It’s all over. We emerge blinking and dazed from the harsh light of the world after 11 (!) days of cheap games. As people all over the world find excuses to not check their bank balance, I ask this simple question: How was it for you?
I have a slightly unnerving 34 extra games in my Steam list, although most of these came through the single purchase of the complete THQ collection. How much did you buy? Anything you’ve been pleasantly surprised with? Or were there games that, in the cold light of day, you probably wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have bothered with?
Personally I used it as an excuse to pick up a bunch of games I’d been hesitant to buy in the past: Metro 2033, The Void, Overlord II, Stalker: Clear Sky and Lead and Gold, among others. I also grabbed a few titles that I’d not been a big fan of in the past, like Saints Row II and Kane and Lynch, with the aim of giving them another chance. Then, of course, as is always the way with buying a collection of publisher specific games, there are the games I really have no intention of ever playing. In this case I’m talking about Company of Heroes, which will forever sit inside my games list, silently mocking me. The bastard.
Still, overall a good haul, even if it does mean that, at some point, I will end up playing a game called World of Zoo. How did you fare?
In the last RDR post I talked about the issues I had with some elements of the game’s narrative. Perhaps the nit-picking nature of the criticism gave away how much I’m enjoying the game (or maybe it was the bit where I said “especially as Red Dead Redemption is a brilliant game,”) but it seems a little unfair not to write about what I’m enjoying.
At this point it’s pretty tempting to write “everything else” and be done with it. I’ll try and pepper in some criticisms while I’m at it.
DISCLAIMER: I should mention that I’ve essentially been mentally conditioned to love the setting. I grew up watching Westerns on Sunday afternoon TV with my dad. The same dad that conditioned me not to completely hate the taste of bitter. They don’t half mess you up, your parents.
Red Dead Redemption is a game with an extraordinary sense of detail to its world. You’ll have to forgive yet another GTA comparison in the discussion around this game, but the difference in approach is striking. In GTA IV your character is in what feels like a living city. People, thousands of them, teem the streets and roads following whatever scrap of AI code is sending them from their spawn point to their deletion. By their very numbers they feel inconsequential and, aside from direct physical contact, they have zero interaction with you. You are standing in a crowd, completely alone. It’s a fairly accurate representation of your average city. The game attempts to temper this with a handful of friends you can call and hang out with but even this informal non-mission interaction feels too scripted. (It also feels pretty dull – the bowling mini-game is shit whether it’s boosting favour with a friend or not.)
Red Dead Redemption feels like the complete opposite. The world is huge (and feels even bigger because your main method of transportation has exactly 1 horse power) but largely barren. It means the interactions you do come across – and there are plenty of them, from travellers in need of help through to wannabe gunslingers looking to make a name for themselves by duelling the best in the west – feel more meaningful. They’re no less scripted, but the sense of community born out of a place where the environment is deadlier than the inhabitants lends these small world events a degree of authenticity. Even now, after logging about 70 hours with the game, I feel a small pang of guilt when I ignore a man whose wife has been kidnapped to hunt bears.
His survival chance decreased dramatically after I actually learned how to duel.
Ah, the hunting. The game features 4 ‘Ambient Challenges’ that you can work towards at any time throughout the game. These are mostly brilliant (the flower picking one being an exception – I mean really flower picking is how I show off my mad survival skills?) and a much better way of having players explore the game world than making them find 100 tangentially-themed collectibles. While attempting one of the hunting challenges, collecting 5 pelts from three specific species, I found myself camped up in the hills for about 4 in-game days. It completely changed the dynamic of the game. I found myself isolated from any pockets of civilisation and running low on ammo and medicine. I could have used bait to try and attract some critters, but there’s no guaranteeing what will come to investigate. A pack of wolves could have spelled disaster.
As I drew closer to my objective I let my guard slip and, without warning, the growl of a cougar and a flashing red screen let me know I’d been careless. Luckily it didn’t land the second, fatal, attack. After I’d killed it I had to pause the game, catch my breath and make a cup of tea. Cougars, man. Fucking cougars.
