How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2
vulture.comI haven't played a big-budget game in years, but I decided to give RDR2 a try, specifically because reviewers described it as slow and boring.
I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride.
On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other hand, it revives the sense of wonder that I haven't felt since I learned to treat games as something to win rather than something to get lost in.
My main problem with the game was how willing it was to fail you on whatever your current objective was. For example, I passed a woman on the side of the road with a broken leg who needed help. Easy enough, I stopped and offered her a ride. She couldn't get on though because I had pelts on my horse. In the time it took me to walk back to my horse and drop the pelts, she'd yelled at me "Fine, I'll get home myself" and walked off, and wouldn't speak to me anymore. I've had similar experiences with several other side-encounters, and even main story missions where I had to replay 10 minutes of riding somewhere because I got off my horse midway to shoot a deer and failed out of the mission because of it.
Also, the controls are quite bad - it suffers from the "Rockstar Claw" just like all their other releases. Overall, I want to enjoy this game, and I love the characters and the immersiveness of the world they've crafted, but the game containing the world is hard to play.
Rockstar Claw is fixed via the ‘Standard FPS’ setting with toggle to run. You click the left thumbstick once to jog and twice to sprint just like FPS games like COD. Pulling fully in a direction sprints and just barely touching it walks. I liked the change but it felt weird and I worried that I would just run off every cliff I came to.
That only works for on foot though, not on horseback.
Rockstar have not innovated on their open world format
Why is it called 'Rockstar Claw'?
You have to hold down 'x' to run, and if you don't you go maddeningly slowly.
You need to mash A to run, but also need to keep a finger on the stick and the trigger, meaning you end up with your thumb on the stick, index on the A button, and middle on the trigger, creating an uncomfortable claw shape with your hand.
The newest Zelda is like that as well. I finished in a couple of weeks; my wife has been playing for almost a year and just finished the main quest. My daughter just enjoys exploring and cooking dishes with all the ingredients. The attention to detail at every level is what makes it work as a free-world. I'd argue this aspect is better than the traditional main-quest story line and execution, but the entire game is an amazing experience.
I've never played a game that offered more enjoyment in simply moving around the world than in Zelda. Putting yourself in the headspace of climbing up mountains and paragliding for transportation is so fun.
Slow and boring is what sold me on it as well. Early on I was getting frustrated with having a bounty on my head but I've learned how to avoid that (stop committing crimes). Now, I slowly explore the map and occasionally complete a mission to move the story forward.
I feel the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of single player games ... it’s like I gotta have a multiplayer competitive at all times , if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears , Meh who cares not fun haha
Interestingly, the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of multiplayer games: so many people are playing them, there's no chance I am going to be able to compete, given that I only play occasionally. When "multiplayer" meant "lan party" or "friends come together and play a skirmish" you actually had a chance, but now? Not so much.
I really prefer single player games with a nice story and an action that's not too hectic that I can enjoy at my own pace.
This is why for me, Warcraft 3 and Starcraft were my fondest memories of playing online games. The standard multiplayer was always going to be competitive, but the real wonder was in the custom games. This was before the big wave of indie game creators, so you had a bunch of people churning out interesting and creative games with the WC3 editor. The custom games were most famous for DOTA, but you had genres like Tower Defense which blew up in a big way in the custom game scene.
You had maps like wilderness survival and troll tribes, which, if you've played Don't Starve, feels largely derivative. Footmen Frenzy, Dark Deeds, Sheep Tag, Uther Party (Mario Party ripoff), LAOP, Parasite, Mars Survival, Risk knockoffs, etc. It didn't matter if you sucked at these games, because most people sucked at them; the playerbase for each custom game was pretty small. A good time for novelty - I'm hoping reforged brings back some of that magic from that scene. I played LOL after moving on from Blizzard games (Wow was never my thing), but it wasn't the same. Also, very toxic. Not a great game for casual players.
That means it has bad matchmaking either because of laziness or a shallow player base. You should be matched up with people of equal skill.
As a debilitatingly asocial person (even online), I have the complete opposite position. I dislike the industry shift towards games that focus on multiplayer and sometimes don't even have a single-player mode.
