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Red Dead Redemption 2

DuderonomyDuderonomy Haut de la Garenne 7,793 Posts
in Strut Central
Get a 60 inch HD tv and the latest Xbox, take a 3 month sabbatical, and spend the most rewarding time of your life running around pretending to be Clint Eastwood. Hype is justified. It isn’t perfect, but it’s fucking fun.

  Comments

  • JimsterJimster Cruffiton.etsy.com 6,960 Posts
    Did man die of TB doe?
  • klezmer electro-thug beatsklezmer electro-thug beats 1,393 Posts
    Watched my partner play the first few hours of this. It's very polished but even compared to other open-world games it seems to me to have that GTA-ish general global hostility - like, a very rich world full of different people doing different things, and there are like 2 buttons to interact with that world - threaten verbally, or threaten while pointing a gun - press twice to fire the gun. And if you're good at not pressing those to initiate constant fights to the death, the world does so for you. Run into somebody's shoulder too hard due to it being a game where you make a man walk with millimeter joystick moves, and you're in a totally unprompted fight to the death, no matter time or place. Get busted by extremely realistically rendered police, and wake up in the countryside minus your guns and a half-eagle coin.

    It seemed stark that the technology behind rendering the world in visuals and sound, and animating AI figures in that world, has vastly surpassed games' (or game developers') ability to conceive of ways to interact with that world. Hope I'm wrong, I guess I'll give it a go some time anyway and see.
  • JimsterJimster Cruffiton.etsy.com 6,960 Posts
    klezmer electro-thug beats said:
    It seemed stark that the technology behind rendering the world in visuals and sound, and animating AI figures in that world, has vastly surpassed games' (or game developers') ability to conceive of ways to interact with that world. Hope I'm wrong, I guess I'll give it a go some time anyway and see.

    It's been like this since "Space Invaders".  If it moves, shoot it.  If it doesn't move, shoot it until it moves and then shoot it.

    Srs doe, I wonder if long-term players do actually get de-sensitized to violence to the point where stabbing someone to death IRL is the defacto response to any small disagreement or accidental bump.

    I guess the argument back is that the game is offering "Escapism" but really, does everyone dream of violent rampages?

  • klezmer electro-thug beatsklezmer electro-thug beats 1,393 Posts
    Of course shooting's the main interactivity in many of the most popular games, but like, even compared to RDR's closest competitors (assassin's creed and the witcher maybe?) they've really not progressed the hostility of the world to a level of realism close to every other measure you could use on that game. Like, other open-world games don't put you in a random fight to the death because you met eyes with somebody for too long... these dudes seem to have built a 90s GTA game where you're still supposed to just assume you gotta kill everybody you meet, despite all the subtle storytelling and beautiful world building that made me think there'd be more rewarding things to do.

    As for escapism vs. desensitizing, who fucking knows when there's so much other real and depicted violence everywhere. Given how many millions of people are shooting each other on fortnite at any given time I'd assume it to only be a trigger for people already on the road to being violent themselves.
  • DuderonomyDuderonomy Haut de la Garenne 7,793 Posts
    BRB, just going out on a motiveless killing spree.
  • DuderonomyDuderonomy Haut de la Garenne 7,793 Posts
    Don’t SWAT me bro!  I keed.


    I get the complaints, but not every shoulder bump reacts in violence - there’s a lot more to it going on than that, and I think if I did have that sabbatical, I could play it through twice; once as a no-fucks-given psychopath, and once trying to be the whiter-than-white Singing Cowboy, and have two very different game experiences.


    Would be good if they made a game where contacts and information gathered (not through force) could be developed, but ultimately these are meant to be escapism: my dad also has Fallout76, and so much attention to detail has gone into the periodic chores that are needed to survive in a radioactive wasteland that it just isn’t fun, it’s housework under duress from mutant rats and rogue robots.
  • klezmer electro-thug beatsklezmer electro-thug beats 1,393 Posts
    Yeah it's a tough balance to strike. I can have lots of fun killin' virtual people but I guess the way RDR was described had me assuming more. Anyway, we paid for the damn game so I'll give it a proper go sometime.
  • JimsterJimster Cruffiton.etsy.com 6,960 Posts
    I do wonder about the number of nutcases out there.  We encountered one during Christmas week and walked away from his aggressive threats to follow us home (I had pulled him up about barging my wife out of the way as we were shopping). 

    I later wondered if one or both of us were going to get knifed and simultaneously angry at myself for not being violent.  
  • DuderonomyDuderonomy Haut de la Garenne 7,793 Posts
    You see! Computer games aren’t that far removed from real life.
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