Seriously: fucking cougars
Between random world-events, ambient challenges, opportunities for gambling, night-watch jobs, bounties to collect, strangers to meet, gang hideouts to clear and even scraps of outfits to find, there’s plenty to keep you occupied before you even begin to look at the missions. Well not necessarily before. As with any open-world game you’ve got to wade through a lengthy opening of cutscenes and tutorials before you’re let loose on the world. The somewhat meandering opening is effective enough as an introduction to the world and, to an extent, your character (although I personally preferred the immediacy of Gun’s opening which gave you the classic Western moment of the lone gunslinger arriving in a new town.)
Elsewhere the story is somewhat of a mixed bag. Each character you can do missions for hangs around a little too long. After your 4th or 5th long horse ride with the same person retelling you their philosophy of the west you start to wish the character didn’t refuse to fire at friendly NPCs. Even Marston himself runs out of interesting ways to tell people he’s trying to save his family far before he stops telling people he’s trying to save his family.
"Hey, John. Have I told you about how I'm a grumpy old curmudgeon trying to bring a little law and order to my town? No, you're probably right, now isn't the time."
Other sections are more successful. A couple of times during the story, landmark moments like arriving in Mexico or the resolution of a late game mission have you riding to the next destination while a song plays in the background. It’s an inspired moment of emotional resonance that strikes a chord in a way that could only be achieved in a game. It’s like the ladder moment of MGS3, only not ridiculous. I should also point out, now that I’ve finished the main story, that the final collection of missions almost make up for my issues with the Mexican campaign. It’s a well executed segment, setting up the story nicely for the final resolution, which itself manages to actually give a tangible sense that something has changed for the characters involved while still leaving a believable reason for the player to be able to carry on existing in the world afterwards to tie up loose ends. Fallout 3 could learn a thing or two.
More successful than the story missions are the strangers you encounter throughout your travels. These are essentially narrative-vignettes about people trying to make their way in the region; writers looking to capture the romanticism of the era, producers looking to forge a new age of cinema and even just concerned spouses looking for their loved ones. The first ones you come across will all too often result in the stranger turning out to be mental, to the point where you start trying to second guess each person’s particular deviancy, but as the game goes on you’ll find some genuinely interesting characters that you’ll encounter in multiple places throughout the game. Particularly worthy of mention is the ‘I Know You’ strand, featuring an unknown man with a penchant for testing your moral fibre. It’s one of the most intriguing mysteries of the game and its resolution ties-in brilliantly with the final cutscene.
So, a couple of story niggles aside, pretty much perfect then? Not quite. Red Dead Redemption is unusual in recent Rockstar games in that many of the core systems at work are non-diegetic. Take the fast-travel; you just need to set up a camp and with a couple of clicks you can travel instantly to any location you’ve previously visited. Bizarrely the game also includes an in-world fast travel system with coaches that can be hired. Pay for a coach or move a few feet away and travel for free? Unless you’re deliberately trying to preserve the atmosphere it’s not much of a decision.
Marston contemplates the mystery of the fast-travel fire.
Death is handled in a similarly blunt manner with the game displaying a hilariously over-sized DEAD screen and reloading the last auto-save. There are plenty of doctors dwelling in major settlements so why not just have your character wake up there à la GTA? Also, and this is getting really picky, there’s really no excuse for your character to die the moment he steps in a body of water. How much this stuff bothers you is probably dependent on how much you buy into the atmosphere woven by the setting, visuals and audio. In case it’s not clear yet I bought into it a lot, much to the consternation of my flatmate who kept reminding me that I could fast-travel instead of taking 15 minutes to ride my horse into Mexico. I hadn’t forgotten Chris, I was just ignoring it.
TL;DR version: Red Dead Redemption, it’s better than GTA.
That’s right, I’ve been doing this shit for a year now! Hurrah! Actually it’s been 1 year and 18 days, but I always forget birthdays. So while I warm up the Celebratron-3000 for some super-fun-party-times, here’s a rundown of the highlights of the past year… and by highlights I mean “things I can still read without wanting to punch myself in the face.” Self-congratulation, go!