While there is definitely a focus on multiplayer games ($$$ drives all things), these last few years have also yielded some of the most incredible single-player games. Major studios are investing in AAA primarily single-player titles (from this year alone, God of War, Spiderman, RDR2, Assassin's Creed Odyssey) and there is also an explosion of high quality indie titles.
As someone that almost never plays online except some occasional co-op with friends, I don't feel one bit neglected by the current state of the industry.
That is a shocking statement. You are there to hear the tree falling in the forest. Are you saying that your reason of playing video games is to get acknowledgement from others?
I find this shocking because it's incredibly in line with discussions and articles that claim that a large portion of younger men had been deprived by society from getting a sense of belonging and accomplishment and is now using video games as a bandaid for that.
This is a unfortunate statement, as there are many reasons to game. I'm guessing you havent really spent much time gaming. For me, the most important part of gaming for me is sharing time with my far-flung-friends. We're not watching a tree fall, we're building a campfire together. Sharing GTA5's space with 7 friends is much better than a group video call with the same crowd, for example. Acknowledgment from others doesn't even rank on the list of reasons why I game.
Unfortunately I've spent a lot of time gaming. Not much online with friends though. At least not in recent years.
You make a very valid point that sounds entirely different than OP's "tree falling in the forest" argument.
Yeah I think I was more getting at the 5 axis of game design, there’s people who’d like to : Explore, Socialize. Challenge based game / rankings , Strategy / logic, Forget other one
I’d say my tree falling in forest remark goes along two axis of social + challenge against other human brain . Almost same dopamine hit of telling a joke and getting reaction from crowd, feels fun to tell jokes similar to goofing off in multiplayer games etc
My only point was that there are many different motivations to game and ways to derive value from a gaming experience, my bad if I come off as holier than thou.
You've merely reinforced his point.
It's a fair sentiment and I don't think you deserve to get downvoted for expressing it. Years ago when I still had an Xbox 360, I remember Microsoft had implemented a system where all of your friends would be able to see your in-game achievements on Xbox live, even in single player games. I'd actually say it goes even farther back to the days of arcades: sure, it's fun to play arcade games on your own, but really you just wanted to beat your friends' high scores.
I don't feel that way about single player games, but I do find narrative based games less enjoyable than story-less games/story-poor games where the game play mechanisms are at the forefront: like Enter the Gungeon, the new XCOM, Prison Architect, Oxygen Not Included, KSP etc.
Games with stories and narratives feel like chores and are restrictive.
Yeah, I agree, form should follow function, not the other way around.
"This game allows you to pluck chickens / pay respects / become a porn star, that was never possible in a game before!!!", but it's really just that you can press a button to trigger an animation.
That's fun for a while, but seeing a bunch of games and programming a bit, it kinda becomes transparent and samey, and those little touches of realistic decoration are also reminders that they had time for that $animation, but not for this $mechanic. Some people see redheads and blondes and brunettes, I see committees.
Here's a crazy idea: Replace all models by their hitboxes and all textures single colors, remove all ambient sounds, remove all padding from dialogue and let NPC just name the variables they need to have met, and what variables that will set as a result, and so on. A game or a simulation would of course look and sound terrible, but it would still work, while a interactive movie kind of "experience" will be reduced to next to nothing.
Take chess for example, playing with beautiful weighty pieces is certainly more fun than with, say, pieces of paper with letters on them. But if you're good at chess and longing for a good game of chess, you would rather play against an opponent with a similar elo ranking as you with pieces of paper, than against a child or a random number generator with nice chess pieces.
We can rank sciences by "hardness" all day, but the thought of "hard gaming" seems oddly offensive, why? I also noted that no comments seem to reference the article, which is understandable since it's such a fluff piece. And none of the comments are pointing out any gameplay challenge, clever AI, nothing.
> After a few hours, you can almost feel the ego diminution, the sense of “merging with nature or the universe” that Michael Pollan describes in How to Change Your Mind. (And at $60 for a copy, Red Dead Redemption 2 is cheaper than psychedelic drugs.)
