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

I... forgot Austin wouldn't be appearing until I loaded the video and thought "Oh, yeah." I'm sad now.

@humanity: I don't dislike open world game design, but I do think Rockstar gets way too much credit for theirs. I don't like the world they created with Redemption, but overall they make fantastic looking and feeling open worlds in games. I still think GTAV has not been topped there. But that said, I think their actual gameplay in those worlds are one of the worst I have played. Granted, I seek out good games only and don't bother playing games that look-seem like trash to begin with, but on that AAA level, their gameplay is pretty sluggish and tame.

I think GTAV is one of the best playing games they have ever made, and I think that game only plays 'OK'. You name several activities in Redemption and I just didn't like any of it. It all plays shitty. I distinctively remember horse racing was just a nightmare. I had no fun doing any of it.

I'm not being reductive, I legitimately think Redemption is a terrible game. The story is uninteresting at best and drags on at worst, the dialogue had me wanting to rip my ears off at times too. Marston answered every question people asked him with multiple sentences and yet they all say: 'you don't talk much do you'? It made me put the controller down the first time almost just because of that. It felt like it was written by two different people who met like twice over lunch during the entire script writing process.

Besides that none of it plays well. And what makes matters worse is that the original game played really well! I don't even understand how you can go from good gameplay to shit gameplay like that.

Note that I'm not at all saying you're wrong for liking it. I can see if you like westerns specifically and if you think Rockstar games are great overall than it must be a wet dream to play. But man, I had less than no fun playing this. It made it all the more infuriating after putting in 16 hours collectively that people told me 'just keep playing it will get good later'. Yeah, no.

@zevvion: I guess you just don't like that specific game. I mean I don't understand what is terrible about the gameplay itself, and thats the sort of thing that isn't exclusively subjective either. Like the shooting felt good, I think, and so did everything else for the most part. I guess I could ask what open world games did it better in your opinion? GTA V does pretty much everything exactly the same as Red Dead did with a modern paint job, that stuff didn't evolve all that much over time. The planned heists are the highlight of that game and their heavily scripted nature doesn't really even make use of the open world design at all. Out of those type of experiences I generally can't really think of many titles that did this whole open-ended gameplay all that much better. Games like Sleepy Dogs, Far Cry or Watch Dogs all have lesser side running parallel alongside the main plot, and the side stuff is usually there to check off items on a list. I guess I'm really curious which game in your opinion plays "the best" if GTA V is merely OK in your opinion?

The story is an entirely subjective thing so you like it or you don't. I thought Marston was a good character and I liked his tale of redemption but hey different strokes for different folks. I also really liked Max Payne 3 exactly for that same reason (not made by Rockstar of course). You like Mirrors Edge and I mean if you want to talk about bad stories then in my opinion you don't get much worse than that in a triple A game. Great innovative gameplay, completely awful, eye-roll inducing "fight the man" type of narrative with naive characters and childish motivations. Corporations are bad I hear, gotcha, fight the man by.. parkouring.

Just to be clear the only reason I'm defending the game so much is that I genuinely believe Red Dead Redemption was one of those rare great experiences of the last generation. I really, really loved that game and even taking a step back from my own fandom think that it's objectively a well made piece of entertainment. The systems were good, the controls were tight. Plenty of upgrades and opportunities to tackle objective in different ways. So it's very strange for me to hear people thought it not only was bad overall but to lament the gameplay as well. I think Skyrim is an awful game in many ways, but I can't deny that the gameplay itself was pretty good for the most part. I hate the thing as a whole but it did play well.

Anyway I guess we just have polar opposite views on the matter and thats fine. It's pretty fascinating to hear someone talk about something you hold so dear in such a negative light which is why I engage this topic so passionately. I'm honestly curious to know why someone dislikes everything that I think is "good" so thanks for your input - although I'm still bewildered by your dislike for it haha.

I don't understand these games, and I find the Wild West an incredibly boring setting, but i'm glad so many people find joy in this.

EDIT: Hateful 8 is Tarantino's best film.

@humanity: You're totally losing me when you say Sleeping Dogs and Watch Dogs have less good gameplay. Try out the shooting in those games, then go back to Redemption and try it there. There is a massive difference in feel, precision and responsiveness.

It's not weird that we feel differently about that though. I tend to notice subtle differences in movement a lot more than other people do. But trust me I'm not lying when I say Redemption's gameplay feels goddamn awful to me. It really isn't the same as in GTAV. I also don't think heists are the highlight of that game at all. It is the world they built. If you take that away and put heists in another open world game it wouldn't be as great.

Also, I don't think Skyrim plays well at all. There is a floaty nature to melee combat lacking any feedback. I think Skyrim is great for different reasons.

I've played through this game three times, each time 100% and here i am thinking that i should probably play through it again.

Yes, thank you! How has no one else (on page 1 at least) commented on this?

Liked this game a lot, really wish the horse would just default to max speed though rather than make you hit a button constantly. I've got old man hands, I gets tired. Looking back though, Marston doing stuff on behalf of the lunatics in this world... its a bit weird.

I missed out on this generation of console-exclusive games entirely and recently picked up a 360 for cheap to catch up on a few. I picked up RDR and GTAIV around the same time, the latter of which I'd played on the PC for a handful of hours with cheats enabled around 2009 or so.

