toblix

Red Dead Redemption

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Also: instant death water? Fuck you.

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So... I've never played any of the GTA games.. were they as glitched out as this one seems to be?

not really

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I went cow tipping and apparently a bull didn't like it, so it charged me and I got gored...

Im at the start and honestly the lead up is a little weak, but liking everything else. My biggest complain my controller seemed to take a turn and the x button is a bit screwed, which sucks since I need it so much.

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Yessss, managed to buy it yesterday and play it a couple of hours.

My first impression was one of mild disappointment though. Graphically the game doesn't achieve the richness of, say, Assassin's Creed 2 and environments (especially interiors) can often be a little sparse. Worse is that the game does a terrible job at explaining its mechanics to you. Four hours in and I still have no clue what the fuck is going on with my fame, honor, bounty and quests. (When) does the game save automatically? How the hell does duelling work? It's quite a hassle to pierce through all these things.

But, I get a feeling that once you do, you're rewarded with a one-of-a-kind experience. Besides, I'm having major fun making the wildlife go extinct, so there's plenty of incentive to learn.

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Yessss, managed to buy it yesterday and play it a couple of hours.

My first impression was one of mild disappointment though. Graphically the game doesn't achieve the richness of, say, Assassin's Creed 2 and environments (especially interiors) can often be a little sparse. Worse is that the game does a terrible job at explaining its mechanics to you. Four hours in and I still have no clue what the fuck is going on with my fame, honor, bounty and quests. (When) does the game save automatically? How the hell does duelling work? It's quite a hassle to pierce through all these things.

But, I get a feeling that once you do, you're rewarded with a one-of-a-kind experience. Besides, I'm having major fun making the wildlife go extinct, so there's plenty of incentive to learn.

As far as the graphics go, I honestly think that it looks fantastic. Assassin's Creed 2 is a hell of a high watermark, sure, and it definitely doesn't live up to that game. But in comparison to other open world games of this scale like Fallout 3, Oblivion, and such, RDR looks damn good. Especially the John Marston character model.

Do you... still need help with these other things? Fame and honor are explained to you as you achieve the "levels" or ticks on the scale every time you earn them. Basically, honor gains you cred with lawmen and fame gives you cred with everyone.

Bounty is basically just semi-long term repercussions of committing crimes, upping the ante from Rockstar's GTA games. Once you accrue a bounty, you can either pay it off at the closest train station, hand in a government pardon to magically whisk your bounty away, or let it build up over time hoping you don't get ultimately screwed.

The game seems to save pretty consistently after quests complete, along with various checkpoints within each quest. Beyond that, you have to manually save at a campsite, property you own, or bed you rent from someone.

Dueling is pretty simple. Challenge someone to a duel and when the whole thing starts, you enter "dead eye" mode. Unfortunately, that whole thing isn't well explained either. Dead Eye mode allows you to mark several places to shoot after a certain time elapses, normally activated by aiming at someone and clicking the right trigger. After you mark enemies using the right bumper, you then pull the right trigger to fire off all the bullets you just aimed. Dueling just takes that mechanic and places it into a very narrow scenario, requiring you to disable one guy faster than he gets you. You can easily win most duels just by marking the guy all over as fast as you can, but you can also try to shoot him in the hand to make him drop his weapon.

Now that you mention it, that was a hell of a lot to explain. Then again, that stuff is explained a little bit more progressively and "in the moment" than any other game I've played, only really teaching you those things as you need them/they become useful to you.

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Dueling is pretty simple. Challenge someone to a duel and when the whole thing starts, you enter "dead eye" mode. Unfortunately, that whole thing isn't well explained either. Dead Eye mode allows you to mark several places to shoot after a certain time elapses, normally activated by aiming at someone and clicking the right trigger. After you mark enemies using the right bumper, you then pull the right trigger to fire off all the bullets you just aimed. Dueling just takes that mechanic and places it into a very narrow scenario, requiring you to disable one guy faster than he gets you. You can easily win most duels just by marking the guy all over as fast as you can, but you can also try to shoot him in the hand to make him drop his weapon.