The second ever post on the site, probably what tipped me over the edge into setting up a dedicated games blog in the first place, was about Braid’s hidden message on obsession.
Shortly after that I ran out of topics for intelligent analysis, so instead wrote some shit about the first hour of a bunch of games. Here’s Jade Empire, which I hated, and Dawn of War 2, which I quite liked.
A couple of weeks with Battlefield: Heroes got me thinking about snipers in online games. Conclusion: They’re bastards, but probably necessary bastards.
Generally I manage to avoid flying into a rant about something I’ve seen on the Internet. Generally, but not always.
Probably the weirdest game I’ve chosen to do an hour with post about. Pathologic.
Some thoughts on character creation led to some interesting discussion in the comments thread. God bless you people, you do make the time spent writing this stuff seem worthwhile.
The Bad Company 2 beta led to some of the tensest moments I’d felt in an online shooter for a long time. Here’s me attempting to capture that feeling.
Highlight of the last year: Reckless Disregard for Gravity’s developers showing up in this post to say thanks!
[It's been a while since we've had a guest post at the site, so when District 16 member and former Neptune's Pride nemesis MrEff asked if I wanted a review for Split/Second I said yes. Mostly to find out if the game was any good. -Phil]
Ask yourself this; what would be the result if Michael Bay decided to make a racing game? The Answer: Split/Second. Made by Black Rock Studios and set as a fictional reality TV show Split/Second is an arcade racing game that allows you to blow away the competition, literally.
Unlike other arcade racers you don’t pick up weapons to use against the other racer, rather you build up ‘power plays’ that can be used to trigger events on and around the race track. The system used is simple; you draft, drift and jump to build up three bars that can be used to activate these power plays. Level one will cause cars and trucks by the side of the track to explode, helicopters hovering overhead to drop explosive barrels or will open up shortcuts to shave a couple of seconds off your time. Level two power plays are aimed to take out multiple opponents with buildings collapsing, producing larger explosions. Let your bar reach level three however and that is where the fun begins. Maxed out you can use it to activate route changers that can change the path of the track and lead to destruction on a truly epic scale. For example, one that is worthy of a mention is in the Airport Terminal race. Here you can detonate explosives placed in an aircraft control tower, leading to it collapsing and diverting you onto the runway. Come around the next lap and you have access to a level two power play that causes a huge jet plane to crash land on the very runway that you are racing down.
All of this action hurtles along at a blistering speed allowing you little time to admire the scenery, which is a shame. On the PC, with the graphics on high, the cars, track and various things that will soon be exploding or on fire all look beautiful. The frame rate never drops low either, even when everything is trying it’s hardest to wreck you. Also worth mentioning is the HUD used. Rather than filling the top of the screen like most racing games, the bare minimum of information that you need is positioned floating behind your car. This is an ingenious idea since it frees up the screen allowing you keep an eye out for any hazards that block your path.
Racing isn’t the only type of event that the game has to offer though; you get detonator, survival, air attack and air strike modes as well. Detonator has you performing a single lap against the clock as all the power plays are activated in front of you, leading to some spectacular near misses. Survival has you trying to overtake trucks flinging explosive barrels in your path. The blue ones slow you down while red ones blow you up, wrecking your car. Air attack has you racing round the track trying to avoid missiles raining down from a helicopter trying to take you out and air revenge has you deflecting those missiles back at the helicopter trying to take it down.
Even though the cars aren’t licensed models they all look fantastic and handle appropriately with the SUVs being slow but sturdy, the muscle cars wanting to drift at every opportunity and the sports cars zipping along at an incredible pace.
This isn’t to say that the game is perfect. You can only activate power plays in front of you, and many of them only if there is another car present to try and take out. It would have been nice to be able to activate them behind you too to slow down the other cars, which can be problematic due to the rubber-banding used to keep the action going. Thanks to this you can never get a good lead, there will always be another car not too far away to try and stop you from winning. On the plus side this makes for some intense races where you can’t relax until you have crossed the line, on the minus you feel cheated when you are taken out on the last corner of the last lap and denied the win you fought so hard to get. Furthermore when drifting you do lose quite a bit of speed. Considering that this is one of the main ways to fill your power play meter it seems a little odd that it slows you down, sometimes almost as much as just ploughing into the barrier and letting that guide you round the corner.
