towards the end of the game, before the epilogue to be exact.
And they created this fictional world that is so huge, detailed and...well...full of scripted events. It's the same plague that rottens the main campaing. Once you've seen everything that there is too it, it means there is nothing beyond it. It's scripted you can't change what's there...in a video game...a medium known for it's interactivity. A world to me doesn't just end in looking pretty, full of activities to waste your time on and scripted events. It needs to be alive. Sorry to bring up Fallout New Vegas again, but the Mojave as ugly as it can be I personally feel more connected to it because it let's me do whatever I want and I'm not limited beyond the game already tells me. And sure, you can say in Fallout New Vegas the game is "scripted" but it opens the possibility to change the world around your decisions, not just you having a bounty on your head or not, so it limits itself to a binary system without any gray zones in between.
There is too much passion, blood and tears put into this game. Down to every minuscule detail, it's honestly excessive because this isn't a "Cowboy Simulator", it comes from Rockstar; the same company that coded Grand Theft Auto V's driving. Then what? It's Red Dead Redemption just GTA's boring brother? Is GTA going to fill that rampage arcady fun of many people? Is it RDR going to be even more immersive in the next entry? Too many questions when it comes to identity, GTA V and RDR 2 are the total opossite in the same vein GTA IV and Red Dead Revolver are. Talking about excessive, Rockstar Games were caught making crounch on their developers while making Red Dead Redemption 2. The horse ball conversation is more than known by the public by now, but it's the perfect example of making pointless details that might have put just for fun at the detriment of some employees. Just imagine someone consantly supervising the work of the horse testicles shrinking by cold temperatures and all the variables that comes with them, and you're the one in charge. It honestly doesn't sound that fun. A leadership like this? Starts to sound Dutch, ambition knows no bounds for the greater good of everyone but your people.
Honestly, this game is good. But it's severly flawed. If it wasn't for the impecable story and writting probably I would've not continued playing it. Not even the survival elements can make it for a decent replay, since for the most part everything is automated and slow because "Realism". It's frustrating to know so much effort went in a game that is loved by millions but it's a clear example that more doesn't always mean better It's a game thar is less that the sum of it's parts, which means if we evaluate each component individually we'll get very high ups and very low downs.
But thanks Arthur, for trying.
🎜 "The many miles we walked, the many things we learned" 🎝
May possible be one of the biggest and longest open world games I've ever played. Almost 90h worth of mainline content and I can't imagine how much there's left for me when it comes to side content, let alone achievements. It was, for the lack of a better word: "A wild ride" to behold. It's in a whole another league compared to what we currently have in the industry and probably hasn't won't be replicated ever again. Was the sacrifice worth? Yes, to some extent.
Let's start this reading with a simple question...what is Realism? Cambridge Dictionary says: "A way of thinking and acting based on facts and what is possible, rather than on hopes for things that are unlikely to happen". Dictionary.com says: "The tendency to view or represent things as they really are". Why did I bring that up? You see, Red Dead Redemption 2 is full to the brim with details in every department it can cover or be developed on, is it really though? No, of course not is not perfectly "Realistic" but, it's realistic in a way a videogame can be, just before it starts to be annoying. Same goes for the word "Immersion", stranded in a world were you can feel it really exist, and you're part of it. "Realism" and "Immersion" are two sides of the same coin, while not exaclty meaning the same, they are rules that a certain work uses to make a peaceful cohesion in a fictional world. Realism can help a world feel more immersive since it's using real world rules, something that I think everyone knows by now. Immersion can work on it's own and does not need realism to make a world feel "real".
🎜 "..The building of a shrine. Only just to burn" 🎝
Why is Fallout New Vegas as a game more immersive than Red Dead Redemption 2? It's all about being consistent. Fallout's World doesn't aim to be "Realistic" it aims to be immersive, while Red Dead Redemption 2 tries to be both, and sort of fails in both categories. This was just a realisation I had after skinning so much animals in the wild, some had stupidly long animations that I felt were just made for comedic purposes and some didn't even had any animations to begin with. Why just don't go all the way in? Game just shitted the pants in front of me after flexing for so long I could skin an animal in with some very gruesome long animations. It was one of the most shocking aspects of Red Dead Redemption 2 to me, it could've been a perfect game in my eyes if it really want to go all in with it's mechanics. It's inconsistent, for the most part and this isn't immersive nor realistic, it's frustrating. And I can't get over the fact Rockstar did that to themselves, meaning it was intentional. As a game it is still bounded by Rockstar's philosphy.
🎝 "Shine light into darkness" 🎜
Let's just get the possitives out of the way first because this game has a lot of it. First off the story is all around great and enjoyable, really long too probably lasting as much as 90h. Arthur Morgan is a great character, everything you want in a cowboy. But most of all, he's human with all it's flaws and strenghts that comes with it, further elevated by Dutch's actions during the game. It's like you're playing as some sort of innofensive gang of villains all the way through the game surviving the rampant change of times in the middle of nowhere. It's a compelling tale from start to end, even if it drags for way more than needed. I've heard once "Time affects the way you feel towards someone or something" and I think it applies perfectly to this game.
It's not just Arthur, the whole gang adds something of value to the group of outlaws, again with it's flaws and strenghts and no one is absolutely in top of another, except for Dutch. The most important characters in the game are the ones that end going through the biggest changes, or in the words of Arthur: "Just reveal who they really are". The writting takes a huge leap in quality compared to Rockstar's past works as well, I can admire that any day of the week. I think the title of this review encapsulates the story very well too, the wrong sacrifice for a greater good or something like that. The soundtrack, which surprisngly most of it it's original as much as the first game is impecable and captures the feeling and themes of "Desolation", the very last breath of the wild west with Arthur and "Union", the new born man finally living in society with John. I love it.
As the title of this review says "Good Intentions". Most of the negatives I just remarked, are positive for others that aren't me or some of you that didn't like this game personally. It's a sacrifice towards accesibility. I still remember reading a news article saying something like "70yo grandpa has played Red Dead Redemption 2 campaing over 20 times" or so it said. That made me smile a bit, knowing that there are people out there that are willing to play games but can't sink time in something so demanding and hostile towards them. And I'm glad this type of game exist for the right people that love it. But, Why just don't go all the way in? Rockstar is a master of their craft, but can't seem to understand their formula, desing isn't flawless in this day and age. What may have been acceptable in GTA III, in 2001 isn't much in Red Dead Redemption 2, 17 years down the road. It's a philosophy, a way of living such as Dutch said. Even if isn't perfect and they have to stand for it.
🎝 "That's the way it is" 🎝
Even if the story is great and pretty much perfect, it's sadly encapsulated, sealed in a perfectly safe bubble, a world apart from the open world. They're two separated entities working under the same roof. There's story missions Arthur Morgan which tells Dutch that killing people is a big no-no, and there is open world Arthur Morgan which internally disagrees and has commited mass genocide in Rhodes and Valentine in broad daylight, the open world does not mean much to the story and the story does not mean much to the open world itself, aside from some specific occations but they don't work together at all. This has been an issue with Rockstar in general. Specially in something, just to give you an example GTA IV. But in this game is much more aggravating knowing there are more decisions to be made, it either rewards or punishes for your behiavor, since you have more options to interact with the enviroment at your dissposal. You choose the way you want to be in the, that very system is reduced to a serviceable Honor System. The Honor only affects the open world slice of this title and affects the story in very minor key details which are some specific cutscenes towards the end of the game, before the epilogue to be exact.
And they created this fictional world that is so huge, detailed and...well...full of scripted events. It's the same plague that rottens the main campaing. Once you've seen everything that there is too it, it means there is nothing beyond it. It's scripted you can't change what's there...in a video game...a medium known for it's interactivity. A world to me doesn't just end in looking pretty, full of activities to waste your time on and scripted events. It needs to be alive. Sorry to bring up Fallout New Vegas again, but the Mojave as ugly as it can be I personally feel more connected to it because it let's me do whatever I want and I'm not limited beyond the game already tells me. And sure, you can say in Fallout New Vegas the game is "scripted" but it opens the possibility to change the world around your decisions, not just you having a bounty on your head or not, so it limits itself to a binary system without any gray zones in between.
There is too much passion, blood and tears put into this game. Down to every minuscule detail, it's honestly excessive because this isn't a "Cowboy Simulator", it comes from Rockstar; the same company that coded Grand Theft Auto V's driving. Then what? It's Red Dead Redemption just GTA's boring brother? Is GTA going to fill that rampage arcady fun of many people? Is it RDR going to be even more immersive in the next entry? Too many questions when it comes to identity, GTA V and RDR 2 are the total opossite in the same vein GTA IV and Red Dead Revolver are. Talking about excessive, Rockstar Games were caught making crounch on their developers while making Red Dead Redemption 2. The horse ball conversation is more than known by the public by now, but it's the perfect example of making pointless details that might have put just for fun at the detriment of some employees. Just imagine someone consantly supervising the work of the horse testicles shrinking by cold temperatures and all the variables that comes with them, and you're the one in charge. It honestly doesn't sound that fun. A leadership like this? Starts to sound Dutch, ambition knows no bounds for the greater good of everyone but your people.
Honestly, this game is good. But it's severly flawed. If it wasn't for the impecable story and writting probably I would've not continued playing it. Not even the survival elements can make it for a decent replay, since for the most part everything is automated and slow because "Realism". It's frustrating to know so much effort went in a game that is loved by millions but it's a clear example that more doesn't always mean better It's a game thar is less that the sum of it's parts, which means if we evaluate each component individually we'll get very high ups and very low downs.
But thanks Arthur, for trying.
Everything wrong with the video gaming industry packed in one abomination
(have not played btw)
(have not played btw)
Painfully Average. That is all I have to say about this game.
Edit: I think I might replay this one, I only got 5 hours in originally and got bored
Edit: I think I might replay this one, I only got 5 hours in originally and got bored
To make it short: RDR2 is THE best open world game that has been ever made, obviously by the studio that has been making THE best open world games out there. It's superior on all levels to all other games that claim to be open world and is only one of the very few that truly live up to the genre name.
If I wasn't such a fan of Final Fantasy X, I would say without a shadow of a doubt that Red Dead Redemption 2 is the greatest game I've ever played. I got into RDR2 at the request of several around me who had been prodding me for years and years to finally get on it, I didn't have a PS4 for some time and didn't have a capable PC either so I had held if off. Lo and behold upgrade time came and I finally got on both the proverbial and actual train.
RDR2 starts off slow, and I mean really slow. I think for the first few hours I might have touch a key other than W maybe one or two times (major hyperbole there) but you are doing a LOT of walking and following. However throughout the story of Dutch Van Der Linde's infamous gang, things and people start to change. Greed and anger seep their way into the gang slowly but surely over the fifty+ hour experience.
This game is the definition of a slowburn, but what you get in the payoff is quite easily a top two written story and the greatest open world in attention to detail ever made. Fans of the original Red Dead Redemption are probably aware that this is no shocker, but the minutia that Rockstar gets into here is absolutely off the wall. Animals, people, the weather all interact in unique ways, you're never sure to see the same thing twice in the same location.
