Red Dead Redemption

The Game Room
22

Still haven’t played it yet, but it looks fantastic! The theme and gameplay is just right up my alley, looking forward to play a little bit later

23

It definitely has one of the most memorable side missions.

24

I would have to pick Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. It was like playing a completely new game. The size and depth of the story could have been made into a sequel but they made it a DLC instead.

I finished Undead Nightmare last night. It was fun certainly. I found the colors were even more of a problem. It was like playing a game on a black and white Tv. Maybe it worked for atmosphere but it made aiming at targets difficult.

25

Oakminster could only be talking about Read Dead Redemption 2, because the first Red Dead Redemption could not have come with his PS4. It was only ever released on PS3 and Xbox 360.

I enjoyed Red Dead Redemption 2, and would be interested in playing the first one, but I’ve never owned a console of that generation so I’d have to buy one solely for that purpose.

26

There was an annoying glitch. Maybe it was only on the streaming version on PlayStation Now. Without warning the heads of the zombies (and arms mostly) and NPCs would disappear. You could still shoot the invisible heads but it made it difficult to aim. Worse than that it usually glitched up the missions too. If the heads disappeared while clearing a town or cemetery the zombies would spawn forever without the mission ending. The only way to fix it was to die on purpose and it was usually ok when it reloaded.

27

The 360 version of Red Dead Redemption is backward compatible on the Xbox One, for what it’s worth.

28

I’ve just started playing RDR2 and am enjoying it a lot. Some observations:

  1. The voice acting is good but the choice of voices is poor. What I mean is that they all sound like generic gruff men. Each voice on its own has a lot of character, but all of the voices together have much the same character and therefore lose their character. Make sense? During the very first mission it took me a while to work out which of the gruff voiced characters was mine, something Yahtzee touched on in his YouTube review.

  2. I have no problem with the horse control. If you want to gallop you only need to tap the run button occasionally, you don’t have to hammer it constantly. I like the way you can hold the run button and it will match your horse’s speed with your companions. It is a common gripe in other games with “escort” or “follow” quests that the NPCs walk at some awkward pace that is faster than the player’s walk but slower than the player’s run. I have had a collision with a coach when riding my horse and I got thrown off, but I was speeding around a blind corner and deserved it.

  3. Arthur walks very slowly. I know it is realistic, and that is how fast people walk, but it takes some getting used to. Oddly, in first person view, he walks much faster (maybe twice the speed). I think it helps if you try and get into the mood and pace of the game. It is a rural setting where people talk, think, and move slowly. I do wonder if the ~60 hours of gameplay would only be 30 hours if Arthur walked like characters in other games.

  4. I wish there’d been a tutorial for hand to hand combat. I’m still not sure what movement options are available to me. It seems I can punch and block, but sometimes I have managed to evade a punch by swaying backwards, but I don’t know how I did it. While not in a fight I’ve been able to dive sideways, but in a fight this ability seems to have gone.

  5. There is a “go to the pub and get drunk” quest early on that I enjoyed a lot. The way being drunk was portrayed was brilliant.

I’ve only been playing for a few hours, but so far so good.

29

I’ve just started playing RDR2 and am enjoying it a lot. Some observations:

  1. The voice acting is good but the choice of voices is poor. What I mean is that they all sound like generic gruff men. Each voice on its own has a lot of character, but all of the voices together have much the same character and therefore lose their character. Make sense? During the very first mission it took me a while to work out which of the gruff voiced characters was mine, something Yahtzee touched on in his YouTube review.

  2. I have no problem with the horse control. If you want to gallop you only need to tap the run button occasionally, you don’t have to hammer it constantly. I like the way you can hold the run button and it will match your horse’s speed with your companions. It is a common gripe in other games with “escort” or “follow” quests that the NPCs walk at some awkward pace that is faster than the player’s walk but slower than the player’s run. I have had a collision with a coach when riding my horse and I got thrown off, but I was speeding around a blind corner and deserved it.

  3. Arthur walks very slowly. I know it is realistic, and that is how fast people walk, but it takes some getting used to. Oddly, in first person view, he walks much faster (maybe twice the speed). I think it helps if you try and get into the mood and pace of the game. It is a rural setting where people talk, think, and move slowly. I do wonder if the ~60 hours of gameplay would only be 30 hours if Arthur walked like characters in other games.

  4. I wish there’d been a tutorial for hand to hand combat. I’m still not sure what movement options are available to me. It seems I can punch and block, but sometimes I have managed to evade a punch by swaying backwards, but I don’t know how I did it. While not in a fight I’ve been able to dive sideways, but in a fight this ability seems to have gone.

  5. There is a “go to the pub and get drunk” quest early on that I enjoyed a lot. The way being drunk was portrayed was brilliant.

I’ve only been playing for a few hours, but so far so good.

30

Duplicate

31

Happy new board!

I mentioned earlier in the thread that I had recently finished Red Dead Redemption 2, and that I had played a little bit of the original Red Dead Redemption, but that I had never finished it. Based on some of your recommendations, I’m now playing the original Red Dead Redemption.

I do think the second one is the better game, but the original is still very good. The graphics in 2 are better, obviously. It’s helping me with my Red Dead Redemption 2 withdrawal.

32

Some further thoughts after playing it for longer.

Really cool emergent gameplay at times.