RDR was hugely disappointing. I'd heard so many good things about it that I honestly checked to see if there was a sequel or something I was confusing the positive response with. I then played through a significant portion of GTAIV under the impression it came out after RDR, thinking, "They really learned some lessons from RDR!"

Something about RDR's world feels dull to me. You go out to kill some bandits and run through empty desert for 10 minutes. 5 dudes then show up out of nowhere after the fight to chase you down- huh? Where'd they come from? At least in GTAIV I can buy cops driving up from around the corner, but in RDR I can cover a few miles without seeing anyone only for the world to come alive all of a sudden after a fight.

Also feel like the general action in GTAIV was way more interesting from the get-go. I'm more than a few hours into RDR and feel like I'm still in the tutorial for whatever reason and haven't been "set free" yet.

Not going to assert either game is better than the other, though. RDR is just not the game for me.

It's weird to see the backlash on RDR. Seems like a lot of nit-picky stuff that's evident in most GTA games and many open-world games. I suspect a bunch of the hate is rooted in the fact that the game never got a PC version and/or the classic "dislike popular thing to sound cool" internet b.s. Game of the generation for me, and it still holds up. I'm really struggling to think of an area where it was lacking.

Environment: exceptional. (That a great time can be had just riding around doing nothing is really cool.)
Story: good. (It dragged at some parts, but was strong overall, mixing silly and serious very well.)
Graphics: great. (Easily among the best-looking last-gen games. Incredible skyboxes and lighting.)
Controls: solid. (Dead-eye is still loads of fun, and riding a horse felt about as good as it could have.)
Music: exceptional. (Ambient music is consistently great, and had some standout full tracks as well.)
Voice work: exceptional. (Among the best ever, especially considering the lack of "star" talent.)
Sound: great. (Tons of nice little touches here and there that add to the overall experience.)
Campaign: great. (Enough mission variety, length, and interesting characters to make it fun.)
Side missions: great. (Some were hilarious, some were disturbing, and some were affecting.)
Hunting: exceptional. (Dangerous wildlife, and badass challenges like taking on a bear with a knife.)
DLC: exceptional. (The DLC against which all DLC should be judged. Great story here as well.)

All I can really think of in terms of qualms are that some of the dialogue gets repetitive, and that the random encounters were a little too same-y. It's a 10/10 game. A true classic.

Man, I am so completely over the writing of the characters you encounter in Rockstar games. They're all over-the-top monologizing characterizations of shitty people. It's like the main character is running from stage play to stage play with some of these hyperbolic idiots. Worse, they're all totally unsympathetic people. Even the main character hates them, constantly looking for ways out of interacting with them any more. Not only is it repetitive, it's bad writing.

Rockstar is in dire need of some subtlety. I know it isn't their bag, but they need it.

I've never really understood the love that Dead-Eye gets. The whole thing just felt like a glorified "Press X to win" QTE. It just made the combat feel super hollow to me.

I also don't really understand the appeal of VATS in Fallout.

To each their own, I suppose.

I could really relate to Alex when he was talking about playing RDR and American Truck Sim and soaking up that vibe; around the same time they were streaming this, I was driving down California State Route 178 toward Sequoia National Forest and taking in scenery like this:

@daedaluss: was there an official announcement on why Austin left? I know where he went, just wanted to know why.

Never played RDR but Rockstar has never made a game I felt had a "core" to it. It never felt like their games had a reason to be made other than making the environment prettier and the dialogue snappier. Rockstar games feel messy and thrown together, like they were made from the top down instead of bottom up. The sum feels dead equal to the parts if not less. If I wanted a good story I'd watch a top tier crime/western film, if I wanted a fun world to explore I'd play any number of open world PC games, if I wanted a fun shooter I'd play...basically any other well made video game.

For me all of them together never amounted to anything I couldn't get separately and done better.

Shit, has this game always looked this good? Not played it in forever, but damn. Holds up graphically.

People are trying very hard to prove how much they hate this game. It's crazy to me.

Goddamn I almost want to get an Xbox One just to play through this again on a modern machine. Easily one of my favourite games of all time.

A bit odd that Alex is showing off a game in this capacity. I understand that rose tinted glasses can be counterproducutive to good journalism, but here lies a game that most people are digging up out of their collections to enjoy an old favorite, and the man showing it off on our favorite gaming site never even finished it. I beat this game at least 4 times, and that is not a claim i can make for anything this side of an elder scrolls game. It would be nice to have some reverence and skill from the guy playing a feature i got goosebumps seeing on the feed! still always fun though guys love ya!

It's too bad this didn't come to PC. Think about how clean those faces could have been.

This game taught me to play Texas HoldEm poker.

I really really wanted to love this game, because there's so much to love, but DAMN Rockstar should really start getting some mission design lessons. I can't remember when I had fun playing a mission in a Rockstar game since San Andreas. And the story really starts to drag out and it all becomes just a test of patience.

Yey for RDR2, glad to see Rockstar putting out this game on XB1 and even the previous game on current consoles was actually a part of a "bigger plan".

Great to see this was added to the BC list on Xbox.

I wonder if Alex actually finished it. I know I've tried a few times, really enjoyed RDR, but always gotten a Skyrim like sense of being overwhelmed by the size and length of the game and fallen off it (in all fairness, I'm easily distracted and had limited gaming time).

I'm so hyped for Red Dead Redemption 2.