The story of Red Dead 2 takes the form of a multi-season cowboy television show, it feels almost surreal in how un-rushed and realistic it is. Fear and death follows Arthur Morgan everywhere he goes whether its his fault or somebody elses. The twists and foreshadowing that occur throughout this game will have you audibly gasping and pausing as they unveil.
Though the ending you can see a mile away, it's the delivery Rockstar achieved that will make anybody no matter how manly they are, cry some damn cowboy tears.
RDR2 starts off slow, and I mean really slow. I think for the first few hours I might have touch a key other than W maybe one or two times (major hyperbole there) but you are doing a LOT of walking and following. However throughout the story of Dutch Van Der Linde's infamous gang, things and people start to change. Greed and anger seep their way into the gang slowly but surely over the fifty+ hour experience.
This game is the definition of a slowburn, but what you get in the payoff is quite easily a top two written story and the greatest open world in attention to detail ever made. Fans of the original Red Dead Redemption are probably aware that this is no shocker, but the minutia that Rockstar gets into here is absolutely off the wall. Animals, people, the weather all interact in unique ways, you're never sure to see the same thing twice in the same location.
The story of Red Dead 2 takes the form of a multi-season cowboy television show, it feels almost surreal in how un-rushed and realistic it is. Fear and death follows Arthur Morgan everywhere he goes whether its his fault or somebody elses. The twists and foreshadowing that occur throughout this game will have you audibly gasping and pausing as they unveil.
Though the ending you can see a mile away, it's the delivery Rockstar achieved that will make anybody no matter how manly they are, cry some damn cowboy tears.
What a ride.
In my eyes, Red Dead Redemption 2 is an absolute masterpiece - and I hardly ever use that word! It has everything I could possibly ask for in a game: an unique and memorable cast of characters, catchy soundtrack, enjoyable gameplay and my favorite story in a video game.
There's many great things to be said about this game, so I'm starting with the immersive world, the scenery and sheer amount of detail put into just about everything. I expected the open world to be as generic as a Far Cry open world outside of the cities, but was pleasantly surprised. Not just in the sense of how it looks in terms of graphics, but also in terms of structure and pathing. It's just a joy to explore and you can always find something new on a trip. Whether it be a random encounter or change in weather, the game will keep you entertained while riding from A to B. Speaking of the weather, I absolutely love the many different weathers in the game. Ranging from a thick fog to a heavy sandstorm, there is a lot of variation in the weathers and not just the "standard" sunny/cloudy/rainy/stormy weathers present in most games. You know your game looks good when photo mode doesn't do it justice and seeing the scenery in-game is just a better experience overall.
As I mentioned before, I believe Red Dead Redemption 2 has one of the best written narratives in gaming and is my favorite story in a game as of right now. The characters act natural and the relationships between gang members also come off as pretty realistic to me. I like that unlike in other games not everyone got along with each other, just because they're part of the same crew. In terms of best written characters in the game, I'd say Arthur and Dutch easily take the top spots. I've also really enjoyed the characters of John, Sadie and even Micah. Arthur is just an amazing protagonist in general and Roger Clark really delivers his lines and the emotions within them. Then again, I believe all voice actors did a really good job for this game; I don't remember even one voice sounding off for a character. And they certainly had a lot of fun recording the lines, you can feel that.
Now onto some other positive tidbits about the game. The customization is great and you've got many different outfit parts to mix and match. Honor as a mechanic is also well done, because you indirectly influence some parts of the game depending on your good and bad deeds. Having high honor will allow you to get discounts in shops and new outfits, while low honor will make NPCs dislike you and you'll get worse loot from enemies. Also here I'd like to add that (in my opinion) there's hardly any real filler content in the game and everything has atleast some meaning to it.
But what about the gameplay itself? Hunting and tracking down animals, fishing and playing cards is a fun way to spend your time, but what's important in a game like this, is how the gunplay feels - and I believe it feels really good! Thankfully the revolvers have a certain power to them already, but rifles are also great to use with their extended zoom.
If I were to mention flaws about RDR2, there really wasn't anything major things that bothered me, just two little things that got annoying at times. The worst offender by far was "Mash A to run/boost horse", which just exists to give you thumb pain for no reason. Second point is the game forcing two weapons on you before any big fight, spoiling the surprise already. I also believe having two large guns on your back looks silly, but as I addressed earlier, this can't really be called an "issue", since it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the game overall.
Personally, I believe I have made my point clear - I like this game! A lot actually. And that's because it is a good game and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a world to just get immersed in. Now excuse me while I go think about Arthur Morgan again.
In my eyes, Red Dead Redemption 2 is an absolute masterpiece - and I hardly ever use that word! It has everything I could possibly ask for in a game: an unique and memorable cast of characters, catchy soundtrack, enjoyable gameplay and my favorite story in a video game.
There's many great things to be said about this game, so I'm starting with the immersive world, the scenery and sheer amount of detail put into just about everything. I expected the open world to be as generic as a Far Cry open world outside of the cities, but was pleasantly surprised. Not just in the sense of how it looks in terms of graphics, but also in terms of structure and pathing. It's just a joy to explore and you can always find something new on a trip. Whether it be a random encounter or change in weather, the game will keep you entertained while riding from A to B. Speaking of the weather, I absolutely love the many different weathers in the game. Ranging from a thick fog to a heavy sandstorm, there is a lot of variation in the weathers and not just the "standard" sunny/cloudy/rainy/stormy weathers present in most games. You know your game looks good when photo mode doesn't do it justice and seeing the scenery in-game is just a better experience overall.
As I mentioned before, I believe Red Dead Redemption 2 has one of the best written narratives in gaming and is my favorite story in a game as of right now. The characters act natural and the relationships between gang members also come off as pretty realistic to me. I like that unlike in other games not everyone got along with each other, just because they're part of the same crew. In terms of best written characters in the game, I'd say Arthur and Dutch easily take the top spots. I've also really enjoyed the characters of John, Sadie and even Micah. Arthur is just an amazing protagonist in general and Roger Clark really delivers his lines and the emotions within them. Then again, I believe all voice actors did a really good job for this game; I don't remember even one voice sounding off for a character. And they certainly had a lot of fun recording the lines, you can feel that.
Now onto some other positive tidbits about the game. The customization is great and you've got many different outfit parts to mix and match. Honor as a mechanic is also well done, because you indirectly influence some parts of the game depending on your good and bad deeds. Having high honor will allow you to get discounts in shops and new outfits, while low honor will make NPCs dislike you and you'll get worse loot from enemies. Also here I'd like to add that (in my opinion) there's hardly any real filler content in the game and everything has atleast some meaning to it.
But what about the gameplay itself? Hunting and tracking down animals, fishing and playing cards is a fun way to spend your time, but what's important in a game like this, is how the gunplay feels - and I believe it feels really good! Thankfully the revolvers have a certain power to them already, but rifles are also great to use with their extended zoom.
If I were to mention flaws about RDR2, there really wasn't anything major things that bothered me, just two little things that got annoying at times. The worst offender by far was "Mash A to run/boost horse", which just exists to give you thumb pain for no reason. Second point is the game forcing two weapons on you before any big fight, spoiling the surprise already. I also believe having two large guns on your back looks silly, but as I addressed earlier, this can't really be called an "issue", since it didn't hamper my enjoyment of the game overall.
Personally, I believe I have made my point clear - I like this game! A lot actually. And that's because it is a good game and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a world to just get immersed in. Now excuse me while I go think about Arthur Morgan again.
fully automated gambling is a mainstay of digital entertainment, but whenever its presence is established in other titles i never once felt the need to participate. too much time, too little reward. i imagine most players feel the same given the achievement stats for new vegas, a title where hustling on the strip is the game’s core motif. and yet in spite of my disposition, i found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in red dead redemption II playing poker. when i wasn’t playing poker, i’d be hitting blackjack, and if i wasn’t betting against the dealer i’d be making my bones in dominoes. on paper, none of this served any real practical purpose. unlike the brisk pleasures of most computerized gambling, a round of poker in RDR2 takes much, much more time – your opponents need to shuffle the deck, lay out the cards, or place their chips on a bet. sometimes their decisions won’t be near instantaneous, and in all cases, the victor will smugly reap the spoils of their bet, dragging their hoard of chips inwards. as if the protracted length of gambling wasn’t enough, RDR2 axes the high-stakes poker variant from the original game, so even in the best-case scenario – a six player poker match, no player leaves early, and you rob everyone of their chips – you can only stand to net $25 dollars in profit. a handsome sum in 1899, but a pittance in contrast to RDR2’s other revenue streams, especially when you factor in the time investment. it’s all too likely you’ll end up losing money if you gamble poorly. why bother?
i still gambled a lot though. no matter the inconvenience of the supposed realism on offer, i wanted to fleece people. i wanted to stop and think about my decisions, and i wanted to withstand droughts of bad luck only to tap in when fortune was turning in my favour. and i guess uncle’s smug aura at camp made me want to rip him off all the more. the defining trait which enables this engagement is also RDR2’s greatest strength: the level of verisimilitude it aspires to. the slowing-down-of-affairs intrinsic to RDR2 is somewhat uncharacteristic of rockstar, but they’ve thrown their immense weight behind a kind of granularity not often observed even in comparable massive AAA productions. i honestly think it saved the game for me. i had to force myself through gritted teeth to finish the first red dead and GTA IV, and i’ll never finish GTA V at this rate, but conversely for close to three weeks straight i lost myself in rockstar’s portrait of the old, dying west, however illusory it was.
GTA is very much predicated on extreme player agency in real-world facsimile. the dedication the team committed to this vision creates this inherent friction where in the absence of real limitation, the world rarely feels alive but feels more akin to a little diorama or a quite literal playspace. the devil is always in the details with these titles, but i find the fetishism for the microscopic to be little more than framing at best and rote at worst. maybe if you walk the streets of san andreas in GTA V and get lost in a suburb, quietly observing the mundane (they need an umarell minigame in these games), a lived-in feeling really does exist, but this does not feel like genuine intent so much as it feels like supporting the foundation of american pantomime.
while the quotidian is nothing more than a byproduct in GTA, its function in RDR2 is the games essence. new to the series are various impositions which carefully stitch together simulation elements, asking for a stronger degree of investment from the player than past rockstar entries, both in a literal and abstracted sense. hunger and stamina have to be continually managed for both the player and their steed, money is harder to come by than prior rockstar games, and every activity (hunting, fishing, crafting, cooking, gambling, weapons maintenance, chores + camp support, horse grooming, even just simple travel given that fast travel isn’t immediately present) represents an innate time investment – gone is the sense of casual gratification, tightened ever so slightly more for the sake of a more cohesive world. naturally i’d be remiss to not point out they’re intrusive to only the mildest of degrees - it’s certainly the ‘fastest’ game ive ever played with a simulation bent - and rockstar’s aim here isn’t necessarily to rock the boat but instead one of vanity, to impress with their technological prowess and visual panache.
