Erkki

Another Red Redemption, Dead

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Woohoo! I just posted in another thread that I can't easily get excited about games any more, but this changes everything! Red Dead Redemption was basically the X* of video games.

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-04-18-why-fans-are-excited-about-this-leaked-red-dead-redemption-2-map

 

(the map is probably spoilery so better not look at it too closely)

 

* insert suitable X according to your personal tastes

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I am conflicted. The core gameplay and world of RDR was good, but I despise Rockstars writing, both dialog and plot. RDR did lack rockstars terrible vehicle controls and invulnerable NPCs. Real question is will it be on PC.

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I read somewhere that it'll be a prequel to the last game, which I guess means you play as the same dude.

...how can I know that when the game hasn't even been announced :)

I stopped when I hit Mexico in the last game, I'm not sure why I didn't go back to it. Probably some other game came out. I remember feeling overwhelmed with the idea of starting from scratch with a second map, like you had nothing to show for amount of time you've already played, that huge location that you've learnt your way around? Yeah, well, start again bucko

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I really liked the music of RDR, if there's more of that I'm excited regardless of how it ends up.

I heard good things about the zombie dlc, but never played it on account of it didn't seem like something I wanted in my spaghetti western game. Was/is it worth playing?

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Yeah, the zombie DLC is actually pretty good. The first time I tried it I was put off as well, but I tried again later and started liking it.

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I stopped when I hit Mexico in the last game, I'm not sure why I didn't go back to it. Probably some other game came out. I remember feeling overwhelmed with the idea of starting from scratch with a second map, like you had nothing to show for amount of time you've already played, that huge location that you've learnt your way around? Yeah, well, start again bucko

Mexico's only an interlude. You go back to the States for the last act.

 

Great fucking game. RDR's the only R* title I had finished up until that time. (I've since completed GTAV, but didn't play nearly as much of it as I did RDR.)

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I am totes up for a new Red Dead game. One of the finest open world GTA-emy games ever made. I recall virtually nothing from the plot, but fondly remember strutting around on my horse, eagle-aiming a noose and shooting armadillos, then getting mauled by a bear. I'll have more of that thank you

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I really really liked RDR, but I also remember listening to the Jumping the Shark podcast back when it came out and hearing Bill Abner talk about how much he hated it and agreeing with basically all of his points.

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I remember it suffering pretty badly from the same narrative issue GTAIV did. Namely, the main character is strung along by very bad dudes for ages and tricked or manipulated into doing things for them over and over and over. At some point it started to get a bit tedious. The game nailed everything else though (and had a great ending), so I was able to get past it. Looking forward to a sequel.

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I remember it suffering pretty badly from the same narrative issue GTAIV did. Namely, the main character is strung along by very bad dudes for ages and tricked or manipulated into doing things for them over and over and over. At some point it started to get a bit tedious. The game nailed everything else though (and had a great ending), so I was able to get past it. Looking forward to a sequel.

R* games are full of stupid protagonists going along with bad ideas formulated by people who spout annoying philosophy on unskippable traversals to missions. I despise their writing style to the point that its the biggest reason I didn't buy GTA 5. 

I distinctly remember characters in RDR complaining about how lawless things are, but how they resent the loss of freedom the federal government brings.

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I distinctly remember characters in RDR complaining about how lawless things are, but how they resent the loss of freedom the federal government brings.

 

Also, that the times are changing and these are interesting times and the interesting times are changing interestingly. The Idle Thumbs episode about the game is spot-on about how it felt like there were at least two different writers on the game: one who laid down the dreary Old West tropes with a fuckin' shovel and another who did a pass on all of the characters and made a select few tolerably close to human beings.

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The writing is garbage, sure, but the game itself was immensely playable. I enjoyed the narrative I built for myself, not the one written by the Brothers Houser.

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I didn't like Red Dead Redemption - but then the last Rockstar game I didn't think was utter pish was probably Manhunter.

 

I am saddened to hear that they are going to make another one and that I am going to get constant Facebook updates about this game up to and after the game is released.

