Ever since Grand Theft Auto 4, Rockstar has had a real fascination with creating technologically marvelous games with incredible sandbox potential, populating them with fun verbs and toys for the player to play with or use to interface with the world, and then implement arbitrary restrictions anywhere and everywhere to slap you on the wrist every time you try to have fun with any of it. This is all done in the name of Immersion. You see, the Houser brothers have Very Important, Very Mature stories to tell you, stories inspired by Michael Mann and Martin Scorcese films, so it's very important that Grand Theft Auto doesn't have jetpacks or parachutes anymore, that you don't do interesting things like attack Area 51 or steal tanks from the military, and that our cowboy game centers 90% of its mission design around Following A Guy On A Horse And Listening To Him Talk.
Red Dead Redemption 2, as with every Rockstar game now, feels like a game at war with itself. It offers you a wide open cowboy fantasy landscape teeming with wildlife, towns, and the folk who live in them. It lets you shoot guns and bows, hunt wild game, tie people up with lassos and drag them from horseback, tie them to train tracks, etc, etc. It lets you rob trains, rob stagecoaches, rob ordinary people and their shops, all intuitively done by simply pointing a gun at a guy and pressing a button. A good 90-95% of the verbs you use in RDR2 (and for that matter, any Rockstar game) are inherently villainous. It offers you unlimited potential for wacky cowboy antics, tinged with silly ragdoll physics and the unbridled cruelty that freeform gameplay allows for, and the moment you engage with any of it, the Fun Police spawn around you in infinite numbers until you ride out of the annoying fucking magic circle that continuously spits hostile NPCs from the ether just outside the draw distance because you dared to ask "what if I tried to have fun in the Mature Cowboy Game For Sophisticated Adults"
For decades, other developers have understood significantly better than Rockstar the fun inherent in mayhem - that the joy of a sandbox is in manipulating the sand, but sadly developers like Pandemic Studios and Volition have all gone under in 2023, taking with them their Mercenaries and their Saboteurs and their Saints Rows. Somehow, inexplicably, the guys who know the least about making a fun open world game continue to release these things year after year to maddening acclaim from the gaming press and the public alike and every time I try to engage with one of their games, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is it so much to ask for a mission designed around something, you know... fun?
anyway this game is significantly better with a trainer installed mashes the ragdoll button until arthur collides with a horse and cart at mach 5, killing everyone in a 3 mile radius
Red Dead Redemption 2, as with every Rockstar game now, feels like a game at war with itself. It offers you a wide open cowboy fantasy landscape teeming with wildlife, towns, and the folk who live in them. It lets you shoot guns and bows, hunt wild game, tie people up with lassos and drag them from horseback, tie them to train tracks, etc, etc. It lets you rob trains, rob stagecoaches, rob ordinary people and their shops, all intuitively done by simply pointing a gun at a guy and pressing a button. A good 90-95% of the verbs you use in RDR2 (and for that matter, any Rockstar game) are inherently villainous. It offers you unlimited potential for wacky cowboy antics, tinged with silly ragdoll physics and the unbridled cruelty that freeform gameplay allows for, and the moment you engage with any of it, the Fun Police spawn around you in infinite numbers until you ride out of the annoying fucking magic circle that continuously spits hostile NPCs from the ether just outside the draw distance because you dared to ask "what if I tried to have fun in the Mature Cowboy Game For Sophisticated Adults"
For decades, other developers have understood significantly better than Rockstar the fun inherent in mayhem - that the joy of a sandbox is in manipulating the sand, but sadly developers like Pandemic Studios and Volition have all gone under in 2023, taking with them their Mercenaries and their Saboteurs and their Saints Rows. Somehow, inexplicably, the guys who know the least about making a fun open world game continue to release these things year after year to maddening acclaim from the gaming press and the public alike and every time I try to engage with one of their games, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Is it so much to ask for a mission designed around something, you know... fun?
anyway this game is significantly better with a trainer installed mashes the ragdoll button until arthur collides with a horse and cart at mach 5, killing everyone in a 3 mile radius