i understand that rockstar titles are now once-in-a-generation events subject to whatever epoch of games discourse they are releasing in but it is with great amusement that i look back to two strands of dominant conversation at the time of the game’s release: that it is too realistic for its own good, and that its mission design is archaic. both are conversational topics that, at least from my perspective, miss the forest for the trees with critical rdr2 discussion, and at least partially feel like people taking rockstar to task for GTA IV & V’s design after forgetting to do so the first time. firstly, everything addressed as cumbersome in rdr2 is polished to a mirror sheen; whatever truth might be found regarding rockstars digital fetishism impacting personal enjoyment loses a bit of edge when one considers that the inconveniences imposed on the player are essentially operating at a bare minimum. for every measure of sternness here there is a comical remedy. players might be expected to have attire fitting for the climate zone they travel in lest they suffer core drainage, but the reality is that preparation is easy, conducted through lenient menu selection, and at no point is the player strictly via the main narrative made to trudge through the underutilized snowy regions. even a snowy mission in the epilogue automatically equips you with a warm coat, negating the need for foresight. temperature penalties are easily negated for lengthy periods of time if you consume meals that fortify your cores. you don’t even really, honestly have to eat. the penalties associated with the ‘underweight’ class don’t obstruct players very much and individuals can forego the core system entirely just to rely on health cures and tonics alike, meaning it’s a survival/simulation system carefully planned out so certain kinds of players don’t actually have to engage with the systems at all. the most egregious offender for the audience, then, is time investment, for which my rebuttal is nothing so eloquent: just that it’s barely a significant one. there’s something genuinely fascinating about this undercurrent of somewhat strained response to an AAA production making the slightest of efforts to cultivate a stricter set of systems for immersion only to be met with the claim that it goes against the basic appeal of games, something which i at least find consistently prescriptive, contradictory, and totally self-interested. that breath of the wilds approach to open world design predates this is probably at least somewhat contributory - after all its priorities are to filter reality and freedom through more sharply accented and cohesive game design, far from the totalizing rigidity of rockstars work – but it’s not a case of one needing to mimic the other when it’s simpler to state that the contrasting titles just have different priorities. all this is to say that RDR2 is really missing something without some kind of hardcore mode, which would have probably increased my personal enjoyment exponentially and led to a tighter game.
secondly, the complaints regarding mission design are reductive and downplay a much, much broader foundational problem. there are a lot more missions that i actually liked compared to the usual rockstar fare this time, in part because character dialogue is mostly serviceable and not grating, but also because several of them are content to serve characterization or to convey some kind of tailored experience. all the best missions bring the combat to a halt rather than a crescendo. serve on a mission alongside hosea, for instance, and the odds are unlikely you’ll end up drawing your revolver. likewise certain missions are focused entirely on camaraderie, narrative, or some other kind of unique quality. this works really well in spite of the game’s tendency to anchor the proceedings to the mechanically dull yet market-proven gunslinging. it’s unfortunate to center so much of this game around combat when the shooting rarely, if ever, registers as more than serviceable; pulling the trigger feels great, but its repetition, lack of intimate level or encounter design, and oddly weighted aiming reticule underscore a game in need of some kind of revision. strangely enough there are many options for mixing melee approaches and gunslinging in a manner that feels close to appealing but is never leaned on because it’s just not efficient, paired nicely with level design, or geared towards survivability. likewise, the scores of ammunition types and combative crafting options feels redundant in the face of the simplicity of the ol’ reliable revolver and repeater, the lack of genuine ammunition limitation (you’re always able to stock more ammo than you could ever reasonably need) and every enemy’s total vulnerability to precise aim.
but the fact that there are genuinely enjoyable missions that focus more on the game’s verisimilitude is indicative of my chief takeaway from RDR2: all of my favourite components of the game managed to make me finally understand the appeal of the rockstar portfolio, and all of my least favourite components reminded me that i was playing a rockstar game, with a formula and brand reputation that now serves as a millstone around the neck obstructing genuine innovation or risk. for one thing, it was absolutely lost on me until RDR2 that these are open world games which are concerned with a loose sense of role playing but don’t much care for the implementation of stats, skill trees, abilities, or what have you. because these systems are handled with more care than in the past, i found there to be genuine pleasure in this complete reprieve from the mechanical, with an emphasis towards simply just existing and being. without the admittedly illusory constraints of the core systems or the time investment required from its activities, i may not have stopped to have felt any of it – it would have been every bit as inconsequential as GTA. but RDR2 demands to be soaked in. its landscapes really are vast and gorgeous. the permutations of the weather can lead to some dazzling displays; tracking and hunting down the legendary wolf at the cotorra springs during a thunderstorm is imagery permanently seared into my brain even after dozens upon dozens of hours of play.
however well-intentioned it is though, this emphasis on simulation betrays a tendency towards excess that is profoundly damaging and saddles RDR2 with a lot of detritus where a sharper lens would have benefitted its approach to simulation. this is especially bad when considering that a good deal of these extraneous elements are where the crunch surrounding RDR2’s development is most inextricably felt. broader discourse often struggles to find a way to discuss bad labour practices without either treating it as a footnote in the history of an otherwise ‘good’ title (thereby excising its role in production completely) or only writing about it from a pro-labour critical stance, but RDR2 makes my work in reconciling these threads easy: it’s just too sweeping in scope for its own good, and it’s difficult to see how mismanagement and crunch resulted in a better game. after years of these scathing reports and discussions, it’s hard not to let out a grim chuckle when you reach the game’s epilogue, which opens up an entire state in RDR2, only to realize that all this landmass has zero main narrative context. new austin and the grizzlies are massive regions, perhaps not pointless in their inclusion per se, but the campaign has difficulties integrating them yet leaves them present in their totality. it’s a wealth of untamed land included for its own sake.
this is especially frustrating because the game’s structure is suggestive of, strangely enough, sly cooper. the van der linde gang moves further and further away from the west over the course of the game into new and uncharted territory and in each chapter, comes to grips with the surrounding locales trying to pinpoint where the next great score or heist may present itself. every time seems like a small reinvention. the atmosphere at camp changes, new dialogues present themselves, new opportunities, and the narrative is content to settle on one small pocket of the world rather than its sum. perhaps it’s not the rockstar modus operandi but when i realized this was the game’s impetus, i thought it would have been a fantastic way to try something different, for a change – to focus on a small number of higher density regions with a bit less sprawl. i think at least part of why i feel this way is because the narrative is not one bit committed to its stakes. they want you to feel like an outlaw on the run, the law at your heels, the world shrinking around you, and your freedoms slowly being siphoned away, and yet there’s no tangible consequence in RDR2’s worldstate for sticking around valentine, strawberry, or rhodes – three towns that you wreak significant havoc in – like there is for even daring to return to blackwater, the site of a massacre which kickstarts the events of the game proper. obviously the ability to return to blackwater would break the story on its hinges, which is treated as such, but it’s hard to say why any other town gets a free pass.
anyways i find it somewhat ironic that after a journey replete with as many peaks and valleys as the old west it's modeled on, it's the comparatively muted epilogue which is still holding my attention and adoration. the first game's epilogue was, similarly, a striking coda to a wildly uneven experience. after screeching to a halt for its final act, RDR1's culminating grace notes center around a hollow, self-gratifying act of vengeance which succinctly underscored the alienation & ennui of the world you were left stranded in. it was a weirdly audacious swing for rockstar to take in 2010 - to explicate the ever-present emptiness and artificiality of their worlds as part and parcel of RDR1's thematic intent – but in spite of my dislike of the rest of the title, i found that it resonated with me.
RDR2 has a somewhat similar ace up its sleeve. following the game's highest point of intensity, the player (now with john marston taking the reins instead of arthur morgan) is thrust into a narrative scenario ill at ease with the game's prior formal language, seemingly begging at all turns for the player to put up their guns. every triumph in the epilogue chapters won by means of gunslinging bravado is, as a result, sharply dissonant; the score is often explosive, almost mythic in the way that it recalls RDR1, but there's a sort of uncanniness present because, in leveraging its prequel status, one has total clarity as to where this path eventually leads. like in RDR1, the throughline here is still one of inevitability.
complimenting this is the epilogue's equal amount of focus afforded towards john struggling to acclimate to the simple pleasures of domesticity. a natural extension of john’s unexpectedly genius characterization in RDR2’s narrative up to this point as arthur’s perpetually irresponsible and imprudent little brother, this focus on smaller-scale character study allows for his character to be more fleshed-out than he ever was in RDR1. similarly, the missions present in the epilogue are afforded more variance than anywhere else in the main game, taking the title’s previously established simulation elements and bringing them to the forefront of the proceedings. taking your wife out for a nice day in the town is probably my favourite mission in the game - it felt tender in a way that i have never once come to expect from these titles.
it's a taut novella that honestly represents some of rockstars finest work, so naturally it's only accessible after some 40-70 hours of ho hum debauchery and mediocrity. no reason to waste more time on this so let’s carve through the more important bullet points quickly. arthur is a wonderful protagonist, likely the best rockstar has conceptualized for how he compliments the structure of these games. he’s someone who isn’t a lone wolf nor a second-in-command, but rather a mover and shaker who is third in the hierarchy and remains blinded by both loyalty, cynicism, and self-hatred. it’s a reasonable enough marriage between the game’s pressing narrative demands and the freedom to act that a rockstar title is built on, disregarding the horrid implementation of a trite morality system. all the little flourishes animating his character are excellent – the journal he writes in quickly became one of my favourite features of the game. roger clark’s performance alone is enough to carry the game’s writing when it sags, which it often does – clemens point and guarma are terrible chapters. side quests are also largely bad, save for a few that present themselves in the beaver hollow chapter - up until this point they are rife with the kind of desperate attempts at juvenile humour rockstar built their empire on. it’s less good that so much of arthur’s arc is connected to the game’s worst characters in dutch and micah. rockstar’s writers just do not have the capacity and talent to bring the vision of a charismatic leader to life in dutch – they want you to believe in the slow-brewing ruination of the gang and dutch’s descent into despotism but the reality is he starts the game off as an insecure, inept, and frayed captain and only gets much, much worse as the game chugs along. micah is just despicable and not in a compelling way, an active thorn in everyone’s side who no one likes and whose presence makes everything worse. reading about the van der linde gang’s initially noble exploits in-game and contrasting it with an early mission where micah kills almost everyone in a town to retrieve his revolvers is actively comical and it never really stops gnawing at one’s mind. just registers as a total impossibility that not one person in the gang considers this guy an active liability to continued survival. i think he’s someone who can be salvaged since he’s already an inverse to arthur and implicitly serves as a foil to john but not enough work was done to make these elements of the character grounded or believable. cartoon villain level depravity, dude sucks.
the rest of the characters range broadly from underused & underwritten to charming in a quaint way. arthur and john are the highlights, i liked charles and uncle, the rest...mixed bag of successes and failures. javier and bill are more well-realized than their RDR1 incarnations, but most of their character work is tucked away in optional & hidden scenes. sadie is one of the few other characters to be given narrative prominence towards the end, and she kind of really sucks. the list goes on. despite this, lingering in camp is so easily one of the game's strongest draws - wandering around and seeing hundreds upon hundreds of little randomized interactions is a delight, and there's no doubt in my mind that i still missed scores of them.
those more inclined to cynicism probably won't be able to reconcile any of this game's messy threads, and its strengths will likely be eclipsed by its tendencies towards waste as well as its tactless emulation of prestige drama, but for a time i found my own pleasure in the illusion of the west. i think i felt enthralled by it realizing that this was the closest to a great experience rockstar had in them, knowing that they're only likely to regress from here on. rockstar has an unfortunate habit of only being able to conceptualize one’s relationship to their environment if it’s predicated on danger, but at its best RDR2 is able to overcome this, however briefly it might last.
i still gambled a lot though. no matter the inconvenience of the supposed realism on offer, i wanted to fleece people. i wanted to stop and think about my decisions, and i wanted to withstand droughts of bad luck only to tap in when fortune was turning in my favour. and i guess uncle’s smug aura at camp made me want to rip him off all the more. the defining trait which enables this engagement is also RDR2’s greatest strength: the level of verisimilitude it aspires to. the slowing-down-of-affairs intrinsic to RDR2 is somewhat uncharacteristic of rockstar, but they’ve thrown their immense weight behind a kind of granularity not often observed even in comparable massive AAA productions. i honestly think it saved the game for me. i had to force myself through gritted teeth to finish the first red dead and GTA IV, and i’ll never finish GTA V at this rate, but conversely for close to three weeks straight i lost myself in rockstar’s portrait of the old, dying west, however illusory it was.