 

Oh God, Twitter.

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You know what was a cool game? Gun. Remember Gun, guys? Admittedly, RDR has a better, more googleable name, but in every OTHER aspect...

:D

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Finally the story of a white middle-aged man who doesn't stand down before anyone...

 

 

We've all been waiting to hear this tale. < / sarcasm >

 

Color me unexcited.

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It's funny how learning more about the details of this game, while all sound on their own, serves to take away my enthusiasm. Mainly because I can't help to think: oh yeah, this is the slightly more advanced version of RDR1, and I could just replay that. I'm sure I'm doing it a disservice, but I remember having the exact same feeling of elation and anticipation reading about the first game, and it's weirdly turning me off.

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Ugh, my prediction from two years ago was entirely correct - this has been flooding both Twitter and Facebook. I am actually tempted to start muting people as a result.

 

Rockstar are one of those establishments that will be going long after I die and it makes me sad that they will be held as something of a gold standard for story telling in video games.

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Aw, man, sad to see so many people bummed about this. 

 

I was 23 when RDR came out and I hadn't played video games for three or four years. I was traveling a lot for work, coincidentally out to the desert for weeks at a time, and RDR was the video game that pulled me back into the medium. I had never liked cowboys/westerns as a kid, but the combination of lots of long, quiet drives through a real-world desert and horse rides through a digital one calmed my newly adult anxiety. I have a love/hate relationship with Rockstar sandboxes - I despise the juvenile cynicism and apathy of so much of their plot threads, but I admire that their worlds always push the state of the art. I still jump into GTA V just to drive around, and I did the same for a long time in RDR to horse around.

 

GTA is so cynical that I can't finish the campaigns, but I was impressed with RDR; I found some characters and points distasteful, but I mostly enjoyed them, and Marston worked for me. RDR felt hopeful - it has "redemption" in the title. I am excited for the second game. I will be a decade older this time around, so we'll see if their writers have grown, too. 

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Sure, exactly what I play video games for. Shoot someone’s cousin, intimidate a witness into silence, and make a whole bunch of choices oscillating between deeply compassionate and infinitely cruel so that the main "character" looks like a complete sociopath without a shred of personality. 

 

Looking forward to the "story trailer" so we can see how empty this shell really is. :|

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Vainamoinen, check out trailers 2 and 3 here, they're focused on the story/characters.

 

Add me to the "VERY HYPED" crowd. Whenever a new Rockstar game comes out I tend to loose myself in it for a good few weeks/months. Admittedly, I got tired of GTA V pretty quickly after I finished it, but then a couple years later I started playing it frequently in co-op with friends, to the point where I may just have played it more than any of the previous entries.

 

RE: Writing. It's not great, but it's not terrible either. I liked the characters/stories in RDR and GTA IV+DLCs, though GTA V's writing was kind of a mess, with unlikeable characters and dramatic moments that just petered out. I still have faith they can deliver something good with RDR2.

 

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On 11/08/2018 at 8:36 PM, coughlinjon said:

...to horse around....

:D Heh!

 

Seriously though, it has been interesting for me to read the above takes - I never really 'realised' the cynical side of the RDR story - though partly as I didn't pay too much attention to it, and kind of always treated that side of it as a Western-style pastiche. Either way I didn't really care. What did float my boat was the scenery, the expansive feeling of space, the detail of the settings... It was just a great place to look around. Same as coughlinjon, I return to GTAV now and then but purely to drive around or 'explore' a bit of the map I'm less familiar with. The story didn't interest me, and elements of it were downright unpleasant.

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I want to chime in that despite my not yet being particularly hyped for RDR2, as I mentioned above, I did have a grand time playing the first (second) game. What a game and what a scope for that time! The soundtrack was perfect and my favorite activity was shooting armadillos en other wildlife. I remember the story didn't really pan out into the great ways I expected, though the Mexico stuff was fun (if wrong for various reasons).