You do have access to online multiplayer and a split screen modes that allow you to take on human opponents, though they are a bit anemic. There are only three different types of event you can chose from, race, survival and elimination, which makes it feel like the multiplayer was an after thought tacked on at the end of production. However all three events still run smoothly, though you may want to wait until you have unlocked a few of the faster cars before you jump in.
Overall Split/Second is a great game. It may not be perfect but it offers something unique in a racing game and is incredible fun. If you are looking for something a bit different then I would highly recommend it.
Previously on An Hour With: ‘“Red Faction Guerrilla recommends you install Raptr.” Red Faction Guerrilla can fuck off. Jesus Christ, it’s actually launched a Raptr installation executable. Red Faction Guerrilla can fuck right off. Still the patch is done. This had better be one hell of a hammer… Runtime error!’
Yes, my last attempt at running this feature had me trying different executables, installing phantom patches and, finally, shutting down my virus scanner before I could even get the game to run, at which point I had absolutely no desire to actually play the game. Two and a half months later, I’m back to try again.
Why Bother?
Good question! A mixture of that experience and Just Cause 2 had pretty much killed off any interest I had in the game. Luckily for RFG, my Playstation died a couple of months back taking JC2 with it. Sony have been apparently unable to rescue the game from its cold, dead hands. I’ve now re-bought it on PC after finding a cheap-o copy on the Internet. It’s downloading now so it’s seriously RFG’s last chance to impress. Why bother at all? Well, when one of PC Gamer’s writers turns up in the comments thread and tells you that, despite all the shit, it’s worth it, you should probably pay attention.
The Preamble
Anti-virus off. Game launching. GfW Live kicking into life. Update needs downloading. Shit. Luckily, this time it’s all sorted in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. Probably about 10% of my PC gaming experience revolves around making tea. With that sorted the game decides to work properly.
The Playtest
0:00 – Cutscene! The game seems to be bucking the trend of 98% of games set in space in that your character isn’t a space marine. For a moment I’m fooled into thinking the game will be relatively well written. Why? As your character returns to Mars and meets up with his brother he doesn’t say anything along the lines of “Hi brother,” one of my least favourite pieces of awkward character exposition. Instead the brother asks “How’s mum?” which is marginally less clunky. I soon realise how generous I was being, as the rest of the cutscene is awkward story exposition. The EDF have taken over and seem to be oppressing everyone. I’ve played/watched enough science fiction to make a safe guess that EDF stands for Earth Defence Force (Yup, I’ve just checked the manual which confirms it.)
3:00 – Tutorial time. My character announces that he’s here to mine, not gather scrap metal. I’m not here to do either, I’m here to use this large hammer that I’ve just been given. Luckily there’s a big wall between me and where I need to be.
3:15 – Oh dear God. You know, I was completely ready to intensely dislike this game, or at least not forgive it for all the shit I went through last time. That all changed when I first hit that wall. It’s brilliant! The destruction physics are properly amazing. Before long the wall is completely demolished and I’m giggling to myself like a 15 year old that’s spent a little too long sniffing gas out of a deodorant can.
5:30 – The game’s asking me to switch to remote charges to demolish two towers. Unfortunately, at my screen’s current resolution, I can’t actually make out which key it wants me to press to bring up the weapon select menu. My assumption is the number keys and the mouse wheel, but instead of confirming if I was correct (I was,) I take it as a sign that I should keep using the hammer.
14:00 – Yeah, the hammer works pretty well. In my exuberance the second tower falls on top of me while I’m destroying it from the inside. Luckily the developers had clearly anticipated people were going to be this stupid and the character just clips through the rubble, harmed but alive.
15:00 – Shit, the space cops are here! Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I was brought here to salvage or mine or something. If the game ever explained why I was knocking the shit out of some towers then I missed it. Anyway, the cops kill the protagonist’s brother (Spoiler!) If I feel any sorrow over this act, it’s only because it’s likely to lead to a lengthy cutscene.