Duelling is a bit more complicated than that. I'm not 100% sure of the following since duelling comes up so rarely (unless you have the poker cheating outfit and keep getting caught):

1) when the duel starts, you get put into dead eye mode. BUT. You don't necessarily want to draw and fire right away. As long as you do not draw, the camera will keep slowly zooming in, making it easier to place shots when you actually draw. Obviously the longer you wait, the greater the chance that the other dude will plug you before you have a chance to get a shot off. Also, I believe you can draw before the word "draw" appears onscreen, but if you do so, you get an honor minus (or miss out on an honor+).

2) when placing shots, the reticule will grow and shrink. To maximize damage, you want to place the shot when the reticule is at its smallest point.

3) there are two bars on the right hand side, representing cumulative damage of placed shots, one for you and one for your opponent. If you place a shot when the reticule is large, it barely adds a sliver to it, so it's basically a wasted shot.

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God damned bears.

I warped to the forest to hunt some boar and as soon as it loaded I got knocked sideways off my horse by a bear, killing my horse and damn near killing me. 4 pump shotgun blasts later and I was going to skin it when I got slammed from behind from another bear, knocking me down a cliff. I somehow survived, but people aren't joking when they say that the bears are the most aggressive animals.

Earlier I lost my horse I had had for most of the game when a boar ran up next to my horse. Apparently it was being chased by a bear.

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I got my goddamn horse killed by a pack of wolves. Those things have killed me more times than anything else in this game.

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I got stuck in pikes basin after my horse ran off a cliff and died... luckily it broke my fall and I survived, but damn I couldn't get out of that place.

So I'm walking and saw some wild horses, I ran one down(yeahh...?) latched onto and now it's my horse, yay!

Getting drunk in a saloon, get outside and some hooker is being raped or murdered, put a stop to that I did... then i thought, maybe the alcohol was effecting my judgement, she was a hooker I think, so who knows.

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I think cougars are out to get me. I spent about an hour looking for foxes for the hunting challenge and each time I found one, there was a cougar right there to kill my horse and almost kill me. I think they were using the foxes to kill me.

--

The acting is amazing in this game, but the writing for John is off. His character is very inconsistently extremely angry or contrastingly mellow. Also I don't really get the point of the honor system, as the story is completely linear.

The game is great but it's pointing out so many things that I already really didn't like in the archaic Rockstar game design.

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Getting drunk in a saloon, get outside and some hooker is being raped or murdered, put a stop to that I did... then i thought, maybe the alcohol was effecting my judgement, she was a hooker I think, so who knows.

A similar thing happened to me. I couldn't make up my mind on whether I should just straight up shoot the guy or try to resolve the situation in some other manner. In the end, I just ended up shooting him and got some honor out of it, so no harm done I suppose.

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The acting is amazing in this game, but the writing for John is off. His character is very inconsistently extremely angry or contrastingly mellow. Also I don't really get the point of the honor system, as the story is completely linear.

.

Yeah I'm not far into the story, but so far the dialog is a bit bland(like any american made western)and the character seems enigmatic for no reason... there was actually a hilarious point of dialog where bonnie mentions this, like poking fun at a crappy narrative trick.

I don't know if it would be a lame thing to do, but I just don't understand why all westerns haven't appropriated Deadwood's curse filled iambic pentameter form of dialog... it was awesome and fit perfectly with the setting.

Rockstar as been making a point to really focus on animation and facial mocap for their characters. They get a third party company that works on high end movies to do this and so far it's paying off. On some main characters there are just really little subtle things to their facial animation that look amazing at times.

One thing that really stands out as kind of sucky is a problem a lot of rockstar has/had is the animation, mouth and dialog not really syncing up. Like I'm looking at amazing puppets act but the voicing I'm hear don't feel like they are coming from them, it could be a timing issue or a lip sync problem.

I felt Lost and and the Damned(and possibly gay tony) got rid of this problem as they adjusted their character models to have really accentuated mouths... the only issue with that was they looked a little ardman-esq... but the main characters stopped feeling like puppets with dialog being played over the scenes and because characters.