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On 8/16/2018 at 8:03 AM, ephemeracollector said:

Seriously though, it has been interesting for me to read the above takes - I never really 'realised' the cynical side of the RDR story - though partly as I didn't pay too much attention to it, and kind of always treated that side of it as a Western-style pastiche. Either way I didn't really care. 

 

Like I said, I hadn't played video games for a couple years, and what I remembered of GTA made me think RDR would encourage violence, but the outlaw system they had in the game (novel for me at the time) discouraged me from doing anything careless, so I never did. Also, the game was an order of magnitude kinder to women than other Rockstar properties (no engaging with prostitutes, some awesome female NPCs). I know these are low bars, but in the landscape of AAA video games RDR felt tame and mature. I did spend most of my time hunting and taming horses and tracking down wanted posters. I also enjoyed that my family was alive instead of fridged (a term I definitely wasn't aware of yet), and that kept me focused on the critical path toward building a family farm. 

 

It doesn't seem like the new protagonist will be afforded the same humanity of Marston, but at this point in my gaming adulthood I have learned to play characters the way I want to experience their stories. I am playing Mafia III right now and I'm impressed with their ability to tell a very violent story with a bit of grace. I'm confident Rockstar has the chops to do the same.

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I liked RDR a lot for similar reasons as everyone else (atmosphere, music, moment-to-moment gameplay) but the story suffered from the same problem as GTA4, which is the protagonist spends the ENTIRE game saying some variety of "I've left that life behind" before going on to do the bidding of the latest psychopath and killing 100 dudes for them. It works for a while but eventually it gets pretty stale. But even if the flaws are roughly the same, it's been long enough that a prettier, slightly more polished version of RDR1 would be fine by me.

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I put five or six hours into this over the weekend. Early thoughts:

  • It looks astonishing, but then you probably knew that. The lighting and animation is unlike anything I've ever seen in a game. (I'm on the regular PS4, sitting close to a decent 32" HD TV; I'm sure the 4K machines do it better, but I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.)
  • The animations for coming off your horse (especially at high speed) are probably the most horrifying thing I've seen in any Rockstar game. Remember the first time you got knocked off your motorbike in GTA? Imagine that, but you have to watch the motorbike whine and struggle to get upright again. Or sometimes your motorbike will be dead.
  • From a writing point of view this still very much feels like a Houser Bros joint, for better and for worse. (Mostly for worse, imo.)
  • There are so many systems here to do with the look and feel of the game intended to make the player feel grounded in the world. They're mostly cool and sometimes absolutely amazing. But sometimes there's a grinding of the gears when the black bars descend on the screen and we enter a cutscene and suddenly I feel like I'm playing the original Red Dead again. Or any of the GTA games, really. Which is not to say the cutscenes are bad, or that the story isn't interesting; it's more that Rockstar's commitment to delivering a grand cinematic experience gets in the way of the remarkable experience they've made. I sometimes wonder what the game would've been like had they made a similar commitment to the one Valve made with the original Half-Life - to never depart from the first-person perspective, even if it made things really difficult in storytelling terms. (I always thought it incredibly strange that GTA V, and now RDR 2, could be so blithe about allowing players to play everything from a first-person perspective. It's hard to know which of those RDR2 was designed for. Surely not both?)
  • They are, however, doing a bit more in the way of environmental storytelling now. (Hot tip: read every note, every poster you find lying around. There's important stuff there that the game won't always point out to you.)
  • Morgan's journal is beautiful. He draws pictures of dogs in it. But only once you have examined the dogs.
  • For the most part it is remarkably slow-paced. Much like Breath of the Wild it is content to let you amble through the world at your own pace; in fact, in often demands that you do exactly that. (To that end, they've repurposed the old GTA 'call a taxi' system into a sort of slow-fast travel system. It's very clever.)
  • But on the other hand, remember how Breath of the Wild deliberately didn't bother with an animation for picking up items, because you'd be picking up so many? Well, I hope you have the patience to enjoy an approach which is precisely the opposite. (I think the labourious approach to picking up stuff is cool right now but ask me in another ten hours.)
  • Shooting the guns is pretty good fun.

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