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Many of my Red Dead Redemption 2 we have spent a lot of time shooting and walking long distances with a faithful courier. These moments are a mix of explosive excitement and calm. But the best interactions of the game are small. These are tiny pieces of work and loaded physical chores that give the game a kind of texture: rough, gritty, and brittle. These are the smallest parts of an almost overly detailed set, but they are essential to the overall identity of the game.
In a series of letters with my former colleague Patrick Klepek, waypoint Austin Walker, Editor-in-Chief, proposed a word to define Red Dead Redemption 2: friction. It is the discomfort and clash between the lush world and the knowledge of the atrocious working conditions that have created its finest details, as well as the difference between the protagonist Arthur Morgan's heavy construction movement and the Assassin's Creed Odyssey's The freerunning of Kassandra. Narratively, these frictions lie in the way Dutch van der Linde and his gang rebel and oppose a world that can no longer afford it.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has smaller, more subtle points of friction that appear naturally during the game, such as having to fire your weapon and fire again on the lever before a shot, or get lost in the mountain without a horse. These smaller friction points rub shoulders with quieter moments that give an impression of texture, a tactile experience that helps reconcile the most manufactured elements of the game and anchors the player in moments of meticulous and concentrated action.
This is more easily observed in the way players can interact with their weapons. Of course, these weapons will degrade and get dirty like a friction point, but this degradation is offset by the ability, at any time, to stop what you are doing and clean your weapon. As long as Arthur has oil, it is possible to take out a revolver, a rifle or a rifle and bring the damn dirt back to a state of proper use. The player only has to press the action button to adopt a sort of approximate approximation of Arthur's work. This is satisfactory.
Ian Bogost, academician and video game designer, talks about texture in video games and explains how one of the joys of the game is simple: take a coin in your hand and play it. Games, he says, offer "tactile sensations that people find interesting on their own". Red Dead Redemption 2 is full of these tactile actions. Yes, it is useful to clean your weapons, otherwise they are not as powerful, but taking out your Schofield revolver also provides a tactile sensation. It's nice to see the sand and dirt crumbling and darkening in a mirror every time the button is pressed.
My favorite interaction in Red Dead Redemption 2 is a subject that the game never really tells you. If you rest or light a campfire, Arthur may crack split point ammunition for his weapons. These balls slightly improve the damage and reduce the loss of time on your indicator of standard of living. As with everything that happens in the game, the player who decides to do these small tasks has an advantage. But this advantage seems secondary compared to the act of making it itself. Arthur cuts two marks on each ball and for each cut, the controller emits a slight growl. Unlike the roar of an explosion or the burgeoning haptics that result from the shot of a shotgun, this return is light. One. Two. Vrum-vroom. As Arthur starts making dozens of hand-marked bullets, either by pressing an individual button or holding down the button, the game moves back very slightly. There is a roughness, a resistance that the game rejects to the player.
This response is part of Bogost's reflections on texture, in which he attaches great importance to haptics and force feedback. During the making of these balls, the player begins to feel (literally and figuratively) the texture of the world. This is also an example of friction. After all, we have to do it for every fucking ball, one by one. But that's the kind of friction you might feel when you put your hand in a pebble dish. Once you've done that, you'll be able to appreciate the feel of each stone and their pitter patterns as they move. These little moments are Red Dead Redemption 2Pitter-patters, and they communicate more about the world of the game than all the Dutch speeches or all the diversions generated by the procedures.
Fortunately, these interactions are not limited to the care of weapons and the manufacture of ammunition. They exist around the world, giving players a chance to touch and interact with the game in the same way that they could feel the fabric of a scarf. These moments of pleasant texture occur when you brush and feed your horse, clean the dirt in a hot bath or cut firewood at the camp before sipping your coffee, each with multiple pushes on the buttons. . These actions do not provide the great rewards that scams would bring or save insignificant strangers. Instead, they exist largely for their own sake. Each striped ball, each entangled brush stroke and each chopping ax.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is something you push, something you paint and scratch and feel lightly in your hands. And although I've had some pretty spectacular costume dudes and stagecoach flights on the riverbanks, these are moments that keep coming back. These are the moments when, for the shortest second, I feel what Red Dead Redemption 2 is about.
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