17:30 – Can I hammer something yet?
18:30 – Some posh British woman is further tutorialising me. Apparently I’m working for the resistance now. Extensive research shows me that I can’t smash her in the face with my hammer.
19:00 – In case you’re wondering, the thing that’s covering half the screen in the above screenshot is my character’s coat which, at various points in the game, decided nobody was going to keep it anchored to conventional laws of geometry and started to explore the screen.
28:30 – I’ve spent the last 10 minutes hammering everything in sight in our home base. People, buildings and cars all felt the wrath of my +2 Hammer of Childish Shit. Shortly after the video below was taken somebody got fed up with my destruction and started shooting me. Surprisingly it wasn’t the resistance realising they’d made a huge mistake, but instead the EDF. They feel the full force of Hammer Justice. One of them shouts “We can’t win,” which turns out to be a pretty accurate assessment as the protagonist appears to be a bullet sponge.
30:00 – I’m starting to feel a little embarrassed about my behavior, as well as the fact that population morale is at zero thanks to my actions, so I decide to go and do a mission.
33:00 – Woo! My mission is to go to a place and blow up (hammer) a load of stuff! I happily accept the task and begin driving to the objective.
35:00 – Car controls are typically sandbox in being a little twitchy but also very forgiving of crashing into things, although in Red Faction you don’t so much crash into as crash through. Another feature of the game’s destruction engine is that it fixes a problem that plagues so many action games. It’s impossible to get stuck between two bits of scenery when you can smash one into pieces.
36:00 – I get my first taste of mortality. You’d think years of watching King of the Hill would have taught me basic propane tank safety, but no. As my hammer connects with the tank the game decides it’s had just about enough of my consequence free trail of stupidity and promptly kills me.
37:00 – Okay, let’s try again. This time I might actually use those remote detonators.
43:00 – After a few barely-controlled explosions the space cops are back to stop me. Shooting ensues. It’s all pretty simple stuff and your character is remarkably resilient, even on normal mode. This is actually a good thing, as I made the mistake of playing Just Cause 2 on normal difficulty and, after a while, dealing with the army became a chore. When dicking about is a game’s primary means of fun easy is good.
44:00 – With the mission complete I drive back to base, accidentally parking my vehicle in a wall, and go back to being unhelpful.
45:00 – Colonist: “I wish my parents understood what I was fighting for.” It’s amazing just how po-faced and serious the story is. It’s completely at odds with how any person would ever play the game.
47:00 – As I destroy a skip (which NPCs keep throwing rocks into despite it no longer having sides) the game realises my primary focus up to now and pops up with a text box telling me that if I destroy buildings marked as red on the map, I’ll be lowering EDF control in the area or something. Hidden subtext: if you’re going to be a nuisance, at least be a useful nuisance. This leads to my second death of the game, as the first enemy structure I destroy turns out to be full of fuel.
52:00 – With no immediate objective in sight I check the map and notice a hammer icon. This deserves investigating.
54:00 – Shit! It turns out to be a challenge that requires me to use my pistol and explosive barrels to demolish a building. I can’t even select my hammer! Lying bastards!
57:00 – Oh, I was meant to move the explosive barrels into position before blindly shooting at them. My bad. Restart.
1:00:00 – I fail the mission again, despite having completely destroyed every wall. Seriously, look at the picture above, what the fuck’s holding it up? The ladder? How does that work? As soon as I exit the mission the tower falls over. Then my coat spazzes out again.
Conclusion
The story’s predictably shit and bizarrely serious and the game’s plagued by weird bugs (not just the coat thing, I had plenty of display issues as well.) Still, it seems to be great fun and, despite Just Cause 2 having just finished downloading, will probably see itself getting played a lot more often. Even at this stage, if you can find it going cheap, I can confidently say it’s worth picking up.
Because if I frame it as a competition it’ll hide the fact that I fail at sound financial management!