GTA is very much predicated on extreme player agency in real-world facsimile. the dedication the team committed to this vision creates this inherent friction where in the absence of real limitation, the world rarely feels alive but feels more akin to a little diorama or a quite literal playspace. the devil is always in the details with these titles, but i find the fetishism for the microscopic to be little more than framing at best and rote at worst. maybe if you walk the streets of san andreas in GTA V and get lost in a suburb, quietly observing the mundane (they need an umarell minigame in these games), a lived-in feeling really does exist, but this does not feel like genuine intent so much as it feels like supporting the foundation of american pantomime.
while the quotidian is nothing more than a byproduct in GTA, its function in RDR2 is the games essence. new to the series are various impositions which carefully stitch together simulation elements, asking for a stronger degree of investment from the player than past rockstar entries, both in a literal and abstracted sense. hunger and stamina have to be continually managed for both the player and their steed, money is harder to come by than prior rockstar games, and every activity (hunting, fishing, crafting, cooking, gambling, weapons maintenance, chores + camp support, horse grooming, even just simple travel given that fast travel isn’t immediately present) represents an innate time investment – gone is the sense of casual gratification, tightened ever so slightly more for the sake of a more cohesive world. naturally i’d be remiss to not point out they’re intrusive to only the mildest of degrees - it’s certainly the ‘fastest’ game ive ever played with a simulation bent - and rockstar’s aim here isn’t necessarily to rock the boat but instead one of vanity, to impress with their technological prowess and visual panache.
i understand that rockstar titles are now once-in-a-generation events subject to whatever epoch of games discourse they are releasing in but it is with great amusement that i look back to two strands of dominant conversation at the time of the game’s release: that it is too realistic for its own good, and that its mission design is archaic. both are conversational topics that, at least from my perspective, miss the forest for the trees with critical rdr2 discussion, and at least partially feel like people taking rockstar to task for GTA IV & V’s design after forgetting to do so the first time. firstly, everything addressed as cumbersome in rdr2 is polished to a mirror sheen; whatever truth might be found regarding rockstars digital fetishism impacting personal enjoyment loses a bit of edge when one considers that the inconveniences imposed on the player are essentially operating at a bare minimum. for every measure of sternness here there is a comical remedy. players might be expected to have attire fitting for the climate zone they travel in lest they suffer core drainage, but the reality is that preparation is easy, conducted through lenient menu selection, and at no point is the player strictly via the main narrative made to trudge through the underutilized snowy regions. even a snowy mission in the epilogue automatically equips you with a warm coat, negating the need for foresight. temperature penalties are easily negated for lengthy periods of time if you consume meals that fortify your cores. you don’t even really, honestly have to eat. the penalties associated with the ‘underweight’ class don’t obstruct players very much and individuals can forego the core system entirely just to rely on health cures and tonics alike, meaning it’s a survival/simulation system carefully planned out so certain kinds of players don’t actually have to engage with the systems at all. the most egregious offender for the audience, then, is time investment, for which my rebuttal is nothing so eloquent: just that it’s barely a significant one. there’s something genuinely fascinating about this undercurrent of somewhat strained response to an AAA production making the slightest of efforts to cultivate a stricter set of systems for immersion only to be met with the claim that it goes against the basic appeal of games, something which i at least find consistently prescriptive, contradictory, and totally self-interested. that breath of the wilds approach to open world design predates this is probably at least somewhat contributory - after all its priorities are to filter reality and freedom through more sharply accented and cohesive game design, far from the totalizing rigidity of rockstars work – but it’s not a case of one needing to mimic the other when it’s simpler to state that the contrasting titles just have different priorities. all this is to say that RDR2 is really missing something without some kind of hardcore mode, which would have probably increased my personal enjoyment exponentially and led to a tighter game.
secondly, the complaints regarding mission design are reductive and downplay a much, much broader foundational problem. there are a lot more missions that i actually liked compared to the usual rockstar fare this time, in part because character dialogue is mostly serviceable and not grating, but also because several of them are content to serve characterization or to convey some kind of tailored experience. all the best missions bring the combat to a halt rather than a crescendo. serve on a mission alongside hosea, for instance, and the odds are unlikely you’ll end up drawing your revolver. likewise certain missions are focused entirely on camaraderie, narrative, or some other kind of unique quality. this works really well in spite of the game’s tendency to anchor the proceedings to the mechanically dull yet market-proven gunslinging. it’s unfortunate to center so much of this game around combat when the shooting rarely, if ever, registers as more than serviceable; pulling the trigger feels great, but its repetition, lack of intimate level or encounter design, and oddly weighted aiming reticule underscore a game in need of some kind of revision. strangely enough there are many options for mixing melee approaches and gunslinging in a manner that feels close to appealing but is never leaned on because it’s just not efficient, paired nicely with level design, or geared towards survivability. likewise, the scores of ammunition types and combative crafting options feels redundant in the face of the simplicity of the ol’ reliable revolver and repeater, the lack of genuine ammunition limitation (you’re always able to stock more ammo than you could ever reasonably need) and every enemy’s total vulnerability to precise aim.
but the fact that there are genuinely enjoyable missions that focus more on the game’s verisimilitude is indicative of my chief takeaway from RDR2: all of my favourite components of the game managed to make me finally understand the appeal of the rockstar portfolio, and all of my least favourite components reminded me that i was playing a rockstar game, with a formula and brand reputation that now serves as a millstone around the neck obstructing genuine innovation or risk. for one thing, it was absolutely lost on me until RDR2 that these are open world games which are concerned with a loose sense of role playing but don’t much care for the implementation of stats, skill trees, abilities, or what have you. because these systems are handled with more care than in the past, i found there to be genuine pleasure in this complete reprieve from the mechanical, with an emphasis towards simply just existing and being. without the admittedly illusory constraints of the core systems or the time investment required from its activities, i may not have stopped to have felt any of it – it would have been every bit as inconsequential as GTA. but RDR2 demands to be soaked in. its landscapes really are vast and gorgeous. the permutations of the weather can lead to some dazzling displays; tracking and hunting down the legendary wolf at the cotorra springs during a thunderstorm is imagery permanently seared into my brain even after dozens upon dozens of hours of play.
however well-intentioned it is though, this emphasis on simulation betrays a tendency towards excess that is profoundly damaging and saddles RDR2 with a lot of detritus where a sharper lens would have benefitted its approach to simulation. this is especially bad when considering that a good deal of these extraneous elements are where the crunch surrounding RDR2’s development is most inextricably felt. broader discourse often struggles to find a way to discuss bad labour practices without either treating it as a footnote in the history of an otherwise ‘good’ title (thereby excising its role in production completely) or only writing about it from a pro-labour critical stance, but RDR2 makes my work in reconciling these threads easy: it’s just too sweeping in scope for its own good, and it’s difficult to see how mismanagement and crunch resulted in a better game. after years of these scathing reports and discussions, it’s hard not to let out a grim chuckle when you reach the game’s epilogue, which opens up an entire state in RDR2, only to realize that all this landmass has zero main narrative context. new austin and the grizzlies are massive regions, perhaps not pointless in their inclusion per se, but the campaign has difficulties integrating them yet leaves them present in their totality. it’s a wealth of untamed land included for its own sake.
this is especially frustrating because the game’s structure is suggestive of, strangely enough, sly cooper. the van der linde gang moves further and further away from the west over the course of the game into new and uncharted territory and in each chapter, comes to grips with the surrounding locales trying to pinpoint where the next great score or heist may present itself. every time seems like a small reinvention. the atmosphere at camp changes, new dialogues present themselves, new opportunities, and the narrative is content to settle on one small pocket of the world rather than its sum. perhaps it’s not the rockstar modus operandi but when i realized this was the game’s impetus, i thought it would have been a fantastic way to try something different, for a change – to focus on a small number of higher density regions with a bit less sprawl. i think at least part of why i feel this way is because the narrative is not one bit committed to its stakes. they want you to feel like an outlaw on the run, the law at your heels, the world shrinking around you, and your freedoms slowly being siphoned away, and yet there’s no tangible consequence in RDR2’s worldstate for sticking around valentine, strawberry, or rhodes – three towns that you wreak significant havoc in – like there is for even daring to return to blackwater, the site of a massacre which kickstarts the events of the game proper. obviously the ability to return to blackwater would break the story on its hinges, which is treated as such, but it’s hard to say why any other town gets a free pass.
anyways i find it somewhat ironic that after a journey replete with as many peaks and valleys as the old west it's modeled on, it's the comparatively muted epilogue which is still holding my attention and adoration. the first game's epilogue was, similarly, a striking coda to a wildly uneven experience. after screeching to a halt for its final act, RDR1's culminating grace notes center around a hollow, self-gratifying act of vengeance which succinctly underscored the alienation & ennui of the world you were left stranded in. it was a weirdly audacious swing for rockstar to take in 2010 - to explicate the ever-present emptiness and artificiality of their worlds as part and parcel of RDR1's thematic intent – but in spite of my dislike of the rest of the title, i found that it resonated with me.