60$, then "a few hours" until that effect kicks in, and you become one with "nature and the universe" on the screen.
Just wow. I would feel insulted by that. That's such a low view of both the universe and the time of a person.
> The soundtrack helps, too. You hear sounds of nature, long ambient notes in the wilderness, or the Irish-influenced strain of an antique banjo from a nearby campfire. “We have 192 interactive mission scores, and we thought about the music constantly from the time we brought in [composer] Woody Jackson in 2015,” says Ivan Pavlovich, Rockstar’s music supervisor. “Sam was always asking early on, ‘What’s the feel [of the game]?’ ”
Oh yeah, telling people how to feel about things, what would a good game be without that, right?
> Rockstar’s goal is to “slip as much art under the hood without players noticing it — but they don’t have to notice it,” says Dan. If you want, you can bypass much of the story with just a tap of the controller. “It can just be mud, blood, and gore.”
Mud, blood and gore with cutscenes, or just mud, blood and gore... what about gameplay? All the immersion on the one hand, then slo-mo and auto-aim on the other, and plenty of chores to keep your stats up. A huge map, a million NPC with a few binary flags each, and hours of voice acting. What did I miss? All I heard on youtube is the same I read in this thread, "you can go fishing or hunting" ("move to location X and press button Y"), how it's so immersive and detailed, etc. etc., but nothing about solid gameplay.
So your own enjoyment of a game is meaningless unless someone knows you're enjoying it? I suppose that's your prerogative, but it sounds like we play games for different reasons.
No more like I enjoy knowing two or more human brains are collaborating on the same real-time experience
I'm still on Witcher 3. Hopefully it will last until Cyberpunk 2077..
The other day I saw that hour long gameplay video 2077 and it was mesmerizing. I can't wait to play it, will probably even upgrade my PC just for that game, but OTOH the world looks so immersive and deep I fear that I'd need a couple of weeks off.
I bet 2077 will be a next generation console headliner, so you don't necessarily need to buy a $500 video card to play it :)
I have a PS4, but if I can I prefer buying a game for PC.
In part because I have more control over the hardware, but specially because games do not die when a newer console model is released.
I can still play many PC games from 10+ years ago, but I have a box of PS3 discs that I cannot use because the PS4 does not have backwards compatibility. Some of those games have been ported to the PS4, and I'd have to buy them again to play them on the PS4. What will happen with the PS5?
Witcher 3 was the game that put me back to play games and I still love it and all its DLC. And after Witcher 3 game the new Zelda, which reimagined the whole idea of an open world adventure. Waiting for Cyberpunk 2077 now...
Check out no man's sky, since the Next update they've fixed all the missing stuff and it's brilliant, it's almost Zen gaming.
red dead redemption was slow as well, but much better paced. at the time, it seems the tech and general style of red dead redemption made a strong departure from gta iv. the gunplay was very fun in my opinion in red dead redemption. the euphoria physics engine was really fantastic. when i got gta v, it was surprising how sluggish and clunky the gameplay was. it seems they didn't keep or integrate any of the tech from red dead redemption. maybe they did, but it wasn't noticeable. gta v was faster paced, particularly the driving, than gta iv, but the gunplay was still the same old. i was worried that red dead redemption 2 would follow more in the footsteps of gta v than red dead redemption, and that seems to have been the case. the gunplay in red dead redemption 2 is noticeably sloppier and more clunky than in red dead redemption 2.
i played red dead redemption for hundreds of hours, both in single player and in the online multiplayer, which was a blast. i haven't even finished red dead redemption 2, and have found myself very bored with the story and side missions. it's the same formula rockstar has used for years, and the AI is as superficial as ever. it can be a real slog riding around between missions. even though the guns look great, they and the aiming system is not as fun as red dead redemption.
If you enjoyed the slower pace I'd recommend Kingdome Come: Deliverance [1]. It doesn't have the same level of polish or the production values of a Rockstar game, but really surprised me with it's realistic, historic, non-magical setting that actually brought something new to the familiar table of open world RPGs.
I’m sort of ambivalent about the game and it’s largely because I have two young kids at home and have maybe an hour at a time to play and the amount of what I would call ‘empty’ time in the game really stands out.
