Playdate: Red Dead Redemption (07/15/2016)

@icemael: well I mean you're probably in an overwhelming minority on this but hey I get it. I have similar complaints about Skyrim and Fallout and people love those games to death. Also yah Dead Space had some amazing shooting but don't mention that amazing franchise in the same breath as Resident Evil.

You say all this while having a Mirrors Edge avatar...I can't help but feel some sort of hypocrisy here.

The game was truly "of its time". Some of the glitches like horse on the roof and character clipping through each other were more acceptable 6 years ago. Certainly, not liked but acceptable.

As far as teh characters, well the Rockstar liked 'unlikable' anti-heroes at this time too, I think John is slightly more likable than most main characters, but still not a sweetheart. And most of the side characters, aside form Bonnie and Marston's wife, are supposed to be slimy and double dealin'.

This is just my opinion but I think a modern Red Dead game woudl be a lot of fun at today's standards of character interactions and animation. But, I have to agree this game looks rough by today's standards and I really wasn't a fan of the dying west motif. Unlike GTA I don't think people get that RDR is heavy satire. It is attepting to put a critical eye on gun culture, the myth of the west, the idea of the 'white man's burden', etc. RDR is not nostalgic for the west, it is an indictment of wanting to rekindle a brutal stupid time in American history.

@sasnake: Well, we're discussing the fun we have playing videogames, so I don't actually have to be hypocritical when stating my opinion.

Out of curiosity though, where do you think I am being hypocritical? Mirror's Edge has razor sharp control and tight gameplay, Redemption does not. It's also fast paced and doesn't drag on forever. You're pretty much constantly doing the thing you want to do, which is run and traverse. In Redemption you had to do tons of other stuff that was all poorly executed on. And lastly, obviously the most opinion of all, I think Mirror's Edge had a fantastic distinctive look while Redemption just looks like generic bland open world #474.

Besides obviously being very different games, the execution on them is also vastly different. I'm not sure what you were aiming for?

Yup. Still looks great.

I liked the characters in this, but I never got far with the game. I think I got more out of the Snake Oil peddler right now than my 5-7 hours of the game playing.

@steevl: Dude this story is great! It give some really interesting context to the what I feel is some of the best voice active in a game.

He deliver's Marstons lines with like this kind of sketicism and disdain, and I can't help but wonder if some of Wiethoff's attitude toward Hollywood bled through a bit, which if that's the case, in my opinion kind of makes it more awesome.

I know it is, but again, I was going for a bad joke. "RDR: R". "Har Dee Har Har". It's a soundy-likey thingy.

This game is still amazing. It stands next to GTA IV as my favorite Rockstar game.

Yeah, but Assassin's Creed is a kitschy premise filtered through kitschy, gaudy art direction whereas Red Dead has sublime art direction and atmosphere. It also feels like a world, where AC has never even come close to Rockstar in this regard, Ubi's games feel like hollow simulations, their NPCs feel like copy-pasted drones bumping into each other.

I consider it artful because even underneath all the wisecracking, mean-spirited Rockstar humor there's a romanticism present in the world, the archetypes presented therein and its characters, landmarks, themes and music that permeates and runs through the whole thing. Red Dead has a fucking soul and that's why people gravitate towards it, because games can sometimes be way more than the sum of their mechanics or even just have mechanics in service of playing out dynamic stories and anecdotes. Not to mention there is an actual thematic point to Red Dead that evokes Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Assassin's Creed just seems intent of turning history into a Dr. Who episode crashing into a Dan Brown novel.

Assassin's Creed has had games from great to middling to poor but in the end feels like a product. Of course both these publisher's games are products first and foremost, but man, AC just never transcends that. There is nothing wrong with being a mechanics-first kind of player but boy do these comparisons fall flat for everyone whom games like Red Dead resonate with.

Best game of last generation, and I don't think I have found a game this generation that is more fun than Red Dead Redemption.

I played this game a couple years after release and didn't much care for it. Ended up selling it ~5 hours in. The one thing I liked was the atmosphere/world design. But I couldn't stand anything else (the shooting, movement, controls, characters, etc.). Looking at it now, I don't think my opinion of it has changed.

That said, I loved watching the duders play it!

It continues to be a crime against video games that Red Dead Redemption never got a PC version.

MGSV modelled the horse muscles if I recall.

To all the people who don't like this game. Do you typically enjoy westerns?

Yep! I can't hear any of the GB east stuff lately. Anyone know a workaround (other than plugging my laptop into my stereo)?

