Red Dead Redemption: Notes from the field

Summary:

• Gameplay, game environment, open world, music and visuals: Excellent
• Storyline and connected creator controlled elements: Moderate to Problematic.

The Good Part: Aka the reason I own the game: The Sandbox World

The open world sandbox is much more fun than the storyline. Seriously, the only reason I bought RDR was for the open world experience of wandering through the landscape with the incredibly well designed audio atmosphere.  In fact, I could seriously just live without the storyline.  The Rockstar Social Club Challenge was much more intense, dramatic and interesting than the at least half of the storylines – and all I was doing was trying to achieve three tasks in a short timeframe.

The sub-missions for hunting, gathering and trick shooting read like Grinding at first glance until you start trying them out, and it gets ludicrously engaging. Seriously, I spent several hours patrol one patch of the game trying to set up a knife fight with a wild cougar, and it’s provided some of the most intense, frustrating and funny moments of gaming in the process.  Random encounters with horse thieves have provided remarkably entertaining moments – one thief stole my horse up in the cougar country area, rode off, and when I whistled for the horse, the thief was bucked off into a herd of oncoming wolves.  It was ironic justice for the horse to use wolves as a defensive weapon.

Similarly, the interaction of the NPC elements has been surprisingly well done – there’s two recurring Marshalls who wander into scenes shooting aimlessly at an escaped prisoner.  These two show up in the cougar territory during the three hour hunting safari, and the damn cougar tackles one of them clean out of nowhere. They’re walking away, I’m watching them, and suddenly *bam* cougar strike, and gunfire, and one NPC is down, and the other is trying to fight off a wild cat.  It was quite awesome.

Same thing for the hunting – once you start downing various animals, skinning them, and building up a stockpile of animal corpses, the wild dog per square inch of game count does go through the roof. You can’t just farm away without getting increasingly more problems with the scavengers and predators (and it plays out that you can prime an area to get the bigger predators to appear).  Sure, the bit where 16 wolves in a row arrived was an unpleasant end to a day, but hey, taught me the lesson to MOVE THE HELL AWAY at key points in the body counts.

Music and sound are the best two NPCs in the game – another massive feature of the environment are the audio cues, and the way gunfire rings out in the night differs from the daytime. There’s directional sound cues, audio triggers when you’re about to hit a tough area to patrol so you’re amped up as a player, ready for the action.  I’m playing on a standard stereo rig, and I’d love to experience this game in 5.1 Surround so you can hear the directional information.

Visually, the game has to be run on an Xbox360 or any other fixed component system. If I was running this on the PC, I’d have cranked down all the environment settings, graphics, field rendering, and I’d be missing the point of the open world.  The weather effects make a massive difference to the immersion in the game. Bounty hunting  through a rainstorm with blinding flashes of lightning, and squalling rain is a totally different sensation to trying to sneak up in the break of dawn (or just on dusk), or brazenly walking into the camp under the midday sun.  It’s the visual and audio cues that make world so engaging – wander through the night under different moonlight conditions, and have different ranges of vision.  Camp fires flicker in the distance, gunfights sparkle, and wolves appear out of bloody nowhere. It’s immersion done well.

The Problems: Storyline

Mostly ignorable rubbish.  The Libertarian per square inch of dialogue is tedious, but if you mostly ignore it, it goes away.  What’s fascinated Jen is the idea that you can jump various cutscenes and are forced to endure the dialogue between the NPC/PC whilst riding off to missions.  It’s like mandatory storyline lessons. I’d add that the “Ride with Character X to Location Y whilst engaging in prerecorded Story Conversation” is a low point of the mission design.

The storyline has been the weakest part of the process for me as it seems to be a selection of forced training exercises for various other skills – horse riding skills, more horse riding skills, a forced jumping puzzle sequence to demonstrate what the blue X button does, a round of lasso training to give you a lasso and the imperative to use it, and something about horse back shootin’ and ridin’ at the same time. Oh, and a forced duel + a forced use of the bullet time, just in case you weren’t already using both skills.

I’m slugging through the storyline simply to open up larger areas of the game environment.  All I want is to clear the minimum level of story so I can play in the sandbox world, because the story is really struggling.

In summary…

You! (The Player Character)

Plays White Guy with(a) a mysterious past (b) a secret (c) a hidden agenda (d) a missing voicebox (wait, that’s Halo)

Who has the motivations of: (a) seeking Revenge Against Former Best Friend! (b) save offscreen female character (c) avenge dead offscreen character (d) resolving threat to Offscreen Child Character (e) Kill every last living creature you find

To achieve this, you must team up with (a) Strong Female Sidekick Who Gets Removed Two Thirds into Story! (b) Wacky Sidekick Mage!  (c) Creepy Sidekick!  (d) Wacky Ethnic Stereotype!

