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In general, I start these exams by burying the lead clumsily and trying to provide some context because I think it is important. We live in a world of franchises and, although the occasional freelance masterpiece such as "Return of the Obra Dinn" appears from time to time, even though it is cluttered with luggage loads. "Obra Dinn" was a "Lucas Pope game", a personal brand poised to become a complex and nascent franchise of its kind. Rarely, if ever, can you completely extrapolate a work of art from the context that surrounds it. And if you end up tearing your eyes, you almost inevitably end up coming back.
But I do not know where to start with "Red Dead Redemption 2". I feel we almost have to rewrite the book on this one.
Switching from "Grand Theft Auto V" to this is not a transition that any studio could have achieved. Heck, even going from "Red Dead Redemption 1" to this is a stretch, although at least this game has more oppressive themes. Again. A game developed by Rockstar in which criminal activity is actively promoted and the best course of action is often to play the role play as if you were in a living society that breathed, which one does not have. Was not waiting.
(Instacodez / Flickr)
As a studio that has created the kind of open playgrounds, I do not quite understand why Rockstar would have wanted to react so restrictively and seriously to almost everything they had done before. Someone in a meeting room somewhere must have convinced someone else that this approach would bring them more money than ever before. I do not know at all how they did that, but I would like to hear the speech.
Open world games, and Rockstar games in particular, have always struggled to put together a coherent narrative, as they try to bend linear narratives into games with mechanisms that allow for emptying, killing everything and cause explosions. Some games, such as Nintendo's Legend of Zelda: The Breath of Nature, have solved this problem by keeping their linear stories free and light, relying instead on complex systems of mechanisms to generate interesting and adventurous stories for the player.
"Red Dead Redemption 2" asks you what would happen if you reverse this script: create an open world, define all mechanisms of system-based procedural narration, show them to the player, then each time the player tries to use them, punish the player and force him to go down in a small series of trails
(Instacodez / Flickr)
Compared to their previous games, "Red Dead Redemption 2" looks like a visual novel, more like a simulation of what was the life of a great banditmanian in the United States in the late nineteenth century, an arcade machine for entertainment. This can be frustrating, and indeed, the game is not as accessible, or even as fun, as all previous Rockstar titles. For a game rich in stories, the pace of the plot is terribly slow. If you decide to play this game, you will spend about a fifth of its 60 hours of play riding passively on horseback and listening to the characters talking to each other. And the plot of the game does not really take until about 10 hours, so if you're hoping for a quick start, you'll be deeply disappointed.
You reserve the right to lose interest. And given how Rockstar management worked with its writers in the lead up to the release of this game – forcing them to work 100 hours a week to check everything and recheck everything – you'd also be right to ignore the game for moral reasons. Labor standards like that are deplorable, and with them writing their writers in this way, it is a miracle that it has appeared in any form whatsoever.
That said, if you stick to him, there is a light at the end of the tunnel "Red Dead". It's the first Rockstar game where people count. Where lives matter. The crimes you have committed and the houses you are destroying are not simply erased every time you reappear. Where groups like women and African Americans are examined and treated with respect.
(Instacodez / Flickr)
Some Rockstar members had to take a look at the setting in which they were working and realized how difficult and oppressive it was. So, history has been changed to focus on the most oppressed minorities, and the mechanisms have been changed so that freedom becomes a thing to gain – not something given to you.
If you get off your horse and forget to explicitly enter your weapon from the saddle bag, you will not get one. If you are incompetent, you can walk in almost unarmed missions. They may have simply returned all your weapons to your person every time you get off your horse, but the development team deliberately chose to let you forget about them. It was huge for me.
There are many meticulous ways that this game could have done better in its execution. An oppressive atmosphere does not require a departure as slow, boring and restrictive as that of "Red Dead Redemption 2". I sincerely hope that the success of this game will mark the beginning of a kind of "Red Dead Revolution" for Rockstar because it would be sad to return to cynical and cynical humor of Grand Theft Auto .
Marty Forbeck is a video game columnist for the Daily Cardinal. To read more about his work, click on right here.
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