Dang, those are beautiful screenshots. I recently moved over to Linux and have only tried a couple of games on here, but I should see how that one works… haven’t played it in a few months, and I have ways to go in it. I don’t even remember what chapter I’m on.
Love this game. I’m going for 100% for the first time, at about 92% now.
I actually think Guarma doesn’t go on long enough. Should have been more exploring. Yeah it gets a little unrealistic, but a lot of the late game does (see also the prison break, the Pinkerton fight at Lakay).
But overall this game is hands down one of my favorites, and I really hope for another Red Dead in the future.
I’m playing this game for the first time right now. It’s safe to say that it captivated me. The world they created is astonishing. Even after well over 50 hours I’m not bored at all.
Your post really captures the beauty that can be found if one takes the time to look. Thank you for your relentless posting!
One of my favorite things to do is get lost in the world. There’s so much detail that makes it feel alive. For example I was playing today and was stopped by this lady who complemented my horse and challenged me to a race i won
Yes! The high stakes riverboat poker game was very memorable. Apparently, there are lots of side objectives to complete in the garden party too. I haven’t looked for them yet! Loving these posts, keep up the good work.
I’m not normally this dedicated to things. I’m honestly surprised i’ve kept up on it this long. I have like 90 different projects that range from Games i’ve tried to make too books i tried to write that just never got finished
This makes me want to go back for a 3rd playthrough. Especially since I have a steam deck now and have been playing through older games, like Sekiro right now.
Steam Deck is great at handling it, at least for the first hour. Last i checked It had this crippling bug on SteamOS where performance just started killing itself after a while. Changing the Video cache size from anything other than the default also hurts it. It runs fine beyond that though and would highly suggest playing if you want to play it on the go
I’ll have to try and finish it up as Arthur so i can do that. I’m trying to experience everything i can without over extending myself, if that makes sense
Shame too, because there is an appetite for a slow-paced immersive Wild West/cowboy/Southern/post-Victorian era role-playing MMO, and that game’s aesthetic and engine was perfect for this.
I also just can’t really play games that force me to think about my bank account while I’m playing, charging fees or subscription rates just to fully participate in the game, like seeing a bounty hunting mission that requires me to send money before I can start it. Totally breaks the immersion–I play games so I don’t have to think about the real world for a bit. Making me enter bank details wrecks that.
I see a lot of praise for this game but have not looked a lot into it. How would you describe it and what makes it so good? I’m letting myself be convinced for my next game to play :)
The story is really what makes it so good–you start to feel invested in the character, in the world, and that helps with getting deeply immersed in the gameplay. It’s an incredibly well written game.
Beyond that, the screenshots show a lot–it’s a world that feels very lived-in.
Also the gameplay is a ton of fun. Open world, lots of places to explore–some of them beautiful, others treacherous, some both.
It makes you feel like it’s really happening. You’re up North in the mountains, and you need to get back to camp to talk to a friend, so you ride your horse, and get stuck behind a wide carriage for a bit, and the trees are close to the trail for a while, so you can’t easily get around without getting a faceful of branches. One you start making it down the mountain, you find a nice looking deer and think “that hide would look great on some boots”, so you pull out your rifle to hunt. Unfortunately, you’re up wind, so the deer ran away very early on, but you couldn’t be deterred, so you chased after it, and eventually landed a good shot. You take the meat to the butcher, and he comments that he’s greatful you brought it in so fresh this time. You wonder why you ended up here, oh yeah, you wanted to go meet up with a friend, and it’s been over an hour and you’re just less than halfway there, so you look up at the sky and wonder how long it’ll take, it’s a very pretty sky at sunset, so you decide to make camp for the night.
I love the Online, but even i will admit Online is so disappointing. With how many hackers run rampant and the lack of content, it feels like it’s just been left to rot
Definitely. One of my favorite things to do is just turn off the mini-map and go through the world blind. It’s really fun making your own landmarks to navigate and really helps me appreciate the world
Truly wish I could have kept playing this. I was having a blast. Roughly 60% of the way through, game started crashing 30 seconds in. Went back multiple save files, same thing. I’ve never been more disappointed in a game that I truly loved.
I’ll get through the RDR2 story one day. I played it for two stints last year but I just space out and lose immersion every time the main story forces you to kill one hundred lawmen in the middle of a town. For a game that put so much effort into making the open world vibrant, alive and dynamic you face very little consequences for committing what can only be classified as genocide in the main story.
It might well be a me-problem. I had the same issue with Sleeping Dogs that I just finished last week. So I might just have a fundamental problem with the type of gameplay design these kinds of games go for and the fundamental ludonarrative dissonance you have to be able to look past to enjoy them. I just have a hard time squaring off war crime levels of mass murder as “getting into a little too much trouble”. Killing a lawman or two as things get out of hand in Valentine? That’s getting into a bit too much trouble. But Arthur Morgan literally kills hundreds upon hundreds of people and that just breaks my immersion.
The gameplay is definitely way exaggerated because it would not be very engaging to get into one gunfight per chapter. I interpret these parts of many games symbolically—the amount of violence is to make a point. The game would be very short or really boring if it was realistic in that regard.
Arthur is a really complicated character who, despite being sometimes sympathetic, is ultimately not a good person. Even if you make only “good honor” choices, his story is still filled with points where he struggles to reconcile his actions with his beliefs. You wouldn’t want to live near a person like Arthur in reality, and he doesn’t like being that person.