To perform (a) Unrelated Skill Development Based Missions! (b) Cutscenes (c) Forced acquisition of routine objects from your daily life including Bonus New Vehicle Mission (horse wrangling) ! Bonus new weapon mission (lasso) and The Bigger Gun Mission (shotgun/repeater).

All of These Wacky Hi-jinks lead to the (a) a SUPERWEAPON for use in the end of level Boss Fight (b) The trigger for the END LEVEL BOSS (c) Poignant Moment of Death of Support Character (d) Permanent Fridging of Female Character for Story Purpose.

The story culminates with (a) rescuing the princess from the right castle (b) a cut scene (c) a David Caruso one liner (YEAAAH)

I think I’ve played this game before somewhere.

The Problems: Gender issues

1) Forced Male Lead Role: Would it kill the game to have a choice?

2) The Fridge: It was doing so well until the main female NPC interaction turned into a Damsel In Distress, and then disappeared entirely. This was after hinting that said main female NPC might have been a gang leader or retired bandit. Alas, I knew this was always going to be a problem with the game – when praise was utter in reviews for the existence of brothels with non-hireable prostitutes, that’s low standards and low praise.   It’s tedious to have another round of rescue-the-girl. Frankly, if I’d stormed the homestead to be told “Sorry Mario, the princess is in another castle”, I’d not have been surprised.  It’s an older than dirt trope, and it’s one that’s boring in the predictability of a misognystic “Oh Girls Need To Be Rescued Because They’re Girls, and Girls need to be rescued”.

3) Rockstar Still has problems with female characters: The frequency with which I have shot male NPCs for threatening the female NPC prostitutes is becoming numbingly repetitive, and doesn’t stop being problematic in that Rockstar coded a specific scene of murdering a woman in front of you so you could decide whether to watch or intervene. Someone sat down and coded this sequence, and it went through many many levels of QA, voice actor recruiting and a range of other sign offs before becoming a recurring part of the gameplay.

Boring, predictable, repetitive and disturbing are not features I like in a game.

The Problems: Race issues

Yeah, well, anything set in 1910 “Western” America that doesn’t come out if it with massive race issues is remarkable.  All the front end speaking roles have been white male so far (bar one white female character who gets effectively stuffed into the fridge). The sheer number of characters of colour in the rest of the supporting cast is notable, and they do get speaking roles in card games, barrooms, as characters in side missions, and simply just being a part of the landscape.  That’s done well, but it’s hard countered by the creator controlled aspects.

Some of the race issue of the 1910 America including xenophobic, anti-Jewish lines by the shopkeepers just plain didn’t need to be there, don’t advance the story, and if they’re applied for “Historically Accurate” purposes, that could have been skipped since the game features a lead character that never needs to sleep or eat, and is some form of immortal who can return from death (and tends to reboot next to their coffin ^H^H in their bed in the township).

Speaking of the anti-Semitic character – the shopkeeper Herbert Moon kept rattling off anti-Jewish sentiment during a poker game. As a gamer, I just got so sick of this bullshit during the poker match, I quit side-game, drew a shotgun, blasted the annoying bastard to the next life, and walked out of the bar, and straight into an NPC side-mission trigger with the shopkeeper Herbert Moon. Okay, Rockstar? Seriously? If zombie immortal teleporting respawning NPCs aren’t a game breaking shift from reality, then not piling random racist crap into the storyline shouldn’t be a problem.

“Realistic for the time” doesn’t mean a damn when you let teleporting zombie NPCs exist. Anyone wanting to justify the racist content needs to show me proof of teleporting immortal zombies in the “Wild West” before I’ll hear an argument as to why the anti-Semitic crap needed to be there.

The Problems: Gameplay Flaws

Automated trigger points for cutscene annoy me.  Particularly when they’re not triggered by visible cues – there’s a scene where you go to rescue the princess from the castle. Wait, the formerly capable, competent and multidimensional female NPC from a cutscene, and if you get too close to the gallows, the rope-rescue sequence automatically triggers, and you tend to die of a slight case of bad guys who are standing right next to you the second you drop out of the cutscene.

In fact, I’ve died in three cutscene related incidents now – I got killed whilst ambushed on the stage coach – with no control over the character because it’s a cutscene equivalent, and no skip function, or anything to do but die.  That sucked.   It also sucked to be attacked and start taking damage during a skinning cutscene where I come back from the scene to find five coyotes attacking me. Cutscene ran uninterrupted whilst I could hear damage and see damage being taken. I come out of the cut scene badly injured into an almost immediate death.

I know it’s been said around the forums that “nowhere in the game is safe”, but seriously, the cutscenes shouldn’t count as kill zones.