RDR2 has a somewhat similar ace up its sleeve. following the game's highest point of intensity, the player (now with john marston taking the reins instead of arthur morgan) is thrust into a narrative scenario ill at ease with the game's prior formal language, seemingly begging at all turns for the player to put up their guns. every triumph in the epilogue chapters won by means of gunslinging bravado is, as a result, sharply dissonant; the score is often explosive, almost mythic in the way that it recalls RDR1, but there's a sort of uncanniness present because, in leveraging its prequel status, one has total clarity as to where this path eventually leads. like in RDR1, the throughline here is still one of inevitability.
complimenting this is the epilogue's equal amount of focus afforded towards john struggling to acclimate to the simple pleasures of domesticity. a natural extension of john’s unexpectedly genius characterization in RDR2’s narrative up to this point as arthur’s perpetually irresponsible and imprudent little brother, this focus on smaller-scale character study allows for his character to be more fleshed-out than he ever was in RDR1. similarly, the missions present in the epilogue are afforded more variance than anywhere else in the main game, taking the title’s previously established simulation elements and bringing them to the forefront of the proceedings. taking your wife out for a nice day in the town is probably my favourite mission in the game - it felt tender in a way that i have never once come to expect from these titles.
it's a taut novella that honestly represents some of rockstars finest work, so naturally it's only accessible after some 40-70 hours of ho hum debauchery and mediocrity. no reason to waste more time on this so let’s carve through the more important bullet points quickly. arthur is a wonderful protagonist, likely the best rockstar has conceptualized for how he compliments the structure of these games. he’s someone who isn’t a lone wolf nor a second-in-command, but rather a mover and shaker who is third in the hierarchy and remains blinded by both loyalty, cynicism, and self-hatred. it’s a reasonable enough marriage between the game’s pressing narrative demands and the freedom to act that a rockstar title is built on, disregarding the horrid implementation of a trite morality system. all the little flourishes animating his character are excellent – the journal he writes in quickly became one of my favourite features of the game. roger clark’s performance alone is enough to carry the game’s writing when it sags, which it often does – clemens point and guarma are terrible chapters. side quests are also largely bad, save for a few that present themselves in the beaver hollow chapter - up until this point they are rife with the kind of desperate attempts at juvenile humour rockstar built their empire on. it’s less good that so much of arthur’s arc is connected to the game’s worst characters in dutch and micah. rockstar’s writers just do not have the capacity and talent to bring the vision of a charismatic leader to life in dutch – they want you to believe in the slow-brewing ruination of the gang and dutch’s descent into despotism but the reality is he starts the game off as an insecure, inept, and frayed captain and only gets much, much worse as the game chugs along. micah is just despicable and not in a compelling way, an active thorn in everyone’s side who no one likes and whose presence makes everything worse. reading about the van der linde gang’s initially noble exploits in-game and contrasting it with an early mission where micah kills almost everyone in a town to retrieve his revolvers is actively comical and it never really stops gnawing at one’s mind. just registers as a total impossibility that not one person in the gang considers this guy an active liability to continued survival. i think he’s someone who can be salvaged since he’s already an inverse to arthur and implicitly serves as a foil to john but not enough work was done to make these elements of the character grounded or believable. cartoon villain level depravity, dude sucks.
the rest of the characters range broadly from underused & underwritten to charming in a quaint way. arthur and john are the highlights, i liked charles and uncle, the rest...mixed bag of successes and failures. javier and bill are more well-realized than their RDR1 incarnations, but most of their character work is tucked away in optional & hidden scenes. sadie is one of the few other characters to be given narrative prominence towards the end, and she kind of really sucks. the list goes on. despite this, lingering in camp is so easily one of the game's strongest draws - wandering around and seeing hundreds upon hundreds of little randomized interactions is a delight, and there's no doubt in my mind that i still missed scores of them.
those more inclined to cynicism probably won't be able to reconcile any of this game's messy threads, and its strengths will likely be eclipsed by its tendencies towards waste as well as its tactless emulation of prestige drama, but for a time i found my own pleasure in the illusion of the west. i think i felt enthralled by it realizing that this was the closest to a great experience rockstar had in them, knowing that they're only likely to regress from here on. rockstar has an unfortunate habit of only being able to conceptualize one’s relationship to their environment if it’s predicated on danger, but at its best RDR2 is able to overcome this, however briefly it might last.
When playing RDR2, the main comparison that kept popping into my head was with Shenmue. Its not a 1-to-1 comparison, but there are parallels that kept becoming more apparent the more I played it, and maybe serve to help explain why I didn't quite connect to RDR2 in the way that seemingly lots of people have. Superficially, they're both highly acclaimed open world games with very high production values, maybe even too high, given their famously insane development costs. They're both steeped in a sort of simulated immersive realism, with a scattershot approach to their mechanics providing a toybox for the player to experiment outside the critical path. They both borrow from other mediums for inspiration, namely film and television, and both outstayed their welcome with me. They both gesture at some rather grand ideas related to family, revenge, greed but never quite managed to emotionally connect in the way I think they wanted me to, though perhaps for quite different reasons. They both have stealth sections I wish weren't in the game.
On its own, RDR2 leaves me with pretty ambivalent feelings. The most obvious place to start is with the technical aspects. RDR2 is probably one of the most impressive technical achievements of the medium when it comes to photorealism. Especially as I start to learn more about photography and lighting in my own game dev career knowing all that goes into it, I could genuinely spend hours just standing in the middle of a field looking at the clouds and the beautifully rendered rays of sunlight. This is especially impressive because for the most part I'm really not that obsessed with this sort of thing as I think the average gamer is, considering the rave reviews it received aided in large part by this technical marvel. Really, I think photorealism is a fool's game, and later on I'll explain how RDR2 kinda proves me right in that sense, but its so disarmingly beautiful that I'll forgive its too high cost and relatively unimaginative art direction. As Joseph Stalin once said : "the boundless beauty of planet earth has an art direction all of its own".
As I walk through a meticulously researched, faithful recreation of NOT New Orleans full of fully modeled, textured and lit representatives of the era overhearing conversations in different languages, greeting strangers who I can at any point stick up and start a micro story of my own with a high speed chase with the law ending with me blowing them all up with dynamite, well I start to understand why people of 1998 would poop their pants when they realized they could open up their grandma's cupboard and pick up an orange and rotate freely about Ryo Hazuki's hands. I'm actually working on a game set in a similar-ish time period and a week or so ago I was struggling to figure out how to model a particular victorian street lamp, whose exact model I found in the game in one of the towns and went "ohh so thats how they did it". It was not even the last time I saw something in the game which I had done something similar to, which was pretty cool to see.
Spoilers for RDR2
The problem though, with the world of RDR2, is that I don't think it wants to BE an open world. I think maybe this type of thing made more sense in GTA, from 3 onwards where seemingly the campaign was there to both tutorialise all of the toys but also to provide a break from the unstructured mayhem to a more structured set of goals. This might work better when the sandbox is the focus, and the story mostly taking the piss with its tongue-in-cheek satirical tone. In RDR2 though, this structure is at odds with itself. For all the meticulously crafted, reactive playset being created here, it cannot be allowed to mess with the critical path on the one hand, with a lot of the games' progression gated off (like the guns) by story missions and conversely the story is undercut by the freedom allowed by the open world. It makes me feel as if every chapter was at one point supposed to be a contained open world section before moving to the next, but was simply stitched together into one big mess. "Here's Saint Denis Arthur, a monument to the current transition to industrialised capitalism and urbanisation in the wake of manifest destiny having been fully realized, this world of technological wonders contrasted with the poverty, pollution and discrimination of the Jim Crow era". "Yeah I know Dutch, I was here last week". A police chief greeted me in the game's epilogue and told me "Welcome to Town" even though I had just completed like 2 main story missions where he hired me to hunt a bounty.
There was a bit during the game's 2nd chapter (which is incidentally the chapter with the highest drop off in players on Steam on account of its length most likely) where I was getting inmersed in the camp, greeting the well realized colourful cast of characters interacting with each other when one of them said something along the lines of "well this sure beats being in those mountains" and "yeah it feels like we're getting back on our feet" and it stuck out to me because this was at a time where I was still doing sidequests and exploring for its own sake, added to the fact that this was a torturously long chapter of the game, it felt so incongruous. This is something you say when its been a week since we left the mountains, but it felt like it would have been like 3 months. Maybe this is just my own fucked up perception of time, but its hard not to notice how drawn out a lot of the chapters are. There is also the matter of the mission structure, which involves mostly riding back and forth with another character and then getting into a token shootout. Its almost comical considering how much of the narrative seems to focus on the grey morality of the gang and their seeming downward spiral from semi robin hood figures (criminals with a heart of gold maybe) into common thugs, when just in the cause of regular gameplay Arthur has killed enough people to populate a small country. Its another point at which the open world and missions clash, getting roped into a massacre in a mission leaves me with a massive bounty in a particular part of the map, but no worries, I can just pay off the bounty that came from me murdering 30 peoplein cold blood! Not the bounty from the inciting incident that kickstarts the game's plot mind you. It even undermines the thematic arc of the game of the days of the old west being over, the land now "tamed" (a nice detail being that there are several tourist attractions with the owners speaking of their clients from new york coming to "Experience the wild west" as the sanitized version of myth which was quickly capitalised upon by the likes of Buffalo Bill irl) with Arthur remarking that back in the old days one could simply escape trouble by moving to the next town, but in the logic of the bounty system, thats still the case! And for all that the gang is chased across america, this seems mostly to come from their continued attempts at killing and robbing people, rather than the law catching up with them all that much. The pinkertons show up once in a while but even then.
The game's story, whilst compelling, feels unsure of whether or not it wants a player, given how closely choreographed and railroaded the mission structures are. Much of the game feels like a designer trying to figure out how to cram in character dialogue whilst the player is actually doing something. Its another case where a game borrows so many cues from television that you start to wonder, what is the point of it all? Why make this and not just a season of HBO Presents : Arthur Morgan. What is it the game adds beyond the need to have token shootouts every 5 seconds, undermining the realism the game's systems and aesthetics are trying so hard to achieve? Well, for the most part the answer lies in the camp. If there is one thing that has kept me coming back to RDR2 for a whole 50 goddamned hours its the camp, the home base that the game is built around. The opportunities for roleplaying and really getting inmersed into this world, with a dozen or so well rounded, well realized characters interacting with the player and each other, catching glimpses of their lives and hopes and fears. Its great. As much as the game is far too long and the gameplay uninspired, the excellent dialogue and the roleplaying aspect where enough to keep me going to the finish line. So much so I reread Arthur's journal at the end and genuinely caught myself reading it in his particular cadence and voice in my head. He's a compelling character and if there had been more of the moments where Arthur interacts with Mary Linton, or walking around helping Rains Falls, maybe this would be the best game ever, but for everyone of those there are missions where you go a place and shoot a bunch of people, and another submission where a passerby begs you to help them and it involves riding on your horse for 10 minutes as they verbally explain their entire life's story and personality to you. Understandable that the quality of the game's writing would vary this much considering that by the look of the credits, more people worked on this game than on the Pyramids.
So much of the game's story feels like token, unfocused filler, a means to an end with the end being "Arthur gets closer to realising that Dutch is a complete fuckhead who doesn't know what he's doing". The Epilogue especially feels unnecessary except for perhaps the final confrontation but even then. I admit that I haven't played 1, but I am almost sure that all that bullshit in building the ranch and going clean and reconciling with Marston's wife ends with his wife and kid getting murdered within the first 15 minutes of that game. Its the prequel issue I suppose, like how much of BCS is spent on building the superlab even though its entire purpose is to exist for Walter to cook in and then destroy. At the end of it all though, I think the biggest failing for me is that after all that, despite Arthur Morgan's compelling character arc as he tries to do some good with what little time he has left, he died and I didn't really feel all that sad, nor did I cry, which is rather embarassing because I'm very easy to get to cry with sad stories. Added to that 6 hours of a goddamned epilogue have dampened even that. Idk man, Shenmue I felt disconnected to because I fundamentally couldn't really understand or relate to Ryo Hazuki or give much of a shit for his quest, but with RDR2 I just don't even know what to make of it. Maybe that's okay.