There have been times where I’ve done all the work I need to do to get some unbroken alone time, spent 40 minutes playing and gotten absolute nothing accomplished which really sucks given that it might be the only time I could play that week.
I get that it’s atmospheric but as a dad game it just sucks.
I’d like to be able to load the game and play through a couple of missions quickly without all the faffing about brushing my horse and crafting and hunting and what not.
Basically my life is full of enough chores that I don’t need games that simulate doing more chores.
Request for service: Dad Game Reviews. Games that are fun to play and more engaging than the mindless idlers and puzzles that are out there today but support meaningful episodes of 30-40 minutes.
The entire genre of roguelikes might fit that.
Because they generally have this permadeath mechanic, every step in the game is meaningful to not losing, and the game developers are also kind of forced to make every part of the game fun and not too tedious or superfluous, as you'll generally replay them many times.
I currently quite enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which you will need a free afternoon to get into, but after that, you can even have meaningful episodes of 5 minutes. You're not gonna complete a run in 5 minutes, that's rather gonna take 8 hours (though the world record is at less than 30 minutes), but you can load up the game, play a few hundred turns and then save and quit easily in that time.
Site name idea: Dadgum Gaming
I think Wired used to have a column like that.
Called what?
Geek Dad.
There are certain games I have to play either very late or very early to give them the unbroken lengths of time they deserve. Not possible for everyone but if you can squeeze a long session once a month or every couple weeks it can dramatically change the experience of some games for the better.
This is definitely an issue I encountered as a new dad playing RDR 2. That said, this game is such a landmark achievement, the scale and ambition is largely without precedent, it was still worthwhile persevering for me in small chunks.
I like dead cells for that kind of interval. It has a good balance and walking away from the game is fine. MOBAs and Battle Royales like dota and fortnite also give that '1 hour play session' balance typically.
I'm not even a dad and this game sucks for the reasons you mentioned.
Lots of respect for Rockstar but... Add FL I alone on that I thought GTAV was at best soulless and at worst terrible. I almost stopped playing when Trevor became available.
Whereas GTA4 was genuine satire (Republican space rangers anyone?) the sequel had poor characters and I honestly have never gone back to it since finishing the main storyline, the first time this was true in the series.
Anyway RDR2 Looks amazing. I bought an Xbox just to play it. Who knows how long it'll take to get to PC but I'll buy it again when it does.
I quite liked GTA4 but just couldn't get into 5, in part for the reasons you mention. RDR2 on the other hand comes close to giving me the enjoyment that RDR gave me (and surpasses it in some ways).
I don't think the last one ever made it to PC, I assumed this one also would never get there.
While it’s true RDR 1 never made it to PC, with GTA V rockstar invested a lot optimising their tech stack for PC - it’s a huge leap in quality over the pretty poor port of GTA IV.
GTA V’s PC port was also financially an enormous success, it cemented a place in Steams top seller list for years thanks to the success of GTA Online.
Couple this with the leaked RDR 2 PC developer job titles that have been discovered via oversharing Rockstar employees on LinkedIn, I think there is a good chance RDR2 follows the GTA V release model and a PC version hits 12-18 months after console release.
I bet a significant number of gamers ended up buying GTA V twice at full price thanks to the staggered release schedule last time (I and many friends certainly did), I’d not be surprised at all if this factors in their decisions.
The story in that game was an awful pastiche of 90s era action movies. No nuance or depth to any of the characters.
The game is good but the controls are so bad it's comical.
Don't try and get on your horse if someone is standing near it because triangle is also "get into a fight with that person". You can back out of the fight, but not with the circle button (which is so often the "go back" button) - this time circle is the punch button!
Basically the core game loop is: move a bit, look in the bottom right to see if you can press some buttons to do a thing, do a thing or move a bit more.
Just today I started playing it, and it's really impressive. It's like being in a Cormac McCarty novel.
I imagine the pacing, realism, and atmosphere is not for everyone, but if it is your cup of tea this is (so far) a masterpiece in single player gaming.
I see it as more like being in Westworld.
Good point!
"a masterpiece in single player gaming."
why?
