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Red Dead Redemption 2'S excessively detailed world tries to suggest reality. Fall and you get covered in mud; while covered in mud someone could make a coy how about how they hope it's not shit. NPCs are real people with real reactions. But the more I play, the more they feel like puppets putting on a show.
Red Dead Redemption 2 wants to draw the player to a simulated (albeit overly romantic) version of the past ages when the natural world bore off from the world. The world reacts to the player. Shoot someone in the leg and they might end up with a prosthetic the next time you see them. Leave a carcass by the side of the road and come back to a few days to find bones. The game's natural world, with its detailed snow and character, temperatures, strives to feel realistic. Even Arthur himself emulates a real person through his need to groom and bathe, while his slow gait seems an attempt to separate him from faster, video-y game contemporaries like Assassin's Creed Odyssey's Kassandra.
On the surface, NPCs aspire to the same level of detail, acting out what seems to be full lives. An angry saloon-goer tosses by the window for sleeping with his wife; a clumsy rider stops to calm their horse to get kicked in the head. These moments are the result of their lives, but when contrasted with the rest of the game, they are woefully artificial. The seams start to show, and it's obvious that Red Dead Redemption 2'S people only exist in relation to me, defined by what I can do them.
The game's interactions are constrained due to its inspirations. Westerns are a complex and problematic genus linked to a violent history that gives rise to the myth of an egalitarian tool (eg, the oft-quoted "God made man, Sam Colt made them equal") and rugged, self-reliant masculinity. As a result, interactions with Red Dead Redemption 2NPCs exist within that masculine framework. Arthur and the player's actions are expressions of a mythic masculinity. We rescue men and women, and we would be able to fight their offspring and fight against them. We tip our hat like a proper gentleman, and we kill anyone we want. The game rewards those masculine impulses. The Western framework leads to some types of interactions, and those interactions inevitably lead to rewards: outshoot someone in a marksmanship contest and you'll gain some cash; rescue a man from wolves and he will give you a treasure map.
These rewards further stress that, in spite of Red Dead Redemption 2'S meticulous details and animations-created through excessive, condemnable hours and strenuous work-the NPCs just exist for the player's benefit. HBO's Westworld-Whose heart conceives is that people can wait for a theme park of Wild West role-playing android "hosts" who offers unique adventures-mocks this design in a scene of one of the park's artificial workers falls off his horse. When a human protagonist, William, comes to his aid, the host tries to entice him with rich tales of a treasure map. William's companion dismisses the prospective adventure as a transparent narrative park. It's kiddie stuff, a blatant attempt to pull park people into their activities and storylines crafted for their fun. And yet, in Red Dead Redemption 2, these scenarios play with little irony. The game's details are meant to evoke wonder, and these NPC interactions are meant to suggest a larger world of secrets and adventures. But those adventures are constrained, always coming back to rewarding the player. What a deep and rich world, to have such people and such adventures on every ridge and road! Yet they are in the game of other details, which makes them feel even more unreal.
One time, while riding through the plains, I heard a man crying out in fear. He was going to die, dammit. Please do not someone help him. As it turned out, he was bitten by a snake. I could leave him, I could suck out the venom, or I could give him medicine. I opted for the latter, and we then parted ways. Nearly five hours later, I heard the call to be while I was walking around the town of Valentine. He was sitting on his shop's porch with his friend. Why, was not it wonderful for him to see me, his savior, again? He was so delighted that he offered to pay for whatever I wanted in the gun shop. I bought a Springfield Rifle and Scope; it's perfect for hunting deer.
This encounter meant to give my actions consequences, but the reward and the scripted nature of our interaction rank false. For all of Red Dead Redemption 2'S attention to detail, this NPC was not an entity that existed before I found him. He was spawned in as he came back to life, only to be rescued by me, and then again to reward me for it. Red Dead'S characters are always leading you somewhere, instead of just being people. Enemies are magically summoned for me to gun down; I've watched them blip into existence on my radar during certain events. NPCs exist in orbit of the player, for the player. As a result, Red Dead Redemption 2'S open world often captures the beauty and detail of real spaces, but it never emulates a functioning society. How can it, when do these people exist to serve me?
I avoid the towns more often than not in the game. I get too distracted by the animatronic people and their play-acting lives. Perhaps I've been playing games so long that I can not help but see the puppeteer's strings. When I'm out in the forest or riding on the plains, things seem to calm down. Red Dead Redemption 2'S detailed environments are intoxicating enough that I forget myself for a time. But that silence always breaks. Suddenly, there are broken stagecoaches passengers on the side of the road, hillbilly ambushes, or a man caught in a bear trap. The world does not want me to forget all things I can do it all the rich its characters want to give me. There's a lot of things going on there, all for me, that the game can not help but summon its theme park actors and crafted set pieces. After all, the greatest crime I could commit to miss them.
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