RDR2 is ultimately a story about bad people struggling against other bad people. One group represents the lawless banditry that is dying out, while the other is the capitalist yoke that wears a nice suit. Lots of normal people get caught in the middle, and they usually suffer for it.
It succeeds for me because it still keeps the humanity in focus. Bad people are humans too. It does not absolve them, but it underscores the conditions that can manufacture them.
I don’t really disagree with you about the nature of the story, and I don’t have anything against the overall narrative. I just personally think the story could have been told with fewer bloodbaths and outright massacres and still be compelling. In fact, for me every innocent you kill would feel more impactful morally and narratively if there were fewer of them.
But maybe I’m out of touch with the attention span of the modern mind.
There’s nothing wrong with having different preferences. It doesn’t have to be because someone has a worse or better attention span.
I personally do think the number of enemies that had to be killed should have been decreased. For me, it was mostly because it became comical sometimes that more guys kept coming out of the woodwork. After the fiftieth O’Driscoll you kill, you start to wonder if it’s a gang or a country’s military.
I’m sorry. The attention span comment wasn’t directed at you personally, it was reflecting on your point that people would find it too slow and boring with fewer kills. It wasn’t meant as a jab at all.
I think it sounds like we’re mostly in agreement. And yeah, the O’Driscolls spawning in and popping up like whack-a-moles is another great example!
I mean it is an era where up and moving 100 miles basically meant you started your life over. But that was kind of the plot: they were a gang of that era where they could run in a town, wreak havoc, disappear, and the infrastructure didn’t yet exist to reliably track them across the gigantic land mass that is North america.
But by the time the game rolls around the beginnings of the modern federal government are happening and agencies to track people like them across the country are in full swing. So all of a sudden their way of life is coming to a close, quickly. Instead of just some pissing off a sheriff in a town and never being able to go back there, occasionally having a bounty hunter after you, you now have a huge team of people with the resources of a government coming for you.
I think part of it that’s understated is the size of the map. The map is obviously big for a game but it’s supposed to be a huge chunk of America. When you compare the geography of the map to America it’s somewhat clear that it’s supposed to be a gigantic swath of America, from like Montana down to Louisiana and across to Texas. You can ride across the map in 20 min but obviously this would take months irl. Obviously this is about gameplay balance but as a result you lose the sense that Arthur is going extremely far away when he’s going from valentine to st denis, when in reality that would be like a month of riding and crossing several states. Even if he did a genocide that would probably shake the heat for a little while back then
They did obviously play it up of course. If you literally murdered everyone in a town back then there would probably be more of a response from the surrounding towns to find you. But gamers like violence and it’s again about balancing gameplay vs authenticity. usually gameplay wins because otherwise you end up with a boring game
I love this game. It has several drawbacks, some of the physics make things feel like you’re underwater the whole time, the wanted system can be extremely irritating at the worst moments, and for a game with a world that is extremely alive the missions are extremely on rails where often even doing something slightly off the developers intended path will fail you
But despite that I still love it. The game is gorgeous years later. They put so much effort into the world. It’s not just the graphics, it’s every detail that just makes it feel so alive. Walking around the town the npcs are so thought out, have so much dialogue. The animals too. I remember playing other open world games after and just noticing more so how lifeless they felt in comparison; that npcs would repeat dialogue after 2 or 3 lines, animals would run in circles, etc. and the story is great.
I hope that once gta6 is done they turn to rdr3. Its overall a much better series with a stronger narrative, better characters, etc. with red dead they seem to not be as overly concerned with shitting it up with online bullshit and microtransactions though so the series might be done for
I’ve heard some really compelling ideas to continue Red Dead Redemption either spiritually (as in with a different or slight altered cast) or literally (take Jack at the end of 1 and do something with it or tell a prequel story to RDR2). I’m really hoping Rockstar does make a 3, the franchise is too amazing to let it just die like that.
I remember so many people being furious at rockstar for not releasing dlc on the scope of gta4 but honestly with this game I don’t know what form that narrative would take that could be satisfying.
The main narrative is concluded decisively obviously. It’s a prequel so continuing with John would just be rdr1. Another undead nightmare is eh, zombies are so played out. I guess you could fill in what went on with Dutch or some of the others that show up in rdr1 but frankly I don’t really want to play as them. I suppose you could intro some new character that’s part of their new gang. I dunno. I get why they didn’t prioritize it (well that and more so that dlc costs a ton to develop for a pitiful return relative to something like gta online, which is kind of sad)
Yeah. Adding onto the Undead Nightmare one, i just don’t feel like it would fit the vibe of Red Dead 2. As much as i’d love another one, Red Dead 2 feels like it takes itself a bit more seriously than the first one. i’m not really sure what it is, but i’m just not sure an Undead Nightmare would fit at all.
I think it was the illness. Even without the illness based on the first games ending and the fact that Arthur was not mentioned or existed within it I was pretty sure I knew how rdr2 was going to end before I started but the illness gave it such a somber tone. Arthur recognized his mortality and really started to reflect.
It’s been ages since I played rdr1 but as far as I remember John was more “I’m doing this to be done, for my family!”. The tone was much lighter as a result even though there were moments that were heavy. And the characters weren’t as developed so I didn’t care as much. Dutch was just a fucking monster in that game, bill and Javier were just props. But rdr2 fleshed them all out so much
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