Red Dead Redemption Defiantly Bucks Open-World Trends

Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 are both big open-world games, and they both came out in October of 2018. Both involve a horse riding around and murdering lots of people. The similarities end there.

AC Odyssey is very much of its time. It's an embodiment of the open-world game ethos design popularized over the last decade by its developer, Ubisoft, and it's loaded with ideas that have been embraced by so many other open-world games that they now feel ubiquitous. In contrast, Red Dead Redemption 2 it may be more accurate, it may be more accurate, like it warped in an entirely different timeline.

Since around 2012, more and more open-world games have adopted Ubisoft's information-heavy, player-friendly style of open-world game design. In 2018, "Ubisofty" is a useful shorthand for describing a new open-world game. If you tell someone "Oh, you know, it's basically a Ubisoft game," you're saying there's a big map full of color-coded icons, lots of clearly marked collectables, repeatable and systematized side activities, and lots of progress bars to fill. In that context, Odyssey is a warm blanket of familiar video game tropes and concepts, while Rockstar's game is strange and discomfiting.

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Over the weekend, I'm finally getting back to my Odyssey playthrough. I'd spend the following week and a half marathoning Red Dead 2 in order to review it, and felt ready for a change of pace. I was unprepared for how Red Dead'S peculiar for the rhythms, however, and found the transition back to Odyssey-A game that I love, I should say-more jarring than I'd anticipated.

I loaded up Odyssey a lot of modern games, Odyssey includes gameplay tips on its loading screen. I would like to know what I was going to do, and I would like to go back to that. Red Dead 2'S wordless, evocative loading screens offer no such guidance.

My complete game loading and, holeeey shit:

After dozens of hours with Red Dead 2'S stripped-down interface and general opacity, everything about Odyssey felt aggressively helpful. "Press start to open Quest log and track to new Quest," pop-up in the upper-left of the screen urged me. In the lower-right, a large indicator told me I was on "KYTHERA ISLAND," which was under Athenian Leadership with an Undiscovered Leader. The leader's name was a purple progress bar beneath it, which indicated that the current governing faction was Weakened. I have several questions, a couple of viewpoints, and behind me, several exclamation marks indicating questions. In the upper-right corner of the screen, the number "38" reminded me of my character's level.

I played for a few minutes and the differences continued to pile up. Kassandra, my Odyssey protagonist, moved like a superhuman gymnast compared with Arthur Morgan, the plodding star of Red Dead 2. Kassandras horse, Phobos, controlled more like a Star Wars speeder bike than the idiosyncratic, free-thinking animals I'd been coaxing around in Rockstar's game. I will be able to do this, and then I will go back to the ground. (In Red Dead, I would have died after falling half that distance.) I pressed a button and was given a sweeping aerial view of the shorty of my eagle companion Ikaros. I tagged every enemy in the base. I could see them all through walls.

There is nothing in Red Dead Redemption 2 to compare with any of that. Everything in Rockstar's game is slower, more deliberate, less empowering. It's a quality that I discussed about length in my review: Red Dead 2's snail-slow pace, convoluted control scheme, limited options, sludgy interactions, and hard-to-parse user interface all combine for an experience that is far more popular than ever before .

Red Dead 2 rejects so many modern open-world game design mainstays that it almost feels like it comes from another dimension. Since Friday, I've been watching my colleagues, friends, and other people, and I have seen plenty of people understandably struggling to adjust. Red Dead Redemption 2 is not a welcoming game, and it has a tendency to resist and even a mustang in the wild.

There's a yawning chasm between what I think "Ubisoft open-world design" and the style of open-world Rockstar design has embraced with Red Dead 2. In the Ubisoft model, everything is ugly at the player's feet. The game feels like a digital tool, or maybe an operating system. It's full of menus and progress bars. Every activity fits into a larger, clearly delineated context: enemy outposts, sync points, wineries, tombs, cities, leader homes, convoys, and so on. You always know precisely what you're doing and where you stand.