Anyway, it's a minor point, but I really hope they do some lost and the damned type dlc and hopefully fix that small quibble.

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Assassin's Creed 2

How is the draw distance, ACII was terrible for me.

I'm quite interested to see sales figures for this, it's sold out in the whole of the city centre in Manchester, apart from a few PS3 copies. My copy hasn't arrived, which is annoying, though I should get a partial refund for it.

please don't be lost in the post.

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As a bit of surreal coincidence, I gave multiplayer a try and ended getting shot up by a bunch of guys speaking Spanish in voice chat. Goddamn Mexicans. kidding. not racist. really.

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I gave up playing today because the autosave feature is shit. I complete stuff, thinking it autosaved ala gta, go out do more stuff, die, then it reloads like an hour again.

Can only take so many times of that, not sure why it doesn't work like gta4. I dont want to have to go into town after every little thing I do and advance the world 6 hours just to save progress. yeesh.

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You don't need to go to town to save, you have a tent which can save anywhere in the wilderness. Restores (some) ammo too. There's an upgrade for the tent which gives more ammo. On ps3, you it's accessible from the 'select' menu that shows your inventory stuff.

I think there's a bug with the bandolier in that if you buy ammo from a store it seemingly resets you to the maximum non-bandolier limit.

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Just played for 7 hours, and hit Mexico.

It's a rockstar game. Very repetitive and kind of "Go here and do this thing". "Now go and do this". "Now wrangle a horse"

It's not BAD, it's just a bit...boring.

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On ps3, you it's accessible from the 'select' menu that shows your inventory stuff.

.

Oh theres my inventory. I was trying to figure out where half the shit I bought was.

Thanks!

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The game is great but it's pointing out so many things that I already really didn't like in the archaic Rockstar game design.

Agreed. It shows in this game more in GTA for some reason. I've wanted Grand Theft Horse since GTA III came out, but now I'm thinking I'd prefer a western themed game like Fallout 3 or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. I was somewhy expecting it to be more like that, but most of the non-enemy NPCs are there mostly as decorations, like in GTA and the other ones are there to start a mission with a cutscene when you enter their marker's range. The only way to interact with a person on the street short of killing them (or lassoing them, I guess) is either bumping into them or threatening them...

Also, the saving seems inconsistent and the game makes losing horses easy. By just trying out things and groping for the boundaries (like can I make a horse go off a cliff?) I can lose progress.

The horses seem a bit too fast, at least for console controls. I am losing all those random fights that just pop up here and there, either by being too slow, messing up with the controls, or accidentally shooting the guy I tried to save. I guess the Dead-Eye thing is a must for these situations, but I haven't got the hang of it yet.

Mount & Blade's mounted combat seems like a piece of cake compared to this, but the horse handling is not bad at all.

I like the look of the world, it is very beautiful occasionally. The game is great, but yeah I think rockstar's formula is showing it's age.

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Do you guys go out of your way to hogtie and bring bad dudes in, or do you just shoot them?

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Do you guys go out of your way to hogtie and bring bad dudes in, or do you just shoot them?

The last 2 guys I lassoed just acted like they were hit by a bullet. Bugs!

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This game is destroying my life. I'm already 20 hours into it within less than a week and haven't really slowed down at all. I feel the game slowly coming to a close, but I still feel like I don't know exactly when it's going to end.

I'm starting to get a little bit of the buggyness that people are talking about... fell through the second story of a building to the first and all the textures reset, once. Also couldn't get a captured bounty onto my horse to save a life, eventually dying after seven waves of the guy's delinquent friends. But honestly... this is like two major hitches within the span of 20 hours. Maybe this is just anecdotal, but I really don't consider this game that buggy.

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For the positives, the story is great. The first two acts were REALLY well put together.

Building up a team to assault Mercer

in New Austin reminded me of a way-better executed version of what Mass Effect was trying to accomplish. I also genuinely felt like a foreigner in Mexico, not like it was just populated with different people.

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