On its own, RDR2 leaves me with pretty ambivalent feelings. The most obvious place to start is with the technical aspects. RDR2 is probably one of the most impressive technical achievements of the medium when it comes to photorealism. Especially as I start to learn more about photography and lighting in my own game dev career knowing all that goes into it, I could genuinely spend hours just standing in the middle of a field looking at the clouds and the beautifully rendered rays of sunlight. This is especially impressive because for the most part I'm really not that obsessed with this sort of thing as I think the average gamer is, considering the rave reviews it received aided in large part by this technical marvel. Really, I think photorealism is a fool's game, and later on I'll explain how RDR2 kinda proves me right in that sense, but its so disarmingly beautiful that I'll forgive its too high cost and relatively unimaginative art direction. As Joseph Stalin once said : "the boundless beauty of planet earth has an art direction all of its own".
As I walk through a meticulously researched, faithful recreation of NOT New Orleans full of fully modeled, textured and lit representatives of the era overhearing conversations in different languages, greeting strangers who I can at any point stick up and start a micro story of my own with a high speed chase with the law ending with me blowing them all up with dynamite, well I start to understand why people of 1998 would poop their pants when they realized they could open up their grandma's cupboard and pick up an orange and rotate freely about Ryo Hazuki's hands. I'm actually working on a game set in a similar-ish time period and a week or so ago I was struggling to figure out how to model a particular victorian street lamp, whose exact model I found in the game in one of the towns and went "ohh so thats how they did it". It was not even the last time I saw something in the game which I had done something similar to, which was pretty cool to see.
Spoilers for RDR2
The problem though, with the world of RDR2, is that I don't think it wants to BE an open world. I think maybe this type of thing made more sense in GTA, from 3 onwards where seemingly the campaign was there to both tutorialise all of the toys but also to provide a break from the unstructured mayhem to a more structured set of goals. This might work better when the sandbox is the focus, and the story mostly taking the piss with its tongue-in-cheek satirical tone. In RDR2 though, this structure is at odds with itself. For all the meticulously crafted, reactive playset being created here, it cannot be allowed to mess with the critical path on the one hand, with a lot of the games' progression gated off (like the guns) by story missions and conversely the story is undercut by the freedom allowed by the open world. It makes me feel as if every chapter was at one point supposed to be a contained open world section before moving to the next, but was simply stitched together into one big mess. "Here's Saint Denis Arthur, a monument to the current transition to industrialised capitalism and urbanisation in the wake of manifest destiny having been fully realized, this world of technological wonders contrasted with the poverty, pollution and discrimination of the Jim Crow era". "Yeah I know Dutch, I was here last week". A police chief greeted me in the game's epilogue and told me "Welcome to Town" even though I had just completed like 2 main story missions where he hired me to hunt a bounty.
There was a bit during the game's 2nd chapter (which is incidentally the chapter with the highest drop off in players on Steam on account of its length most likely) where I was getting inmersed in the camp, greeting the well realized colourful cast of characters interacting with each other when one of them said something along the lines of "well this sure beats being in those mountains" and "yeah it feels like we're getting back on our feet" and it stuck out to me because this was at a time where I was still doing sidequests and exploring for its own sake, added to the fact that this was a torturously long chapter of the game, it felt so incongruous. This is something you say when its been a week since we left the mountains, but it felt like it would have been like 3 months. Maybe this is just my own fucked up perception of time, but its hard not to notice how drawn out a lot of the chapters are. There is also the matter of the mission structure, which involves mostly riding back and forth with another character and then getting into a token shootout. Its almost comical considering how much of the narrative seems to focus on the grey morality of the gang and their seeming downward spiral from semi robin hood figures (criminals with a heart of gold maybe) into common thugs, when just in the cause of regular gameplay Arthur has killed enough people to populate a small country. Its another point at which the open world and missions clash, getting roped into a massacre in a mission leaves me with a massive bounty in a particular part of the map, but no worries, I can just pay off the bounty that came from me murdering 30 peoplein cold blood! Not the bounty from the inciting incident that kickstarts the game's plot mind you. It even undermines the thematic arc of the game of the days of the old west being over, the land now "tamed" (a nice detail being that there are several tourist attractions with the owners speaking of their clients from new york coming to "Experience the wild west" as the sanitized version of myth which was quickly capitalised upon by the likes of Buffalo Bill irl) with Arthur remarking that back in the old days one could simply escape trouble by moving to the next town, but in the logic of the bounty system, thats still the case! And for all that the gang is chased across america, this seems mostly to come from their continued attempts at killing and robbing people, rather than the law catching up with them all that much. The pinkertons show up once in a while but even then.
The game's story, whilst compelling, feels unsure of whether or not it wants a player, given how closely choreographed and railroaded the mission structures are. Much of the game feels like a designer trying to figure out how to cram in character dialogue whilst the player is actually doing something. Its another case where a game borrows so many cues from television that you start to wonder, what is the point of it all? Why make this and not just a season of HBO Presents : Arthur Morgan. What is it the game adds beyond the need to have token shootouts every 5 seconds, undermining the realism the game's systems and aesthetics are trying so hard to achieve? Well, for the most part the answer lies in the camp. If there is one thing that has kept me coming back to RDR2 for a whole 50 goddamned hours its the camp, the home base that the game is built around. The opportunities for roleplaying and really getting inmersed into this world, with a dozen or so well rounded, well realized characters interacting with the player and each other, catching glimpses of their lives and hopes and fears. Its great. As much as the game is far too long and the gameplay uninspired, the excellent dialogue and the roleplaying aspect where enough to keep me going to the finish line. So much so I reread Arthur's journal at the end and genuinely caught myself reading it in his particular cadence and voice in my head. He's a compelling character and if there had been more of the moments where Arthur interacts with Mary Linton, or walking around helping Rains Falls, maybe this would be the best game ever, but for everyone of those there are missions where you go a place and shoot a bunch of people, and another submission where a passerby begs you to help them and it involves riding on your horse for 10 minutes as they verbally explain their entire life's story and personality to you. Understandable that the quality of the game's writing would vary this much considering that by the look of the credits, more people worked on this game than on the Pyramids.
So much of the game's story feels like token, unfocused filler, a means to an end with the end being "Arthur gets closer to realising that Dutch is a complete fuckhead who doesn't know what he's doing". The Epilogue especially feels unnecessary except for perhaps the final confrontation but even then. I admit that I haven't played 1, but I am almost sure that all that bullshit in building the ranch and going clean and reconciling with Marston's wife ends with his wife and kid getting murdered within the first 15 minutes of that game. Its the prequel issue I suppose, like how much of BCS is spent on building the superlab even though its entire purpose is to exist for Walter to cook in and then destroy. At the end of it all though, I think the biggest failing for me is that after all that, despite Arthur Morgan's compelling character arc as he tries to do some good with what little time he has left, he died and I didn't really feel all that sad, nor did I cry, which is rather embarassing because I'm very easy to get to cry with sad stories. Added to that 6 hours of a goddamned epilogue have dampened even that. Idk man, Shenmue I felt disconnected to because I fundamentally couldn't really understand or relate to Ryo Hazuki or give much of a shit for his quest, but with RDR2 I just don't even know what to make of it. Maybe that's okay.
I wish I could give this game the lengthy, detailed review that it deserves, but unfortunately my memory doesn't allow for that, so this will have to do.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a perfect game, held back by it's own perfectionism. It works so hard to make everything feel as good as it possibly can that as a result there's simply too much. It took me over 3 years to complete this, and as someone who can easily bash out a 150-hour JRPG in a month or two, that really says something.
Now obviously I wasn't playing it consistently, not after the first 3 months. But seriously.. 3 months! To reach the Epilogue! For 3 months I played this game - and this was back when I used to pick a single thing and play that in basically all of my free time. Granted I spent a lot of that time doing optional activities, but even considering that the game is just SO, BIG.
I remember coming back after around 6 months and deciding to finally get through the Epilogue one weekend while I was visiting my mum over Christmas. About 15 hours later I'd barely scratched the surface of Part 2. (Yep, that's right. Even the fkn Epilogue is 2 parts long!)
After that, it was a hefty 3 year break, playing for maybe an hour once or twice in between before fully committing to beating it recently.
The point I'm trying to make - quite fittingly in the most roundabout way possible - is that this game is by all means incredible. The attention to detail is unmatched, the cast and story are superb, and the fact that Rockstar did all this to set up RDR1 ... They went so far beyond the call it's laughably impressive.
But alas, it's just too much. I'm giving this game a 5/5 because it absolutely deserves it. But unfortunately Rockstar's tedious game design and absolutely insane scale of everything in it means that I, personally, had to experience it in such a way that by the time the credits rolled, everything prior to the Epilogue was already a fading memory. And that kinda sucks.
I would love to replay this game in a more appropriate way, start to finish without years-long breaks. Maybe some day..
(My gf is definitely gunna make me watch her play it once a year eventually though it's fine huehue)
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a perfect game, held back by it's own perfectionism. It works so hard to make everything feel as good as it possibly can that as a result there's simply too much. It took me over 3 years to complete this, and as someone who can easily bash out a 150-hour JRPG in a month or two, that really says something.
Now obviously I wasn't playing it consistently, not after the first 3 months. But seriously.. 3 months! To reach the Epilogue! For 3 months I played this game - and this was back when I used to pick a single thing and play that in basically all of my free time. Granted I spent a lot of that time doing optional activities, but even considering that the game is just SO, BIG.
I remember coming back after around 6 months and deciding to finally get through the Epilogue one weekend while I was visiting my mum over Christmas. About 15 hours later I'd barely scratched the surface of Part 2. (Yep, that's right. Even the fkn Epilogue is 2 parts long!)
After that, it was a hefty 3 year break, playing for maybe an hour once or twice in between before fully committing to beating it recently.
The point I'm trying to make - quite fittingly in the most roundabout way possible - is that this game is by all means incredible. The attention to detail is unmatched, the cast and story are superb, and the fact that Rockstar did all this to set up RDR1 ... They went so far beyond the call it's laughably impressive.
But alas, it's just too much. I'm giving this game a 5/5 because it absolutely deserves it. But unfortunately Rockstar's tedious game design and absolutely insane scale of everything in it means that I, personally, had to experience it in such a way that by the time the credits rolled, everything prior to the Epilogue was already a fading memory. And that kinda sucks.
I would love to replay this game in a more appropriate way, start to finish without years-long breaks. Maybe some day..
(My gf is definitely gunna make me watch her play it once a year eventually though it's fine huehue)
Hyper-realism and its consequences have been a disaster for the videogame medium
É simplesmente o melhor jogo que a Rockstar já fez. Eu achava impossível existir um jogo melhor que o primeiro Red Dead Redemption e esse jogo provou que eu estava errado!
A imersão que esse jogo tem é algo nunca antes visto em jogo algum, você realmente se sente nos Estados Unidos de 1899. O mapa do jogo é surreal de grande com inúmeras coisas para fazer fora a história principal.
O jogo é uma aula de narrativa, tudo muito coeso (principalmente se você jogou o primeiro game), você consegue amar e odiar tais personagens com um força IMENSA!
