Red Dead Redemption and the "Rockstar Fatigue"
By Lungford 3 Comments
In my case, I can't seem to put Red Dead down. I've beaten it once, and I'll most likely play through it again. In single player I'd say it's about 50-50 for traveling by riding and fast traveling. I almost find it's more of a chore to fast travel because you either have to go to the nearest town for a stage coach, or set up your campsite (which can be a frustrating task in a most areas of the game, seeing as it's so fussy about where it allows you to do so), bring up your map and choose the waypoint, and then wait for the load, which can be like 2-3 mins.
Early on in the game I did more fast traveling because I didn't have a good horse, and I didn't know the map and the land well enough, but once I got to Mexico and West Elizabeth, I realized that it only takes a few minutes on horseback to ride anywhere you want, rather than fussing with the campsite. Also, When you fast travel everywhere, you miss all the random encounters, and all the animals and new vistas you haven't seen yet etc. The world's always changing. I always find new things to do, new places to go, new things to shoot. This is what makes the world of the game so compelling to me, and you miss it all when you travel from town to town my teleporting.
My only beef with the riding shotgun/riding to a different place before a mission type of thing is that, yeah, a lot of the conversations you have are the SAME THING, just with different people. Marston needs the location of Bill and Javier, but he doesn't trust the person he's working for. They tell him they've almost found them, and then Marston threatens them if they're lying.. blah blah blah. I mean, there are definitely a few characters that you talk to that actually have something interesting and thoughtful to talk about. The two that stick out the most off the top of my head are Bonnie, and De Santa. It's true, most of the characters after New Austin just aren't as well-written. Seth, West and Irish all had pretty interesting things to say from time to time, but Rockstar seemed to trade in the crazy character quirks from the first area for annoying political agenda in Mexico.
Honestly, I'm not a history or politics guy, so most of the stuff they talk about regarding civil war and revolution goes over my head. I just don't really care. It's not that I don't have an opinion. I wanted to choose sides. I thought they were gonna make me choose a side, but instead you're forced to play both sides, and there's absolutely no consequence for it. I feel like I would care about each character's political views if Marston wasn't forced to play on both sides. It's absolutely ridiculous that they make nothing of the fact that Marston is working for both the Army and the Rebels, massacring both army and rebel alike. I think that's the thing that really set Mexico off for me. Marston's supposed to be this reformed man with a new sense of morality, but throughout the game he proves exactly otherwise. Maybe this is a testament to the incredible endgame, but by the end I didn't really care about John so much anymore, as I did Jack. I also want to mention Ricketts. It's a shame that he doesn't have more screen time. Not to spoil anything, but he's certainly an important player to the story in the very endgame and I would have loved to see him involved a bit more with that.
So no, I haven't grown tired of Red Dead. However, this did happen with GTA4. I had been struggling with "Rockstar Fatigue" as I'll call it for most of the end of the game, and was really just finishing it to see how it ended and to get some points for it. After playing the last mission a couple times and dying from that stupid motorcycle jump, I just quit. I didn't care enough to finish the game, even though it would have taken like half an hour to finish it. I still haven't been able to figure out what happened. I just... grew tired of it. Was it the length? Maybe I could only take the repetition for so long. I doubt I'll ever figure it out. That game is long gone, and I can't see myself going back to it.
I'm sure I could keep talking, but I'd probably just be repeating myself at this point. I love RDR. It's got the most immersive world of any open world game I've played, and the most character as well. I won't be getting rid of this game for a while.
Thanks, Bombers.
Lungford out.
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