@bbqbram: If I want a good Western story with good Western aesthetics and don't care about game mechanics I'll go watch some Western films that pull off the setting, the music, the characters etc. a billion times better than anything Rockstar could ever hope to accomplish. Not only do The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Unforgiven have infinitely more "soul" than Red Dead Redemption (which has a "soul" only by video game standards), they also don't insult me by having me spend the vast majority of the time playing a bad video game instead of enjoying the story. Imagine if while you were watching Once Upon a Time in the West the movie was interrupted every once in a while and you were forced to play a dull, drawn-out, poorly designed combat sequence to get to the next "cutscene." Going through the story path in RDR was sort of like that, only with worse cutscenes.

There is certainly a fun novelty to being able to run around in and interact with a well-realized Western world, but that only lasts so long when the part where it's interactive is trash. The combat system and mission design in RDR are so bad that I suspect the game would actually have been significantly more enjoyable if there had been less interactivity.

@icemael: Go on and keep having those opinions friend, and I'll be over here enjoying this amazing game

Watching this really, really made me want to play this game. I've been pretty tired with my games lately and can hardly ever finish an open world game. Truth be told what happened when I played RDR was I spent probably 20 hours skinning animals making a fortune that I never got into the main story then a different game came out. I even bought the game at the midnight release and have the pack of cards to prove it! I really wanted to get into it but it was a bad time in life. I refuse to dig out my Playstation 3 though and fire it up because I want to play it with a mouse and keyboard on a PC. I not only dislike using controllers but it is painful due to arthritic issues.

Also this game is still beautiful if you cant find beauty in huge empty worlds like this then you are missing the point on a lot of things in life.

I don't want to argue with anyone about graphics but when you say this game looks bad you probably haven't even seen what a real 4K game looks like. Not many people have seen Witcher 3, GTA 5, Fallout 4 fully modded and at 4K with Reshade and I always have a laugh when someone starts ranting about how good some games (usually console gamers) look. Art and aesthetics are purely subjective. There is no point in stating opinions when most opinions are completely bias. I could have a "hip hop expert" talk to me about how good hip-hop is and expect me to fire up his favorite album but it will never happen. We like what we like.

I could spend hours here taking screenshots of what those games look like to make my point but there is no point in doing so. The point is this game still looks good even by those standards.

This also really made me consider getting back into GTA 5 since it does look so amazing modded (almost photorealistic except for the models which you can put lipstick on a pig...) to play the stunt mod. Whiplash is a fucking mod for GTA 5? My god. Whiplash was awesome.

***ROCK STAR MAKE THIS FOR THE PC PLEASE***

I mean if this is xbox one backward compatible that almost means it should work on Windows based on the play anywhere thing Xbox is promoting, right?

Undead Nightmare is one of THE BEST pieces of DLC I've ever played.

Hearing that this comes with it makes me wish I had an XBox One more than ANY game they've released "exclusively" for it.

@zevvion: Yeah! Everything you said! Yeah! Fuck this game!

@icemael: Well, one hugely respected film critic felt they nailed the Western feel.

I agree with him.

Owned this game since release, never played it.

How long is a mainline playthrough?

@csl316: 20ish according to howlongtobeat.com

I've completed this game. I neither hate it or consider it an all-time classic, and these comments make me feel like I have no place on the internet. My opinions aren't Xtreme enough!

***Undead Nightmare is tight and fun as hell though. It would make the list of the 15 Best Expansions/DLC's Ever.

If you download videos before watching you can try VLC Media Player. It lets you boost volume to 200% when playing a video file.

This makes me want to go back and replay this... Man, what a great year that was.

Which reminds me, KojiPro apparently (motion?)captured real crabs for the Death Stranding teaser (as opposed to just making polygonal models based on some pictures or videos).

Please another one!

man... shooting in RDR was sooooooo much better than any GTA ever, this on PC with a first person mode would be just orgasmic.

I liked the setting and characters more than most of the GTA games, and would have loved to play through the whole thing, but this still suffered from the narrative bloat of almost every Rockstar open world game. Every character arc feels like it's several missions too long, and at some point I fall off when the narrative just loses all momentum and bogs down for hours.

I come into every Rockstar game hoping they've solved that problem but they generally seem to have a 10 hour story they'd like to tell in 20-30 hours in an open world that they hope you spend 50+ hours in. Given that the gameplay is only middling at best it's tough to hold up through that extra time.

FYI, the forced vsync in the backwards compatible version adds a significant amount of input latency. I played through the original with manual aiming both in normal and hardcore modes, and the backwards compatible version is simply awful by comparison due to the combination of input latency and giant analog dead zone. I don't think people are complaining about it because (a) most people have probably never used manual aiming (although it makes the game far more enjoyable as a 'game') and (b) nobody is playing it side-by-side with the original versions to feel the difference.

Personally, I'd prefer the original framerate with less input latency - the only tearing was at the top of the screen on 360 and almost impossible to notice. I'm happy they put some effort into making it look/run better, but as someone who really only enjoyed playing the game with manual aiming it's very disappointing.

