How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2

Re:How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’... by hoorayimhelping on Saturday December 01, 2018 @10:20AM (#18577106)

The world is enormous and a huge simulation and really fun to explore. After you do that, you realize missions are repetitive (ride a horse here, we promise there won't be trouble, oops there's trouble, shoot everyone Orthur), the main story is frustratingly dumb (how many times will these morons I'm supposed to empathize with ride into a town, act smarter than everyone, and then get taken advantage of?). I absolutely loved this game for the first three weeks, but after the sheen wore off, it was pretty disappointingly hollow. It was really hard for me to push the story forward in this game, whereas with RDR1 and GTA V and GTA IV, I felt like I beat the game way sooner than I wanted.

And while the character animations are gorgeous and amazing, it makes for a tedious gameplay experience when you have to walk around in circles in front of a can of beans before your character targets the item you want him to pick up.

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Re:How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’... by mercer on Saturday December 01, 2018 @11:41AM (#18577478)

The last open-world game that I played before RDR2 was Breath of the Wild, and I found the difference in philosophy very interesting.

Where RDR2 is filled to the brim with content, encounters, story and mechanics, it does become apparent after a while that it's all more or less hard-coded. And I felt that a lot of the actual gameplay stuff (UI, controls) suffered from too many of the problems that the previous games suffered from, and that it lacked a degree of innovation.

What made BotW special to me, was the way that the game provided you with a set of mechanics that could be mixed in all sorts of creative ways. While the world itself was less detailed than RDR2's, and the story a bit of a letdown, everything felt like a proper upgrade to the 'sandbox' type of game.

Of course, RDR2's sheer volume and beauty still makes it probably one of my favorite games of the year, but I found the contrast between the two quite interesting.

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Re:How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’... by fzzzy on Saturday December 01, 2018 @12:06PM (#18577628)

I totally agree. Creative mechanics that mix together to create emergent gameplay is the future. Rdr2 has a bit of it with the fire simulation, but in the end it’s the same old engine with the same old scripted events. Rdr2 is still amazing and very fun though.

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