The New Definition of Open World
If you were a troll, you could say that Red Dead Redemption is GTA 4 with a Wild West skin, or a mod. If I wanted to hate, I could agree with you. However, Rockstar improved the GTA formula in several ways, and all those tweaks add up to create an enjoyable experience that I wish everyone would try.
RDR is a vast improvement not just because Rockstar removed dealing with friends. The main character, John Marston, is a former outlaw who is forced to return to his killing ways, convinced to save his wife and son by arresting or killing his former gang family. Compare this story with Niko Bellic, who travels to America to start over, only to return to killing for small-time hoods. In RDR, you only had to kill "bad guys" - bandits, thieves, gang members - people who would shoot you first. Quite often, if you killed or ran over a civilian, lawmen would immediately give chase. Contrast this with GTA 4, where you had to kill people quite often, where the line of good and bad may be a bit more blurred, and you could run down several people before the police even notice.
To be fair, it's possible RDR gets a pass because the setting is shiny and new. New York, or some no-name big metropolitan city, has been the setting for several open-world games - GTA, Saints' Row, Prototype, InFAMOUS - not to mention all of those games are set in the present. RDR, on the other hand, is not only set in the Wild West, but the timeframe - early 1910's - is just as important. Railroads are starting to reach into all corners of the West, bringing "civilization" and the federal government with it. It creates a wonderful world deeper than the stereotypical "Wild West", and I for one appreciate it.
Playing through RDR reminds me of playing through Vice City or San Andreas. While GTA 4 is pretty and a cool setting, the game itself was bogged down by the story, which was twice as long as it should have been, and the friend mechanic, which I largely ignored and paid for it in the end.
This entire review isn't going to be blowing Rockstar's masterpiece, however. One minor annoyance were the cougars - GOD DAMN ninja cougars. I started to fear their sound more than any other in the game. I know bears are supposed to be the biggest and scariest animals in the game, but the cougars are worse. They're so fast that by the time you see them and pull out your gun, they're under your horse killing it in one swipe. I understand that real-life cougars are fast, deadly, and you never see them coming, so in that sense Rockstar is right on the money. I know I shouldn't hate the game for this, but I would hate those encounters.
The main thing that absolutely sucks is the tutorial regarding the lasso. The prompts tell you to hold down the left trigger, aim, and pull the right trigger to throw. What I don't remember seeing is a prompt telling you to keep the left trigger down to hang on to the rope. The only reason I knew what to do was because I had heard a podcast mention this small tidbit, so I got it within 5 minutes, but I could imagine spending over an hour without getting it right. It's so awful that they dropped the ball so badly in an intro mission, because I could imagine giving up on the game. That tutorial is so bad they should release a patch just to fix the on-screen prompts.
Besides these points, the game is still a masterpiece, and I don't use flowery language like that often. RDR is what GTA should be. If anyone has any interest in open-world games, they have to try Red Dead Redemption.
I am only sad that RDR will probably not reach the same sales figures as GTA 4. And that is a shame - it deserves the same, if not more success.