Eu juro que me esforcei pra achar algum defeito nesse jogo mas simplesmente não tem. Uma obra prima em forma de jogo. Arthur Morgan viveu para que John Marston pudesse existir.
A imersão que esse jogo tem é algo nunca antes visto em jogo algum, você realmente se sente nos Estados Unidos de 1899. O mapa do jogo é surreal de grande com inúmeras coisas para fazer fora a história principal.
O jogo é uma aula de narrativa, tudo muito coeso (principalmente se você jogou o primeiro game), você consegue amar e odiar tais personagens com um força IMENSA!
Eu juro que me esforcei pra achar algum defeito nesse jogo mas simplesmente não tem. Uma obra prima em forma de jogo. Arthur Morgan viveu para que John Marston pudesse existir.
It starts with a janitor.
You're tasked with trailing him to his house in your car for a uniform. All you have to do is wait and, when the time is right, have a polite conversation with him.
So, anyway, I put a bomb on his door and blew him up the second he walked over to it. I punched him, tased him, shot him, poured gasoline on his brand-new car, and rammed his brand-new car with my stolen one. When I was supposed to park my car around the corner, I made the side of his car my parking lot. All of this "spooked" him, but never once did he die.
Like Classic Rock, Open World is an umbrella term. You have your Checklist Open Worlds, Zelda Open Worlds, Open Worlds that play like STALKER, Open Worlds by Bethesda, and so on. And then you have Rockstar games. The selling point is detail: in Fallout 3, technical limitations mean that every time you see a train running, what you're experiencing is an unnamed citizen with a train hat on, literally running. With Rockstar, the nails in the train tracks around the world are dynamically hammered in by unnamed NPCs that you can talk to. Cars turn realistically in Grand Theft Auto IV, and your average fast-travel system is replaced with a network of trains that you can interact with unscripted. Viewed separately from the content in them, they're masters in their field.
Ultimately, it all comes back to that janitor in the end. I've ruminated on it before, but a lot of what I find to be funny about that scene, in particular, is an imbalance between content and context. It's funny to keep failing specifically because the game asks you not to but puts in no safeguards to keep you from using its more emergent systems against itself. The issue Grand Theft Auto V has is that its caricatures only accelerate this imbalance. If the entire experience is supposed to be stupid, head empty, dumb fun, why play the rules at all?
In Red Dead Redemption II, I occasionally did the same thing. The game was linear, and I was bored, so I gave myself something to laugh at. But more of my time was spent in a modded version of the photo mode, where landmarks as simple and small as hills became vital storytelling tools for my version of Arthur Morgan. Abandoned wagons spoke to a quiet feeling of loss as fog enveloped the greenery. As nature took its course, I felt my figure shrink until it folded into the shadowy figure of the mountains behind me. It could only last for so long—but at least I was there for the trip. Farewell.
There's an inherent sense of melancholy in Red Dead Redemption II's world that I've seldom felt in the games I've played—much less from the Houser brothers and their culture of debauchery. To their credit, much of that comes from the narrative and characters. But beyond anything they had more than a minor role in, it's due to sunsets, fog, red dirt, and dry sand more than anything else. Red Dead Redemption II made me understand the cliche of riding into the sunset beyond a bus I took in high school one time, and it made me want to keep riding through the dark.
Another returning issue from other Rockstar games is as follows: movement still feels janky. I don't find it surprising at all that legendary filmmaker John Carpenter, fan of Sonic Unleashed and Halo Infinite, couldn't bring himself to finish this game. First-person mode here is a continent and two miles above what they half-assed into Grand Theft Auto V for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports, and thus it's the way I recommend playing this. But eventually, you have to get on a horse, and there's no perspective you can control that in where it always feels as intuitive as you want it to be. Crucially, while running around, it was very easy to me to tackle someone accidentally in a public space. I am grateful that the police system in this is more lenient than what's currently in Cyberpunk 2077, because I would have quit otherwise. But it's not perfect, either. You can always pay off your bounties, meaning that while the ride to a nearby post office can be tense, it occasionally feels like there are no meaningful repercussions for aberrant behavior. Combat in Red Dead Redemption II feels better than anything else Rockstar has ever done; using the revolver actually gives you a reason to hip-fire instead of aiming at everything, and it feels glorious. But it's impossible to ignore that a lot of betrays the narrative cohesion found in the cinematics. Given how much of a vibe this game can be, it's a total shame that it falls victim to the Rockstar trope of every mission being either a Shootout Mission, Chase Mission, or Inconvenient Mission that Secretly Becomes a Shootout at the Last Second. As much fun as I had using the shotguns in this game, at some point, I was just kind of over it, and while that's not a feeling that stuck for very long, it never truly went away.
I loved Arthur Morgan, and I loved having him wear a brown coat and have long hair because those are the things that make me feel effeminate and manly at the same time. I loved naming my horse after a television reference because I had one of the final knife twists spoiled for me in advance, and also because it was a cute name for my horse. I liked both Epilogue parts, and I can understand the excuses someone might make for Guarma.
Easily Rockstar's best, I can't wait to see how they fuck up their next game.
You're tasked with trailing him to his house in your car for a uniform. All you have to do is wait and, when the time is right, have a polite conversation with him.
So, anyway, I put a bomb on his door and blew him up the second he walked over to it. I punched him, tased him, shot him, poured gasoline on his brand-new car, and rammed his brand-new car with my stolen one. When I was supposed to park my car around the corner, I made the side of his car my parking lot. All of this "spooked" him, but never once did he die.
Like Classic Rock, Open World is an umbrella term. You have your Checklist Open Worlds, Zelda Open Worlds, Open Worlds that play like STALKER, Open Worlds by Bethesda, and so on. And then you have Rockstar games. The selling point is detail: in Fallout 3, technical limitations mean that every time you see a train running, what you're experiencing is an unnamed citizen with a train hat on, literally running. With Rockstar, the nails in the train tracks around the world are dynamically hammered in by unnamed NPCs that you can talk to. Cars turn realistically in Grand Theft Auto IV, and your average fast-travel system is replaced with a network of trains that you can interact with unscripted. Viewed separately from the content in them, they're masters in their field.
Ultimately, it all comes back to that janitor in the end. I've ruminated on it before, but a lot of what I find to be funny about that scene, in particular, is an imbalance between content and context. It's funny to keep failing specifically because the game asks you not to but puts in no safeguards to keep you from using its more emergent systems against itself. The issue Grand Theft Auto V has is that its caricatures only accelerate this imbalance. If the entire experience is supposed to be stupid, head empty, dumb fun, why play the rules at all?
In Red Dead Redemption II, I occasionally did the same thing. The game was linear, and I was bored, so I gave myself something to laugh at. But more of my time was spent in a modded version of the photo mode, where landmarks as simple and small as hills became vital storytelling tools for my version of Arthur Morgan. Abandoned wagons spoke to a quiet feeling of loss as fog enveloped the greenery. As nature took its course, I felt my figure shrink until it folded into the shadowy figure of the mountains behind me. It could only last for so long—but at least I was there for the trip. Farewell.
There's an inherent sense of melancholy in Red Dead Redemption II's world that I've seldom felt in the games I've played—much less from the Houser brothers and their culture of debauchery. To their credit, much of that comes from the narrative and characters. But beyond anything they had more than a minor role in, it's due to sunsets, fog, red dirt, and dry sand more than anything else. Red Dead Redemption II made me understand the cliche of riding into the sunset beyond a bus I took in high school one time, and it made me want to keep riding through the dark.
Another returning issue from other Rockstar games is as follows: movement still feels janky. I don't find it surprising at all that legendary filmmaker John Carpenter, fan of Sonic Unleashed and Halo Infinite, couldn't bring himself to finish this game. First-person mode here is a continent and two miles above what they half-assed into Grand Theft Auto V for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports, and thus it's the way I recommend playing this. But eventually, you have to get on a horse, and there's no perspective you can control that in where it always feels as intuitive as you want it to be. Crucially, while running around, it was very easy to me to tackle someone accidentally in a public space. I am grateful that the police system in this is more lenient than what's currently in Cyberpunk 2077, because I would have quit otherwise. But it's not perfect, either. You can always pay off your bounties, meaning that while the ride to a nearby post office can be tense, it occasionally feels like there are no meaningful repercussions for aberrant behavior. Combat in Red Dead Redemption II feels better than anything else Rockstar has ever done; using the revolver actually gives you a reason to hip-fire instead of aiming at everything, and it feels glorious. But it's impossible to ignore that a lot of betrays the narrative cohesion found in the cinematics. Given how much of a vibe this game can be, it's a total shame that it falls victim to the Rockstar trope of every mission being either a Shootout Mission, Chase Mission, or Inconvenient Mission that Secretly Becomes a Shootout at the Last Second. As much fun as I had using the shotguns in this game, at some point, I was just kind of over it, and while that's not a feeling that stuck for very long, it never truly went away.
I loved Arthur Morgan, and I loved having him wear a brown coat and have long hair because those are the things that make me feel effeminate and manly at the same time. I loved naming my horse after a television reference because I had one of the final knife twists spoiled for me in advance, and also because it was a cute name for my horse. I liked both Epilogue parts, and I can understand the excuses someone might make for Guarma.
Easily Rockstar's best, I can't wait to see how they fuck up their next game.
NOTA: 8,75
ABSOLUTE CINEMA! Em termos de narrativa, Red Dead Redemption 2 oferece uma experiência única e que será para sempre memorável para mim. O enredo protagonizado inicialmente por Arthur Morgan oferece de tudo: Ação, suspense, estratégia e planejamento além de drama e no fim aquela carga emocional (principalmente na cena da conversa com a freira) e apesar do final triste já temido pelos players, o fim do Epilogo da pelo menos aquela sensação de que tudo acabou bem.
Além de toda a história digna de cinema e a atuação digna de oscar de Arthur, os elementos gráficos e de ambientação desse jogo e a trilha sonora são impecáveis, a Rockstar faz questão de detalhar tudo, não só visualmente como também em mecânicas como limpeza de armas, a física que se comporta de maneira muito realista, a mudança de aparência dos personagens, além das diferentes Interações com os npcs e os membros da gangue dependendo da situação.
Em contrapartida, a experiência de Rd2 no quesito de jogabilidade é limitada, ela sem dúvidas é melhor que a de GTA V mas ainda é bem imprecisa, fora que o ritmo dela e da história é bem lento devido às transições das missões tornando o game praticamente um simulador de cavalgar pelo mapa, mesmo tendo fast travel nas acomodações durante a campanha.
O combate é o que deveria ser, em primeira pessoa eu curti bastante os trechos de tiroteio e dependendo das situações em que os personagens estavam de fato algumas missões eram complicadas, porém os eventos secundários do jogo não me intrigaram por dois motivos: A imersão na história (seja no começo onde ela demora para se desenvolver ou no fim aonde já se espera o pior mas o suspense ainda toma conta) e pelo fato deles não serem nada engajantes. Eu diria que até mesmo durante as missões principais o jogo poderia ter mais eventos distintos no progresso, como mais missões de disfarçe, planejamento de roubo ou eventos como partidas de poker e etc, faltou criatividade para a gameplay em geral.