A story: Once upon a time Runic Games released an action RPG called Torchlight. I bought this game through their website, feeling good about supporting the poor indie developers. I then noticed the kingdom of Steam had a version which included the magical Steam Cloud feature, perfect for a small game that can be played on notebooks and my parents’ PC. “Fuck,” thought I. One day the people at Steam had a sale and started selling Torchlight at a low, low price. I bought the game again.
Skip forward a few months and while exploring the wilderness of the Internet, ever watchful for trolls, I saw a message planted for all passers by. It read, “Torchlight keys now work with Steam.” “Fuck,” thought I. The End.
Yes, it turns out I’m an idiot. Luckily though, this idiocy can directly benefit you because I have a spare copy of Torchlight that can be activated through Steam. If you would like it just comment with something along the lines of, “Yes, I would like to gain rewards from your complete lack of patience and financial restraint you silly bastard.” Closing date is midnight on the 8th June, I’ll randomly pick a winner from any comments left.
The actions of the player character in GTA4 can best be described as the actions of two separate characters, one who reflects the player’s decisions during normal gameplay (run over a sidewalk full of people, kill a bunch of cops), and one that is unilaterally imposed through scripted sequences. (Look at Niko as he shows that he loves Kate. Look at Niko as he feels bad about crime.) The game privileges the “choices” of the second over the first, even when they’re in direct contradiction.
Essentially the Niko of the game’s narrative – an ex-soldier still haunted by his actions in the war and unhappy that he has to continue to kill and steal for America’s criminal underbelly in order to carve out a peaceful existence for himself and his cousin – doesn’t correspond to the willfully destructive Niko of my time between cutscenes.
Aww, he's a sweety.
It’s unfair to suggest Rockstar are solely responsible for this as a factor in any cutscene-driven narrative game is that, once that cutscene ends, the game has to give control of their protagonist back to the player – an agent of chaos. My Gordon Freeman smacked friendly NPCs in the face with a crowbar in Half-Life 2 just to see their reaction and my Solid Snake (and there’s a phrase you can rarely use innocently in a sentence) tortured guards in Metal Gear Solid 2 because he enjoyed their hobbling animation. Neither of them reconcile with what we’re told about the characters through their respective narratives.
Perhaps, then, the reason the Rockstar examples are so conspicuous is because of how extremely it pushes in both directions. Their recent games have tried to push the depth of the story on offer, rising above parodying movie genres to become their own critique of American culture. Where Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti was an even twattier version of Scarface; GTA4′s Niko Bellic is written to elicit sympathy and understanding from the player in order to tell their (admittedly over-the-top) tale of an immigrant resorting to a life of crime. Conversely this is a Grand Theft Auto game and, while the ridiculously cartoonish nature of the violence has been dialled down a notch, it still enables a cacophony of violence and mayhem. Between cutscenes my player-controlled Niko will plough his car through legions of pedestrians, murder hot-dog vendors that refused to serve him because he’d jostled them and nudged passers-by into the sea because they’re pathetic little ragdoll animations made it funny. He also shows an alarming disregard for his own safety. In fact he acts almost as if he were a videogame character in a digitised playground of guns, cars and explosives.
Don't worry, I'm sure he was really conflicted before he set this petrol station on fire.
Here’s the thing. This protagonist gap never bothered me in GTA4. It was clear where the Niko of story-led narrative ended and the Niko of player-led super fun times began. The tonal shift may have been extremely blatant, but it’s exactly that blatancy that makes it so easy for the player to mentally shift between the two positions. When faced with a late game decision I chose to spare the life of the man Niko had been searching for because it felt like what the story-Niko would have done. The player-Niko would have probably thrown a grenade in between the two of them and then jumped at the point of explosion just to see how far across the road he’d fly.
In Red Dead Redemption, however, a similar disconnect does bother me. It bothers me a lot.
It wouldn’t if I was playing Red Dead Redemption in the same way played GTA. If I happily went about killing, stealing and lassoing characters, suffering the trivial consequences of my anti-social actions, the game would have unfolded with the same disconnect described above. The character: a former outlaw, troubled by his past and with his own personal morality code, blackmailed into bringing his former brothers-in-arms to justice. The player: attempting to create fun through an ever-changing series of events pushing the limit of what the game will allow like a child with ADHD. Bizarre? Sure. A big deal? Not really.