I stumbled across some guys in a coach getting robbed. Initially I thought I’d be the white knight and take out the robbers but I was a bit slow and the robbers managed to shoot their hostages before I got to them. Anyway I still killed the robbers but then I was left with four dead bodies, a coach with two horses, and my own horse. I looted all of the bodies (of course) and figured I’d take the coach and sell it to my fence for $40.

I had some other stuff to do though, I’d been given a tipoff on a house that might be worth robbing so I wanted to do that. So I jumped up on to the coach, told my horse to follow me, and I went to find the house. I didn’t find it, but I did find a timber mill that had a wolf problem. For a small fee I went and dealt to the wolves so the timber workers felt safe enough to go about their jobs again.

Back in the coach, with my horse following, I headed back across a couple of regions to the fence. I wasn’t far from my destination when I got ambushed by another gang. I tried to ride away from them but the coach was too slow. As I approached some likely looking rocks that might offer some cover, I leapt from the coach, ducked behind the rocks, and went into Dead Eye mode to headshot the bad guys.

After looting as much as I dared before someone saw me and reported me to the law, I headed back to the coach. What I saw was not pretty. It seems that when I jumped from the coach at high speed, the coach careened off the trail and crashed, killing one of its horses and setting the other one free. Without horses I couldn’t move the coach and so I couldn’t sell it. It had all been for nothing. Except it hadn’t, it was one of the coolest sequences of events in the game so far and it all just happened naturally as a result of my choices in the game.

The game offers lots of opportunity for this kind of thing and it is a much better experience than playing the missions.

The missions themselves are overly scripted.

In contrast to some of the great gameplay that happens in the wild, the missions themselves run on rails and are little more than interactive movies.

For example I was supposed to set one of the characters free from jail. I set up the escape and thought I’d get my horse over to be ready to run. But once I broke the guy out, the horse had gone and I was forced into a sequence where I followed the NPC around the town killing everyone in sight. Other missions will offer you a very limited choice in how to act such as choosing to wait till night and be stealthy or doing it during the day and going in guns blazing. The choice isn’t made by actually waiting for night and being stealthy, it’s made by pushing a button “Wait For Night”, or “Do It Now”. From there you go through a scripted sequence of events where you will have to kill certain people or search a certain building.

I understand that giving a player freedom when playing missions that advance the main plot introduces significant challenges for the developers, but I think it can be done, other games do this quite well. I would prefer the Skyrim approach where the player has so much freedom they can actually break the main plot by killing the wrong NPC.

33

I’m playing this too. After nearly four months of lockdown with a toddler, this is a great escape. I’m not much of a gamer generally, a friend describes my preferred genre as “walking sim”. But I’m liking it a lot.

My favourite feature is the balance between progressing the story and just hangin’ out, fishin’ or huntin’ (sorry) and riding my gorgeous mare Trixie around. (I wish they’d got a proper Horse Girl to do their equine fact checking. A few glaring things, like totally unsuitable/incongruous breeds for the setting. And Arthur purring “that’s a silver dapple pinto” when he chases mustangs made me crack up laughing.)

As we go on, with Arthur getting sicker, Dutch getting crazier, more and more gangs of armed jerks trying to shoot me, I am finding it more stressful. I can only play in short bursts around naptime, which is probably a good thing.

34

I finally bought RDR2 and I’ve started playing it. I have not found it to be a far superior game so far.

I should point out that minigames and collectibles are not my favourite parts of games in general, so adding fishing, dominoes, new versions of five finger fillet, etc. doesn’t get me excited. And I definitely do not think it’s an improvement that Arthur and his horse need to eat in order to stay healthy, or that Arthur needs to clean his guns; that kind of micro-management feels like busy work to me. I also don’t think it’s an improvement that you can now get low quality pelts from hunting.

I like the story so far about as much as I liked the story from RDR1: good, but not blowing me away. I like Arthur’s sarcastic personality, though.

Ironically, aiming at far targets is one of my complaints about RDR2 as well (probably because my TV and my eyesight are both getting old). I just cross my fingers and hope that auto-aim points me in the right direction.

35

Amusingly enough I’m playing Red Dead Redemption 2 right now (it was on sale during Black Friday on the PS Store) and I saw this thread bumped. I am really enjoying it. There is a lot of random stuff going on in the wide wastes which do lead to some very interesting gameplay. I do enjoy the missions as well, even though they may be very scripted - I found that they have very different gameplay mechanics a lot of the time to make them interesting. And I like the story.

Have a wide open world is pretty great, IMO. I’m not super kean on constantly feeding myself/horse, but it’s not a massive deal.

36

I’m very much not big on this idea that “emergent gameplay” is going to totally take over and completely obviate main story campaigns, but I have to admit that when I played RDR2, for about a solid month, I put the missions on hold and basically played it as a hunting/fishing/camping simulator. This is because I decided I wanted the special satchel that lets you carry 100 of everything, and it just took that long to obtain all the ingredients.

37

Prey: Mooncrash. It has a definite ending, and I had done pretty much everything in it.

Yet ten minutes after I switched off the machine after the titles ran, I was back, on a completely fresh game playing it all through again. Loved it.

Barely related to the original.

38

I put my game of RDR2 on hold for now after I got gunned down by gangs of roving enemies three times in rapid succession. That was definitely not the highlight of my game so far…