In comparison, Red Dead 2 is a black box. Most activities are under the influence of a few strangers, or clear gang hideouts, or track down one of five mysterious shacks, for example-but those activities are presented much more organically, as part of the game world. Almost every icon on the map simply designates for rent: a post office, for example, or a butcher's shop. Lots of items in the "total completion" menu are hint at what do you think? One entry is labeled "dreamcatchers," and enticingly instructs players to find all 20 dreamcatchers, note their locations, and "see what you think." Arthur can level up core stats, but those levels are buried in a nest of menus and do not have a huge effect on gameplay.

The two games also have wildly different pacing. Odyssey to get you to work quickly and easily, to get your work done by reams of strong, quests, targets, and missions. Red Dead 2 looks like a long, contemplative walk in the woods. in Odyssey, you can just go to your viewpoint just by opening the map. in Red Dead 2You can only buy a camp upgrade, and you can only do it from your camp. Even that is presented as a cinematic montage of Arthur traveling by horseback.

Red Dead Redemption 2 shares a lot of things in common with 2010's Red Dead RedemptionRockstar's other massively popular games. So why, in 2018, does the sequel feel so peculiar? In part, it's because of the unusual diligence with which Rockstar has pursued the goal of grounding verisimilitude, even by the company's own standards. But it's also going to be pervasive the Ubisoft model has become in the eight years since the first Red Dead.

Ubisoft's approach to the race of the first few Assassin's Creed games, and arguably reach full fruition in 2012's Far Cry 3. That game has been made up, you have not seen it, you have not seen it, you have not been able to do it.

In the six years since then, Ubisoft's many games studios Assassin's Creed, far cry, and Watch Dogs games, though the overall formula has remained the same. During the same period of time, Ubisoft's ideas, helping establish them as game design norms. Games influenced by the Ubisoft model include Mafia III, Horizon Zero Dawn, Spiderman, Mad Max, Dying Light, Batman: Arkham Knight, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Shadow of War, and even role-playing games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3. (There's been some cross-pollination as well: The Witcher 3'S branching dialogue system and sidequest Horizon and Odyssey, and Odyssey also shares a riff on Shadow of Mordor'S nemesis system.)

These games are different in their own ways, but they share many of the same core systems and design ideas. Moreover, each one should be considered as much as possible, and that it should be given as much information as possible, and that the game should be readable above all else. If there's a stealth element to the game, players can usually tag them through walls to keep track of them. If there's a fight, color-coded numbers are often different.

Red Dead Redemption 2 it does not matter, which makes for a fascinating, distinctive experience. I find it appealing despite its obvious flaws, and in a completely different way from something like AC Odyssey. As I put it in my review:

Unlike so many modern open-world games, Red Dead Redemption 2 do not want you to achieve dominance over it. It wants you to be in its world, and to feel like a part of it. It's a crucial distinction, and a big part of what makes it all so immersive and engrossing. The thrill of playing Red Dead 2, like with many other Rockstar games, It comes from the electric sense that you are poking and prodding at an indifferent, freely functioning world.

Over the weekend, I joked on Twitter That Red Dead 2 comes from an alternate timeline where the strange, divisive Far Cry 2 was the Ubisoft game everyone copied, rather than the empowering, crowd-pleasing Far Cry 3. It was an oversimplification, of course; Red Dead Redemption 2 is different from Far Cry 2 in innumerable ways. But Rockstar's new game is the most defiantly unusual big-budget open-world game I've played since Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which was one of the most unusual I've played since Far Cry 2. Like Nintendo, Rockstar has come together to make the most of the game.

I generally enjoy Ubisoft-style open world games. I find them pleasing and easily digestible, and I like picking apart and appreciating the many small refinements that turn up each other. I like Red Dead Redemption 2 as well, but for different, Not every open-world game needs to follow the same playbook, and there is something to be said for major game developers. Despite how slow, frustrating, and just plain weird Red Dead Redemption 2 I'm glad Rockstar's designers have been willing to do their own thing.