I tried playing Red Dead Redemption 2 again recently. I quickly came to the realisation that it’s an utterly tedious experience, even if visually impressive. Why is my horse dirty? Why do I have to actually watch Arthur clean it? Why does he have to pick up every single individual item I’m looting? Attention to detail is nice, but not when it gets in the way of fun. Why do I have to tap a button to fix the wheel on a wagon? Who thought this was a good idea?! Just have a cutscene and cut to them having fixed the wheel because nobody wants to be forced to play such inanity.
I remember the part of the game where you have to slowly carry lumber and build a fence. GOTY.
Every single mission consists of riding on a horse listening to dialogue (written by people who think they are Tarantino) between characters, then going somewhere and shooting everything up. Sometimes you have to do some sort of original task prior to shooting everything up. The gunplay is also too easy, there are a variety of weapons but none of them are more effective than aiming your pistol and flicking up on the control stick to pop a headshot every single time.
The other problem, which plagues many games, is the disconnect between total player freedom and a set story the developers want to tell about a character. It doesn’t gel when Arthur attempts to take the moral high ground in a scene, when ten minutes prior he was engaging in the kind of maniacal, sadistic slaughter that would be seared into the collective memory of the surrounding population for generations.
You’re playing as Arthur Morgan, a character with his own pre-determined personality, beliefs and experience. I wonder whether limiting the actions you can take as a player would better serve a more consistent narrative? Depending on how you play the game, there can be a real disconnect between Arthur Morgan as conceived by Rockstar, and Arthur Morgan as formed by the player which can make the story feel a bit compartmentalised from the gameplay. I’m not a writer, but I wonder if there could be some merit and the player simply not being able to impeach upon the set morals or beliefs or a character?
The story in RDR 2 was certainly engaging enough for me to play all the way through it the first time, and it’s only on a replay that these issues stuck out for me. When you know what happens, you are less forgiving to just how boring everything else is.
It reminds me of the issues with games like Fallout 3, which hilariously boasted a “complex system of moral choice” but is a game in which you can massacre a town, and have everything be forgotten within 3 in-game days, and wrestle with the moral-quandary of whether to detonate a nuclear bomb in a town full of innocent people or to just… not do that. I guess it just bothers me when modern video games boast about “immersion” but then are filled with the most jarring, immersion-breaking moments. There’s a mission in RDR2 where you participate in a massive shootout through an entire town, and minutes later you can stroll through the streets consequence-free. It’s so incongruent.
If developers were brave enough to tell the player “no” then we could have real immersion. A game where your choices, or how you conduct a certain mission means that you are barred from content. Arthur Morgan should have real problems returning to St Denis after shooting more than 100 people in the streets. Nowadays “immersive” means a complex system of equine-care and being able to watch it do a poo in real-time, all while being able to placate the father of the man you just skinned alive with a Mars Bar.
Additionally, although it’s just a game, since becoming Christian I find murder being so casual a little strange in these big open-world Rockstar games. It’s a missed opportunity for developers also, because you could give the player more options on how to navigate different situations, thereby giving the guns-blazing option real, serious consequences and making the game world and it’s NPCs more impactful. Again, I’m reminded of TLoU 2 hilariously trying to teach us something about vengeance, when, prior to reaching that point the player has been forced to deal out endless, indiscriminate and troublingly-animated death to all those who cross your path.
I think games do present the possibility of telling stories in an interesting and unique way, but I think the people writing triple AAA games are either retards or subversives.