Every aspect of the game is gloriously hand crafted. Writing, graphics, sound, etc. But I think what makes RDR2 unique is that it really transports you to a particular point of space and time through the eyes of a character. Visually it's very cinematic, but I feel it's much closer to literature in the way it immerses you into the world, the characters, and the conflicts.
Personally, I've never seen a game with this focus and this level of scope and quality.
I used a video's frames of myself playing RDR2 to train a neural network. I then showed it a photo my son took of some cows at the in-law's place. Here's what happened: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sDTofashQdDSUJMdA
The network was trained with https://nanonets.com, if anyone is interested. Interesting stuff, given the knowledge came from synthesized horses.
I did not train or segment any other entities other than Arthur and his horse. Labels were 'horse' and 'human'.
There are cows in the game too. Did you use those in your training set?
If you like this, you can find more at https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/
GDC posts videos of game postmortem presentations from the games' developers, including classic games like Bard's Tale and Another World:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0...
RDR2 starts out almost as an anti-game, then progresses through a phase that feels like a stereotype of old westerns. I think it jerks you between the two extremes to set up the second half of the game, which involves much more drama, racial overtones, and more examination of the death of outlaw life that the game’s promise is built on.
There are two main criticisms to me.
(1) the dialogue is very cheesy and superficial too often when it would be better to just not have it at all. More segments of deep sparsity, even when other characters are around you (think Shadow of the Collossus) would make it even more desolate and impactful.
(2) The mechanics of the controls and indicated special instructions are sometimes clunky to the point that you fail missions or miss out on things accidentally just due to the control system. I know this will never be perfect, but it is frequently so bad in RDR2 that you are very aware of it and frustrated by it as you complete tasks.
Despite this, it’s easily one of the best games I’ve ever played on multiple dimensions.
It makes me very excited for Death Stranding as well, which I think will be something of a sci-fi / dystopian variation of what RDR2 is.
what exactly makes it one of the best games you have ever played?
I would say it's the best game I've ever played because the aesthetics are so amazing I actually feel compelled to 'roleplay'. I've played lots of games classified as role playing but really I'm always just working the mechanics. In RD2 I sometimes turn on the game just to go for a horse ride or go fishing regardless of whether or not it's contributing to objective progress.
Several things.
The scale of technical achievement is by far more impressive than anything that came before. Metal Gear Solid 5 might be the closest thing in terms of open world technology, but RDR2 is far superior to it.
The anti-game aspects create a very different dramatic experience than most games. Sometimes you just ride along with another character and do nothing but observe what happens. Other times your plans get derailed in an Inception sort of way and you end up halfway acrosd the map doing something you never intended, none of which has anything to do with the story. This happens in ways that are much more organic and natural than previous similar mechanisms in e.g. GTA games.
The story deals with a lot of themes that have more impact because of coming across them in an open world (stumbling into KKK meetings, seeing lynched bodies hanging in swamplands, tracking down a gang that tortures animals, finding evidence of families split by slave trade, and many more).
The main story is compelling and well crafted, but the fuller picture from the pastiche of stuff in the world makes it feel effective, and the scenes of blood-thirsty wild west action feel more like uncommon punctuation marks than important aspects of the plot.
> The scale of technical achievement is by far more impressive than anything that came before. Metal Gear Solid 5 might be the closest thing in terms of open world technology, but RDR2 is far superior to it.
Yep. MGSV has better graphics and far better controls, but the open world in MGSV always felt dead, especially as you got away from enemy bases or outposts. RDR2 does a much better job of always giving you something to do out in the open world that isn't necessarily mission based. MGSV also basically has no friendly or neutral NPCs in the mission areas, which further contributes to breaking the immersion of being in an actual world.
RDR2 does an impressive job of making the stuff seem to organically happen. Smoke signals from random camp sites, animal movements, strangers, other riders on the roads. I’m sure future games will make it even smoother and more integrated, but it’s already impressive in RDR2.
You can also completely ignore these interactions, but you risk missing out on things that will be much harder to do if you wait and come back later, or which might not reappear as options, like helping a stranger or looting a specific enemy camp.