Outlaw and Hero!!!
By RichardLOlson 1 Comments
Being evil isn't cheap, but it sure is fun.
Whenever given the option in a videogame, I invariably bend toward the darkness. If I'm going to do good deeds I may as well save them for real life where it counts. When it comes to those digital denizens of the videogame world, with their strict and artificial rules, I like to have a little fun. When I got done with a recent six hour play session of Red Dead Redemption, the virtual world didn't know what hit it.
The way I see it, there are two types of behaviors in Red Dead Redemption – Rockstar's upcoming open-world Western -- that I would consider key to being a true outlaw. The first are the kind that will actually affect your morality rating in the game. Do good deeds, be the hero and save the day in general and you'll be seen as a hero. Kill innocents, break the law, and help out the villains and you'll be seen otherwise.
The second set of actions I'll get to in a little bit. These are the ones that go above and beyond Red Dead Redemption's laws -- the types of things that any person with bleak thoughts can dream up and perform in a sandbox like this.
Performing actions of the first type and driving down your morality rating is actually pretty easy and it won't take long before you're ready to paint the town red. The game opens with a train ride into a small town named Armadillo and one of the first things you're greeted with is a woman of loose morals peddling her wares. Right off the bat, you can tell that this is the type of place where a person who knows how to use a gun can do as they please. After a brief introduction to set up the motivations of John Marston, you're given free rein to explore much of the world…and that means you're free to start causing a ruckus.
Unfortunately, you won't have many tools of destruction just yet, and you won't have a dollar to your name. Both of these are serious problems for a would-be bandit. You'll want to do a few story missions straight away to earn a few weapons, a lasso and some money. With the basics in tow, I set out to make my mark on the world.
I started out small. A few drinks at the saloon and a bar fight later, I stumbled out into the night looking for some easy money. I ran into an old crazy lady begging me to help her find a man named Peter, but that seemed like too much work so I shot her and moved on. And just like that, my honor meter went down by five points. It would take a few dozen more bullets to innocents to gain some real notoriety, but if there is one thing that Red Dead Redemption has it is a lot of innocents to toy with.
Take, for instance, the sorts of things you can do with a lasso. You gain this little tool during a mission that teaches you the ins and outs of breaking a wild horse, but you can aim the rope ring at people, too. I went to the saloon and found a prostitute, hog-tied her and then slung her over my shoulder to take for a ride. She didn't take too kindly to this treatment, screaming out obscenities like, "There are other ways to a girl's heart, you ass!" along the way. I responded by leaving her on a train track.
The most fun comes thanks to the epic animations Red Dead Redemption produces. Shooting or knifing people and animals invariably results in hilarity. During my travels I did everything from uppercutting a cow with a bowie knife to killing so many lawmen as they entered a saloon that they were stumbling over their predecessor's body pile. You don't even have to kill anybody to have some fun. Just drawing your gun on an innocent walking down the road will startle them into a funny reaction. My favorite was a man sitting with his legs up on a table. When I trained my sights on him he fell over backwards into a piano.
When you meet every rancher, farmhand, and cowboy with a shotgun, finding steady work outside of the main missions can be a bit tricky. Sure, I responded to a woman crying for help when bandits were stealing her carriage. I even tracked down the thief, put a bullet in his head and then brought the little chariot back. I didn't give it to her, however, I shot the horse in front of her and then rode away to leave her in the wilderness.
So, as you might imagine, the income isn't too steady when you play as an insane rogue. Looting corpses only provides a dollar or two here and there. To bring in the money, I had to get creative. For a short while, I turned to hunting and my mission became to rid the plains of all cute and cuddly wildlife. Blue songbirds, though rare, are easy pickings for those with a shotgun. Majestic deer bring in a pretty penny.
Then I found an easier path to riches -- raiding farms. As it turns out, you can skin a horse, pluck feathers from a chicken, or cut out some cow meat just the same as you can wild animals. Only these ones are all penned up and waiting for you to swing by every now and then and take your spoils. Yes, I became a cattle thief.
Before you go crazy on the poor people of Armadillo or its surrounding ranches, you should know about the consequences. They may be enough to scare you straight. Killing innocents will quite often result in a bounty being placed on your head. If you take up arms against a man of the law, you'll always get one immediately (though you also get double the drop in honor on the morality chart). If you're on a killing spree out in the wilderness, you might be able to get away scot-free, provided you can deal with the witnesses through bribery or more murder. When I saw the witness icon pop up on the mini-map, everything in sight died, be it man or beast. Nobody was going to snitch on my John Marston.
Should a bounty get placed on your head, you might first have to run from the sheriff's men until the heat cools down. Even if you do, the bounty remains. Some people in the world simply won't deal with a wanted man and that can be quite a problem. You can pay down the bounty yourself if you have the money. This might not be an option, though. I once had the bounty up near $1,500 at a time of the game where I rarely carried more than a hundred bucks. When this happens, you'll need a pardon letter. These can be gotten by completing quests for the right people, but they aren't easy to come by.
The good news is that it seems impossible to completely close off any avenues in Red Dead Redemption just by being a bad guy. Kill or threaten a shop keeper and their store will only shut down for a day or so. Kill an important side-quest character and you'll fail the mission, but that person will respawn eventually and you'll be allowed another chance.
Was all of this too much for you? Are you perhaps a bit more heroic? Check back Monday when IGN's Greg Miller recounts his exploits in Red Dead Redemption as the goody-two-shoes he is.
Bringing law and order back to the Wild West isn't for the faint of heart.