Okay, so I did do this a lot. But otherwise I've been good.
My problem is that I’m not playing the game like that. I’m actually playing the character like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. Ostensibly someone who is out for himself yet has a tendency to get embroiled in other people’s problems and usually resolves them in a way that satisfies his own code of honour. For a long while my role-play matched perfectly with the intentions and attitude of the character I was controlling. It was the first time in a Rockstar open-world game since Bully that I felt my actions actually matched with the character shown in the cutscenes.
Then I arrived in Mexico. As part of John Marston, the player character’s, search for his former comrades he starts to work for both the army and the peasant uprising that opposes them. For me it mirrored the set up to Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars. Eastwood rides into a town ruled by two warring factions, the Rojos, a local gang, and the Baxters, the Sheriff’s family. Eastwood’s stated plan is “The Rojos on one side of the town, the Baxters on the other, and me right in the middle.” However, it doesn’t take long before he’s clearly siding against the Rojos because of a young mother they kidnapped over a gambling debt they claimed her husband owed them. In Redemption, Marston stays in the middle of the two warring factions of the region throughout the majority of that section of the game.
This is despite the fact that the army is shown to be seemingly taking entire villages of women for the soldiers’ pleasure. Sure, this being a Rockstar game, the rebel leader is shown to be a vain, womanizing, delusional figure but, and this is the key difference, he’s not a fucking rapist. The set up is so ridiculous that in one mission for the army I’m using a gatling gun to cut down hundreds of rebels assaulting a train full of army supplies and then, a couple of missions later, I’m murdering soldiers guarding a train full of army supplies. During one mission, in which I was asked to torch the houses of rebels I thought “no, I don’t want to do this.” It was the opposite of the GTA problem, completely at odds with my envisioned character and, as far as I could tell, the depiction of John Marston throughout the rest of the game. Unfortunately it’s a linear story path. Unless I completed the mission I couldn’t continue the story. I kept waiting for the moment I got to choose to betray one side or another but it never came, the story plays out the same way, without any choice, no matter how you choose to play it.
The Rebel Leader: Twat, not rapist.
Redemption features a rudimentary morality system entitled Honour (or, I suppose, Honor.) The Mexican campaign betrays people on either end of the scale. Those playing the thieving, murderous bastards (the GTA4 method) can’t choose to ultimately side with the army in reward for riches. Those that have chosen to help people and stay on the right side of the law have to do an uncomfortable amount of missions doing dirty work for the army at the expense of the impoverished peasants. The only genuine surprise from these missions is that one side chooses not to turn on you.
I probably helped this soldier two missions ago. Now I will shoot him in the face.
The explanation given for the set-up is that Marston’s family is at risk unless he brings the outlaws he used to run with to justice. Except the game never earns the right to have Marston go to such extremes. The player never sees Marston with his family at the beginning of the game (I’ve not completed the story yet so don’t know if he does later on) so it’s unreasonable to expect the player to care about them throughout when the only connection we have to them is Marston’s exposition to other characters. I’m not saying I need the protagonist to be a Freeman-like blank slate for player insertion, I’m fine with my characters having their own distinct view of events, but using backstory to motivate the character to do things at odds with his own code of honour, as well as the code of honour implemented through the game’s own systems, cheapens the experience for the player.
I’m interested in hearing your take on this, assuming you have one. Many within the games industry seem to now favour the approach of emergent narrative of games such as Just Cause 2 and Far Cry 2 over more traditional stories told through cutscenes. I’m all for this, especially in respect to the ridiculous nature of Just Cause 2, but I don’t think it should completely negate traditional narrative methods especially as Red Dead Redemption is, all things considered, a brilliant game. After all, I wouldn’t have had such a negative reaction to that set of missions if it weren’t.
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Words about gaming published on the internet. How novel.
Words about gaming published on the internet. How novel.
