What I'm Playing: Red Dead Redemption 2

It’s been a bit since I posted here. I have had some stuff going on recently, but also, I had a massive game to play through. Thanks Rockstar…curse you and your overabundance of content! *Shakes Fist*

Jokes aside, the game has a lot of content. The story is 40-50ish hours long, depending on how distracted you get. And that’s not even getting to the side quest stranger missions, random events that can happen on the road, robberies, card games, legendary hunting, and legendary fishing. There is just so much to do. Also, that’s all before you even get to the multiplayer.

The gang is full of engaging and awesome characters.

Story

So, this game is a sequel/prequel to Red Dead Redemption. (Really hard to figure out, right?) For anybody that hasn’t played the first game, it centered around former outlaw John Marston being forced to hunt down surviving members of his gang by a pair of government agents who are holding John’s family hostage. The sequel/prequel takes players back to the days when the gang was still intact and puts them in the players in the shoes of gang member Arthur Morgan. The story follows Arthur through the falling days of the gang as the encroach of civilization and the crackdown of the government starts to unravel the threads holding the gang together.

This story is a long story and is slow paced at the beginning. I can see where some people might not like it, but it works well to establish the gang and bond players with the characters before starting to tear things apart. The first game only included 4 gang members including John Marston. The sequel introduces a gang of about 15 people that the player doesn’t know prior to starting the game, including their character, Arthur.

Missions with gang members help you to get to know each character.

Arthur himself is a great character. He’s well defined through his missions that he has with the gang members especially with John, Dutch and Uncle. He has quick retorts with other characters and seems to be one of the only ones seeing the warning signs from totally well-hidden jerk wad character, Micah. (I’ll get to him in a second.) Arthur also has a great arc through the story that can change based on how the player decides to interact with the world.

Dutch is a great friend turned antagonist showing his shift from the charismatic leader that managed to amass so many followers into a successful gang to the paranoid and unstable Dutch that’s seen in the first game. His downfall is made even more tragic by clear bad guy, Micah who is so obviously a threat to the stability of the gang that it’s painful that there isn’t anyway to take him out early and save the gang. I wanted to just shoot Micah so many times during the game and just be done with his insane lunacy.

Gameplay

In Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar doubled down on making the world as detailed as possible, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. They implemented a food system where the player has to keep track of how hungry Arthur and his horse is in order to make sure health and stamina recharge. They also set up systems to keep track of how dirty Arthur is and peoples' reactions to Arthur's filth.

During the main story, I did not mind the food requirements. Many quests either started or ended at camp which gave me the chance to pick up a stew from Pearson and max out all my cores. Also, I was able to constantly pick up food for my horse around the world looting enemies or from stores in dire situations. However, once the story was done, I didn't have missions to lead me back to camp which made me more forgetful about remaining well fed.

The commitment to detail got annoying in fast travel as well. The map is gigantic and it takes awhile to ride across the map on horseback. However, Rockstar decided to remove the fast traveling from a campsite mechanic which forces the player to either make the ride on their own or spend money to take the train or stagecoach. There's also an fast travel option as an upgrade to the gang camp but it only fast travels out, not back to the camp.

Hunting seemed okay. The restriction of only being able to carry one carcass on my horse at one time isn't too bad for regular hunting but doing the legendary hunting, it becomes more frustrating. In order to be able to craft stuff with the legendary beasts, you have to sell the carcass to a trapper on the map. Since you can only carry one carcass and fast travelling doesn't remember the carcass on your horse, after killing a beast, you have to ride all the way to the trapper and then, if you want to hunt another beast, then you have to ride back out.

That's not to say that there isn't good detail too. The horse bonding system is great. I rode the same horse through most of the game. I got really attached to my horse during the story. I fed that horse. I patted that horse. I made sure that horse got out of the line of fire during combat. That horse was my partner. Then it got shot and died. I still miss it. Which proves that the mechanic really worked.

I also really enjoyed how the stores were set up to give players the options of buying stuff right off the shelves or to go through the catalog. The catalog looked fantastic and was always a joy to leaf through. I enjoyed it so much that I didn't even mind how much I got confused by how they marked items as sold out to tell me my inventory was full.

The shooting mechanics felt fine. I played a lot of GTA V and it felt similar to that. I'm not picky with how shooting feels. As long as I can aim and hit my target without tearing my hair out I'm happy. Dead Eye felt just as cool being a gunslinger as it did in the first game. Being able slow down time to aim and then unloading in quick succession just feels great.

Online

Rockstar recently released the Red Dead Online Beta as the multiplayer component to the game. The gameplay is similar to GTA Online but with some changes to use Red Dead's mechanics. For the most part, it works pretty well. The free roam missions are fun and an improvement on interacting with other players compared to the car selling missions in GTA. Losing to other players is a lot less frustrating when you haven't invested several thousands of dollars before beginning the mission.

The character creation, while a dramatic improvement on GTA's bizarre ancestor system, still leaves something to be desired. However it is functional and if you end up not being completely satisfied with your character's face, you can always hide it behind a big bushy beard.

Interestingly, the online has a story based set of missions revolving around a lady who breaks the player characters out prison in order to send them on a quest for revenge. I haven't played all the missions yet but the story seems okay. It's slightly hindered by the inability for the player characters to speak however it manages to maintain some player agency through honor decisions that the team of four votes on.

It seems like Online has a decently solid foundation that Rockstar is working to improve through the beta and I look forward to seeing what they add in the coming years similar to what they did with GTA Online.

The World

The world of the game is absolutely massive and full of cool things to find. I was riding around once and found a viking burial site that included a helmet and an ax. That doesn't even mention the things like the Ghost Train, the Nite Folk and the UFOs. There's plenty of secrets hidden around.

Even outside of the cool secrets, the world is gorgeous. I couldn't help but stop and take pictures whenever I saw some cool vista or weather effect just to record how pretty the landscapes are to look at.

The world feels lived in as well. The people in each town go about their daily business and can be talked too. I talked to a civil war veteran who lived in Valentine and he would have different things to say when I came back to town. This interaction was even better in the gang campsite. Walking into camp almost always yielded a conversation between gang members that either related to what was going on in the story or the daily routine of what was happening at the camp. There where things like Dutch talking about being pursued by the Pinkertons or Pearson talking with somebody about the day's stew.

The camp is a great place to recharge your cores and restock supplies

Audio

Just as it was in the first game, the score is awesome. It always heightens the emotion in dramatic moments and is great to listen to while riding around the world. The sound effects are for everything in the world are similarly great. Also the voice acting for all the characters is spectacular.

Closing

Even with the funkiness in some of the gameplay decisions with the cores, Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games this year. I am looking forward to what is coming with Red Dead Online and I hope to see single player DLC as well, maybe Undead Nightmare 2? The story alone makes this game worth playing but on top of that it's pretty to look at and robing people as a cowboy is great fun.