Foi por esse motivo acima que eu acabei gostando mais da jogabilidade no epilogo onde sem dúvidas é mais objetivo (em excessão das missões de tarefas do John desnecessárias) e também pelas missões serem em sua maioria mais próximas.
Por fim, enfrentei algumas crashadas no Rog Ally e eu diria que talvez fosse melhor a gangue ter menos membros para de repente focar mais nos personagens mais relevantes para o enredo, até para ser possível conhecer mais sobre a backstory deles, criando mais missões exclusivas desses membros em vez de Interações sem objetivo pelo mapa.
Em resumo, não preciso nem me forçar a querer jogar o primeiro game depois de tudo que aconteceu nesse, vários dos temas abordados nesse jogo são coisas para levar para a vida, o significado de redenção é muito forte e levanta vários questionamentos do que é certo ou errado, muito além de video game, eu recomendo esse jogo como uma experiência para a vida, apenas joguem, infelizmente o game é longo e não precisava ser, mas é apenas uma barreira, que no fim ao ser ultrapassada, premia o player e mostra o quão bom é gostar de jogos desse tipo também. THIS IS CINEMA, meus amigos.
ABSOLUTE CINEMA! Em termos de narrativa, Red Dead Redemption 2 oferece uma experiência única e que será para sempre memorável para mim. O enredo protagonizado inicialmente por Arthur Morgan oferece de tudo: Ação, suspense, estratégia e planejamento além de drama e no fim aquela carga emocional (principalmente na cena da conversa com a freira) e apesar do final triste já temido pelos players, o fim do Epilogo da pelo menos aquela sensação de que tudo acabou bem.
Além de toda a história digna de cinema e a atuação digna de oscar de Arthur, os elementos gráficos e de ambientação desse jogo e a trilha sonora são impecáveis, a Rockstar faz questão de detalhar tudo, não só visualmente como também em mecânicas como limpeza de armas, a física que se comporta de maneira muito realista, a mudança de aparência dos personagens, além das diferentes Interações com os npcs e os membros da gangue dependendo da situação.
Em contrapartida, a experiência de Rd2 no quesito de jogabilidade é limitada, ela sem dúvidas é melhor que a de GTA V mas ainda é bem imprecisa, fora que o ritmo dela e da história é bem lento devido às transições das missões tornando o game praticamente um simulador de cavalgar pelo mapa, mesmo tendo fast travel nas acomodações durante a campanha.
O combate é o que deveria ser, em primeira pessoa eu curti bastante os trechos de tiroteio e dependendo das situações em que os personagens estavam de fato algumas missões eram complicadas, porém os eventos secundários do jogo não me intrigaram por dois motivos: A imersão na história (seja no começo onde ela demora para se desenvolver ou no fim aonde já se espera o pior mas o suspense ainda toma conta) e pelo fato deles não serem nada engajantes. Eu diria que até mesmo durante as missões principais o jogo poderia ter mais eventos distintos no progresso, como mais missões de disfarçe, planejamento de roubo ou eventos como partidas de poker e etc, faltou criatividade para a gameplay em geral.
Foi por esse motivo acima que eu acabei gostando mais da jogabilidade no epilogo onde sem dúvidas é mais objetivo (em excessão das missões de tarefas do John desnecessárias) e também pelas missões serem em sua maioria mais próximas.
Por fim, enfrentei algumas crashadas no Rog Ally e eu diria que talvez fosse melhor a gangue ter menos membros para de repente focar mais nos personagens mais relevantes para o enredo, até para ser possível conhecer mais sobre a backstory deles, criando mais missões exclusivas desses membros em vez de Interações sem objetivo pelo mapa.
Em resumo, não preciso nem me forçar a querer jogar o primeiro game depois de tudo que aconteceu nesse, vários dos temas abordados nesse jogo são coisas para levar para a vida, o significado de redenção é muito forte e levanta vários questionamentos do que é certo ou errado, muito além de video game, eu recomendo esse jogo como uma experiência para a vida, apenas joguem, infelizmente o game é longo e não precisava ser, mas é apenas uma barreira, que no fim ao ser ultrapassada, premia o player e mostra o quão bom é gostar de jogos desse tipo também. THIS IS CINEMA, meus amigos.
A flawed masterpiece but a hell of a ride
the amount of times I picked up and put down this game on pc, xbox and ps4 is wild. Maybe just didn't want it to end, but beating it I can certainly say, the weight of the world feels completely off my shoulders. And as many have said before me I'm sure, Arthur is one of, if not the greatest protagonist of all time.
I'm sure the story is amazing but the controls and gameplay are abysmal here. The cover system is straight up broken, and navigating Arthur around a table in an interior is a goddamn Sisyphean task. The 3 second body searching animation got old exactly the second time I had to do it. There is realism in games, and there is wasting the players time and taking control away.
Man...
What a fucking game.
While I have my small nitpicks with the game's overworld and it's reliance on chance events and lack of freedom or experimentation due to the honor system and scripted missions, (unlike something like TOTK or BOTW) I still ADORE this game.
Red Dead Redemption stands out as one of the greatest games I've ever played, not because of it's overworld, combat, graphics, attention to detail, or realism, but because of it's story. (this game does look AMAZING tho, I played it on a PS5 slim and it looks fucking fantastic)
Sure I loved riding around on my horse, or freeing the random stranger from a bear-trap, but ultimately the story is what kept me going.
And holy SHIT what a story.
Bro this shit is better than some movies, some shows, some books.. God this shit made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me jump out of my seat in panic. This game had me HOOKED. Absolutely all praise to the writers, actors, and directors of this game's narrative. Y'all murdered this.
I won't comment much on the actual story or it's characters as to not spoil anything, and because it's kinda been talked to death from all the youtube video essays, but know that they're telling the truth.
If you haven't played this game yet, then DO IT. It'll ask a lot of your time, and it might take a bit to get invested, but in the end I promise you it WILL be worth it.
You're a good man Arthur Morgan..
What a fucking game.
While I have my small nitpicks with the game's overworld and it's reliance on chance events and lack of freedom or experimentation due to the honor system and scripted missions, (unlike something like TOTK or BOTW) I still ADORE this game.
Red Dead Redemption stands out as one of the greatest games I've ever played, not because of it's overworld, combat, graphics, attention to detail, or realism, but because of it's story. (this game does look AMAZING tho, I played it on a PS5 slim and it looks fucking fantastic)
Sure I loved riding around on my horse, or freeing the random stranger from a bear-trap, but ultimately the story is what kept me going.
And holy SHIT what a story.
Bro this shit is better than some movies, some shows, some books.. God this shit made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me jump out of my seat in panic. This game had me HOOKED. Absolutely all praise to the writers, actors, and directors of this game's narrative. Y'all murdered this.
I won't comment much on the actual story or it's characters as to not spoil anything, and because it's kinda been talked to death from all the youtube video essays, but know that they're telling the truth.
If you haven't played this game yet, then DO IT. It'll ask a lot of your time, and it might take a bit to get invested, but in the end I promise you it WILL be worth it.
You're a good man Arthur Morgan..
I first played this on my PS4 and the second time around I really took my time. Messed around with the side stuff, also took some big breaks between playing.
I know it's a bit cliché to call this a masterpiece, but it truly is. The performances are incredible, it's stunningly beautiful, the story is fantastic and it plays like butter. I don't know many people who play video games who I wouldn't recommend this to.
I know it's a bit cliché to call this a masterpiece, but it truly is. The performances are incredible, it's stunningly beautiful, the story is fantastic and it plays like butter. I don't know many people who play video games who I wouldn't recommend this to.
this game plays itself
This review contains spoilers
O jogo se inicia em um estilo bem parecido com o do tarantino, os 8 odiados e tal, e rapidamente prende o jogador com o seu realismo avassalador e brutal, a neve é linda. Está escuro, você e seu bando de criminosos marcam de pegadas e os cavalos abrem caminho na neve, é uma linda introdução
Mais tarde no jogo, nos saímos da area montanhosa e fria e vamos a um lugar mais quente e menos mortal. Um novo acampamento, mesma vida, você e seu bando não tem mais local aqui, vocês são selvagens, ladrões, bandidos, pelo menos é assim que a sociedade os enxerga.
Parece que a cada roubo as coisas pioram, um dos mais velhos da gangue morre, hosea matthews... ele era sábio, não permitia que o dutch pirasse, pobre coitado
Conforme exploramos aquele país, mais as coisas ficam estranhas, pessoas estranha aparecem, bandidos, ladrões, assassinos, temos que se livrar deles, de um jeito ou de outro, somos parecidos
As coisas pioram mais e mais, após um roubo, dutch van der linde sofre um acidente... ele fica louco, perde sua moralidade, parece que a cada segundo tudo desmorona, mais e mais
A gangue toda tá contra nós, dutch e micah destruiram o censo de moralidade que ali existia
Nos vamos morrer, exausto e com uma doença assustadora, olhe o abismo e ele te olhara de volta
Tudo vai por agua abaixo, batalhamos com todos os membros da gangue e morremos ali, olhando para o por do sol.
Epilogo
Somos john marston, queremos uma vida com nossa esposa e filho, reencontramos velhos amigos e no fim conseguimos, construimos uma casa, uma vida, tudo do zero
Bonito não ? pois é, de fato é um final bonito, mais não dura muito, sabemos o que acontece no red dead 1
Trilhe o caminho de sangue e sofra com ele, essa é a lição que tirei dessa masterpice, somo humanos, somos mortais, lembre se da morte, memento mori, não é sempre que temos poder e controle, somos fracos, aceite isso, viva e morra como um mortal
Mais tarde no jogo, nos saímos da area montanhosa e fria e vamos a um lugar mais quente e menos mortal. Um novo acampamento, mesma vida, você e seu bando não tem mais local aqui, vocês são selvagens, ladrões, bandidos, pelo menos é assim que a sociedade os enxerga.
Parece que a cada roubo as coisas pioram, um dos mais velhos da gangue morre, hosea matthews... ele era sábio, não permitia que o dutch pirasse, pobre coitado
Conforme exploramos aquele país, mais as coisas ficam estranhas, pessoas estranha aparecem, bandidos, ladrões, assassinos, temos que se livrar deles, de um jeito ou de outro, somos parecidos
As coisas pioram mais e mais, após um roubo, dutch van der linde sofre um acidente... ele fica louco, perde sua moralidade, parece que a cada segundo tudo desmorona, mais e mais
A gangue toda tá contra nós, dutch e micah destruiram o censo de moralidade que ali existia
Nos vamos morrer, exausto e com uma doença assustadora, olhe o abismo e ele te olhara de volta
Tudo vai por agua abaixo, batalhamos com todos os membros da gangue e morremos ali, olhando para o por do sol.
Epilogo
Somos john marston, queremos uma vida com nossa esposa e filho, reencontramos velhos amigos e no fim conseguimos, construimos uma casa, uma vida, tudo do zero
Bonito não ? pois é, de fato é um final bonito, mais não dura muito, sabemos o que acontece no red dead 1
Trilhe o caminho de sangue e sofra com ele, essa é a lição que tirei dessa masterpice, somo humanos, somos mortais, lembre se da morte, memento mori, não é sempre que temos poder e controle, somos fracos, aceite isso, viva e morra como um mortal