Man, I'll never understand why Jeff dislikes this game. Best Rockstar game in terms of tonal consistency and writing by far.

@luck702: I get it when he says he played it for about an hour or so and he hated it...I just started playing the game again and it really does take a long time to start doing anything. If there's a problem the game has it overtutorializes everything and ramps up way too slowly.

Yes a thousand times yes.

@monkeyking1969:

Well yeah but isn't that indictment only half of what the game's trying to communicate? Or even just a part? As well as indicting the brutal western past that haunts the main character, his ultimate demise is at the cold, untrustworthy hands of progress. While the past was filled with villains, there were also heroes, but ultimately it doesn't matter where you stand to a government that needs to organize the anarchy that dominated that time period. From a different perspective, civilization is as monstrous as the west, and the government is comparable to Dutch's gang. If players leave feeling nostalgic for the west its probably because the ending makes you feel almost sympathetic for Dutch, a man who at least seemed to communicate some honor and aspiration in his murder and mayhem, as compared to the slimy, self-interested bowler who ultimately does John in.

I think like all Rockstar games, the story has to be viewed from the most cynical perspective, one where truth means tragedy, and heroics are a joke, and the best you can hope for your protagonists is that they walk away from their ordeal alive, and with a more grounded appreciation for their own slice of peace in whatever hell they reside in.

My opinion is that this game is good, actually.

So is this game full of crazy women sitting in the middle of nowhere?

There are a LOT of people in this thread saying, "The games you like SUCK! The games I like are AWESOME! Trust me I'm a doctor". :b

Red Dead Redemption was/is great because it felt like you were playing a triple-A modern western movie, along the lines of 3:10 to Yuma or There Will Be Blood. It nailed the atmosphere and characters, warts and all.

Also, some of its glitches were amazingly creepy, such as the (in)famous Donkey-Lady.

I love Vinny's out of nowhere coin facts

I loved this game! Fun to go down memory lane like this. The horse modeling and movement holds up pretty well I think.

I hate that Brutal Legend never gets mentioned for its Sky Boxes! It has like 50 some variations. Intense thunder storms, the mouth of hell, rotting skulls clouds, ect.

I remember playing this back when it first came out, and not liking it AT ALL. I didn't even make it to Mexico. Thought it was boring, frustrating, and committed the same sins that GTA did. Primarily, I'm talking about the completely unlikable characters that Rockstar always produces, outside of Bully and Max Payne. I'm so sick of the Nico/Marston, "I just want to get out of this life, but in order to do so, I need to be a total scum bag to everyone while lamenting my fate". Ugh. Then, GTA5 is just a bunch of unlikable psychopaths or variations on the aforementioned archetype.

Also, the "ride your horse while having a five minute conversation" scenes are the freakin' worst.

the audio is kinda low. I can barely hear it...

This game was/is amazing, no matter what anyone says. I think it's probably the best game from Rockstar to date (followed by Bully and GTA Vice City).

While I get that you enjoy Mirrors Edge quite a bit, aren't you downplaying Red Dead just a tiny bit? At the time of release it certainly didn't look like another generic and boring open world game and this video kind of goes to show that a lot of the artistic choices they made hold up really well today despite the tech having aged. If you enjoy the spaghetti western setting then it does an astounding job of recreating that aesthetic from the beautiful sunsets to the sun bleached 'high noons'. Red Dead also had plenty of fun open world side activities like tracking down bounties, taming and breaking in exotic horse breeds, or hunting down various wildlife in order to craft equipment. This is all before Far Cry 3 and similar (mostly Ubisoft made) games drove those concepts to the ground. Sure if you don't like open world game design then I get ya' but it wasn't just some bland looking game where you did uninteresting things - it was a beautiful looking world with a ton of fun and interesting side content atop an exciting main story with one heck of an ending.

If I wanted to be super reductive I could say Mirrors Edge is a bland looking zero-texture world where you run through uninspired, and often nonsensical, environments and occasionally engage in clunky combat - all towards a fairly lackluster narrative that goes nowhere fast. It's obviously much more than that, and I get it. I didn't love the first Mirrors Edge but I can appreciate the aesthetic choices they went for and their dedication to first person parkour which is no an easy beast to tame. You might not love Red Dead and thats fine but you can at least give it the bare minimum of respect that it actually deserves as it certainly wasn't just another drop in the open world bucket. To this day it is probably the best open world game Rockstar has managed to make.

Shadow of Mordor on the other hand is one repetitive and bland arse game so no arguments from me there.

@steevl: Thanks for sharing that article. Missed that when it came out and it was a great piece they put together.

What was Alex's education like when he was young?

He was home-skulled.

Ba-dum-tish.