Special Note: Horses and Animals.

I have a bad track record with horses in this game.

Horse 1 crashed on a corner, bucked me off into a rattlesnake (fatal!) whilst it crashed into 2 coyotes (fatal!). It was GTA IV on horseback.

Horse 2 survived until forceably retired by a horse upgrade in the story line.  This gave me the stupidest AI in my gaming history.

Horse 3 was immensely stupid. I mean, unbelievably, immensely, deeply and passionately stupid for AI. It would overshoot any time I called for it to come to me to be ridden.  This ended up with the horse flying off a cliff, into a river, and drowning because I was standing a good four hundred meters from the cliff edge.  I was not remotely sorry to see that horse die. I was deeply sorry I was killed before the save game allowed me to condemn that horse to history.

Horses 4 to 25* are best described as The Horse Meat Flak Jacket or “Cougar Bait”.  I rode one over the top of a cougar which appeared to be the Wild West version of a landmine. You don’t see them until they go off, and then you die. Now I count the number of seconds between New Horse and Dead Horse.  Once I finished the “Stab Cougars” mission, my rate of horse increased for a while, but seems to have plateaued.

*Horse 8 survived several wolf packs, a stabbing, and a large volume of coyotes.  The hunting mission where you have to stab wolves resulted in Horse #8 running into the melee to stomp on coyotes whilst I was trying to stab the wolves. I think I only stabbed that horse once in the process.  Unfortunately, the Horse died to an IEC – improvised explosive cougar – a few minutes later.
*Horse 18 was shot when I was aiming at a wolf in DeadEye mode which proceeded to run under the horse whilst I was firing. It was moderately embarrassing for me. It was worse for the horse.
*Horse 22 survived a cougar encounter only to come second to a wolf moments later. I really hate wolves.

Horse 26 was shot by enemy fire.  I have now lost two horses to bullet related outcomes.

Horse 27 to 30 were coyote and/or wolf related losses. Did I mention I hate wolves?

Horse 31 has survived for over ten minutes of gameplay. I think it might be my personal best.

Other Animals

1. Coyote. Dumb but tasty. At one point, Jen remarked that I was carrying a two packs of coyote skins around, so it’s no wonder they kept swarming to attack – I looked like a family reunion to them

2. Wolves. Blasted wolves.I really hate wolves. Seriously, when the game said “Stab 5 wolves” my only thought was “Why stab? Why not shoot?”

3. Cougars. I hate those things slightly less than I hate wolves. I encounter them a lot less than I encounter wolves. I really, seriously, passionately hate wolves.

4. Boars. When I needed three for a mission, could not find them. After the mission? I’ve started the Asterix and Obelix Catering service.

5. Everything else except the horse: I am not even going to consider the ecology of this game. I am just going to shoot as much of it as possible on the way from Point A to Point B. Owls, hawks, songbirds, cougars, deer, more deer, rabbits, skunks, raccoons, cactus and rocks.  I don’t shoot the wild horses for some reason. Possibly because I get more horses killed by riding them than any other outcome.

5. Wild Horses: I can’t bring myself to shoot them. Sure, I’ve skinned my own fallen mounts (often with the replacement horse protesting in the background of the cut scene), but, and I say this with a puzzled look, it feels wrong to shoot the horses.  I’ve blasted an armadillo with a shotgun, and used a excessive firepower on crows, but taking down a horse? Just ain’t right.

6. Goddamn wolves.

Overall Impression: Less story, more open world, better game. The bits where I get to tell my own story in the game is winning out over the story being told to me. This could be the future for open world environment gaming – have an option to drop the cutscene driven story in favour of more random encounters.

I think the Fame / Honour score that sits within the game could become a new driver for open world story-telling.

As your Fame rises, the more you’re in town, the more people will challenge you to fights and duels to prove themselves to their world. If the fame metric time expires as well, you could chose to head into the wilderness to burn off fame so you were less known, and less hassled. More fame would also put more demanding missions on you, and you’d lose more honour points for failing to met the increasingly unrealistic expectations of the community.

Honour scores could become a trigger for different mission types – including falls from grace, proof of mortality by shooting the wrong person, or just a case of whether you can get a drink in this town or not. High fame, low honour, and everyone shuns you, making it harder to get NPC missions, but easier to get fights started, banks robbed and other crime sprees.

If you’re famous, highly skilled in a sub-mission area (eg dead shot / hunting), then you’d get the corresponding types of missions cropping up to support your reputation (or cause it to fall as you lost face in a public showdown).  Less forced story, more organic evolution of the gameplay.

At least, that’s a game I’d find fascinating to play judging by how I’m using the RDR world.