After six hours of Red Dead Redemption, I don't see how anyone could play this game as an outlaw. The title toys with your emotions – anger, love, sympathy, guilt – and casts you into a world that's crying out for a hero. There were plenty of situations I encountered where a bullet to the head would've made my mission easier, but these weren't just faceless folks in a videogame world – I needed to help them. I can pinpoint the moment when the depravity of the henchmen I was up against made me sick to my stomach and I knew that being good was the only way for me to play this game.
A number of campsites were found raided, complete parties wiped out by a gang of bandits. The sheriff of Armadillo and I were on the trail of these bastards and came to a farm that was far too quiet. We made our way to a barricaded barn, busted in, and found death. In the center of the room, a naked man was hanging by a noose. He was the patriarch of the house, and he was dead. Below him were the beaten and tortured bodies of his family. From the shadows, the murdered man's daughter emerged and told us that the rest of her family was being held captive in the main house.
The entire barn episode angered me in a way few games have. I was completely enveloped in the experience and furious at the monster who would do such horrendous things. I made my way to the house and relished every headshot I pulled off as I killed these men room by room. I saved a few women that I found bound in bedrooms, but their faces were beaten, swollen and bruised. One of them would only tell me that the captors had done "unspeakable things" to them. When I got back outside the house, I found another group of abused women, but rather than the traditional "Thanks, hero!" most games give you, these ladies wailed and blamed the sheriff and I for letting this happen to the family.
It was this event that cemented the fact that I could never play this game as a bad guy. The main character of Red Dead Redemption is on a quest you won't fully understand for quite sometime – I played for six hours and don't truly know the scope of his mission – but the themes will ring true. In a world with this much heartache, there needs to be a hero, and John Marston is meant to be that savior. Hell, the title of this game gives away the man's motivations. John Marston already did terrible things long before you ever pushed start. He's looking for redemption.
Last week, IGN's own Erik Brudvig walked you though his hours in the town of Armadillo, except he played as a bad guy. He shot horses in the head, left women to die in the desert, and raided the countryside. Basically, he was a maniac, and that's the kind of the virtual life I can't live. I need to save people. I need to walk the straight and narrow.
Trouble is, being that beacon of hope isn't as easy as I thought it would be in Red Dead Redemption.
When I first stepped off the train in Armadillo, I assumed being the good guy would be no sweat. Don't kill innocent people, help people in need, and do whatever it takes to make the world a better place. Turns out, Red Dead's open-world freedom Rockstar is always talking about makes being the good guy a little more difficult. During my first real ride across the countryside, I heard gunshots and stopped in my tracks. I did a 360-degree turn, scanned the horizon and did everything I could to find the disturbance, but I had no luck finding out what was going on. Was someone getting hijacked? Was there a fight? Was it just some idiot shooting birds out of the air? I rode towards where I thought the shots were coming from, backtracked, and searched all over the area, but I never found out what was going on.
hings like that haunt me as Marston. There's so much disturbing stuff going on in this world that if I hear a commotion, I'm emotionally compelled to investigate so there won't be someone's rape and/or murder on my conscience. In Red Dead, our hero isn't a superhero. He has no telescopic vision to explore the horizon and no other-worldly sense to hone in on trouble. When something goes on around you, it's up to you to figure it out and act.
Now, these situations come in all shapes and sizes. There are the easy hero decisions, like coming up with the cash to pay a man for his property instead of the easy "blow him away and take the deed" route, but the harder decisions are the ones that need to happen in a split second. At one point, I was leaving a whore house (no services rendered), when I heard a blood-curdling scream from down the road. I ran over to the commotion and found woman on her back with a knife-wielding man on top of her. I pulled my gun and blew the assailant away. Later, I came across a woman asking for help by her stagecoach. As I approached, armed men jumped out as part of an ambush/robbery. After using the Dead Eye feature to kill all the men in a split second, I had the choice of murdering the unarmed bitch who set me up or letting her go. Of course, I let her leave.
These random crimes speak to that urge to be the hero in a pinch, but don't think that you're only going to get the good/bad choice if you're stumbling around the back alleys of this tumbleweed town. One of the first side missions you'll come across is a woman sobbing at the sheriff's station. Her husband journeyed to a remote area and hasn't been heard from since. If you want, you can just ignore her and go back to drinking in saloons, but if you take her quest and ride up into the hills, you'll find a severed limb and a pool of blood. As the days go by, more and more people turn up missing and you keep finding leftover feet and arms like discarded chicken bones before coming across an injured man and a moral conundrum where you have to pick whom you believe. Later, a woman you know gets kidnapped, and her life is left in your hands.
You could be an outlaw and see all of this, but you wouldn't have the same frame of reference. You'd be killing innocent people, running from the law, and striking fear into the hearts of the good people of Armadillo. That's no way for Marston to live. Why even bother trying to take out bad guys when you're worse than all of them? I'd pick patrolling the homestead with a dog named Charlie – a reoccurring side mission where you chase off poachers and drunks – any day of the week.
I love videogames. They connect me to characters and stories like no other medium can. Red Dead Redemption makes me feel, but it doesn't always take me places I like. That's awesome. As we have these arguments about what a game is and if it's art and yadda, yadda, yadda, it's profoundly interesting that a fictional guy in a fictional town can make me feel so many things so genuinely. I can't wait to play Red Dead Redemption, but I also dread it in a way. I know that I'm going to have to see those beaten and violated women again, and I know that I won't be able to save them. For someone who wants to save whatever world he's in, that's a hard pill to swallow.
Still, the people of Red Dead Redemption need a hero, and I'm going to be there for them.
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