I am currently having more fun playing Red Dead Redemption than any other open world game in recent memory, and certainly more fun than I've had with a Rockstar game in several years. The last Rockstar game that felt similar was Grand Thief Auto: San Andreas, largely because of its heavy emphasis on role-playing elements. Grand Theft Auto IV was marketed as if it were a role-playing experience, but it didn't have San Andreas's benefit of a clear genre reference to build its various game systems off of and give them coherence. The clarity with which Redemption identifies itself as a Western, and the surprising extent to which it allows that to inform its world design, puts it head-and-shoulders above every other Rockstar game. Though it suffers from some vestigial design conventions inherited from GTA (mostly having to do with GTA's open world strategy of being a theme park rather than a holistic world simulation) it offers the player more choices, more expressive ways of behaving, than many open world games.
What's striking about Redemption is how unlike GTA it is, in spite of following a lot of the same conventions. It's pretty ironic, considering the associations of Westerns with guns and violence, that Redemption is one of the least violence-centered open world games I've played... even less, I feel, than RPGs like Fallout 3 or platformers like inFAMOUS. The fact of the matter is in the world of Red Dead Redemption there is a whole hell of a lot to do that doesn't involve killing people. I spent the first several hours of my game simply hanging out on a ranch, learning to tame horses, herd cattle, hunt, trade, forage, play cards with the locals, and in general just enjoy the beautiful countryside. I've heard the first few hours of the game criticized as "slow", but I wonder if this is just because no one asks you to kill people until a good while in. The only violence I engaged in (not counting hunting) in my first few hours was night watchman duty for a small ranch, where I was delighted to discover that killing was only one tool in my toolbox of available actions. All it took to scare off some cattle rustlers was pointing my gun at them. More belligerent trouble-makers could easily be disarmed with a well-placed shot, and if they still didn't feel like running they could be wrestled to the ground and knocked unconscious. And this was before I was given the lasso, which is originally for breaking in wild horses but works just fine on people too. Folks can be intimidated, knocked out, humiliated, scared, tied up, carried, untied--all without being murdered. Any combination of these things usually gets the job done, and the job is usually trying to maintain some semblance of order in an already fairly civilized (by video game standards) world. Probably the biggest irony of Red Dead Redemption is that its vision of a frontier civilization feels more peaceful and less violent than most video game worlds. The countryside isn't overwhelmingly hostile like it is in virtually all other open world games. Animals largely mind their own business, and most of the people you meet are friendly. You will occasionally encounter a hungry pack of wolves or some bandits, but these are always the exception, not the rule. You'll hear gunshots often in the distance, but you can simply mind your own business and go along your merry way. Life's too short, after all. And the open sky too beautiful.
The world of Red Dead Redemption is more indifferent than hostile. It isn't trying to kill you by default, and this may be why your range of responses to it involve a lot more than killing. When violence erupts, you know there's a range of ways to respond, depending on what sort of person you want to be and how you want others to regard you. The social simulation aspect of Redemption fits nicely in with the rest of the world. Murdering someone in the street is considered a crime, even if it was part of the duel, as is hogtying or assaulting random citizens. I once shot dead a man threatening a prostitute with a knife, and I was promptly run out of town by the authorities. Murder in defense of the weak or even in self-defense is frowned upon... unless you happen to wear a badge, in which case you basically have a license to kill anyone considered an "outlaw". Bounties always pay better if they are alive, but most gangs refuse to come quietly, so killing tends to become a natural consequence of law enforcement in practice. Of course, you can try to shoot everyone in the leg, hogtie everyone, etc.--and you may even get a few of them--but when you're pinned down in a canyon by seven snipers who have no qualms about killing you where you stand, pacifism becomes the quick road to suicide.
As a simulation Red Dead Redemption isn't as nuanced or as consistent as it could be, which hinders role-playing at times. I blame this primarily on the game's adherence to the "Rockstar formula" for how it attempts to integrate story and world design. Rockstar games have always been more like theme parks than proper world simulations. Story missions and challenges are like rides in a theme park, and the open world mostly serves as a fun space to explore while traveling from one "ride" to another. The rules that govern the open world are built on the story's theme, but they cannot be very complex or have very serious consequences because that would inhibit the players ability to experience all the "rides". There has always therefore been a disconnect between story and world in Rockstar games, and Red Dead Redemption is no exception. As an experience I feel the game would be a lot stronger if your behavior in the game world actually effected the story. For example, it would be nice if the sheriff of Armadillo wouldn't talk to you if you were an outlaw. Likewise it would be nice if all your actions in general had more lasting consequences. The fact that the game responds to you killing everyone in a town by having the town become a ghost town is great, but the fact that everyone respawns six days later is silly... just like the fact that a killing spree gets you in jail, but only for a week or so. Rockstar still doesn't want to prevent players from basically doing whatever they feel like at any given moment... like any paying customer at Disneyland.
The dissonance created by Red Dead Redemption's theme park structure, along with its occasional bugginess and thematic verisimilitude, makes it feel at times like a computerized version of Westworld, that old sci-fi movie from the 70s about a Western theme park populated by robotic cowboys. When the spell of Redemption breaks down, when the simulation suddenly feels shallow or the narrative inconsistent with my personal player behavior, it feels suddenly like I'm a customer in a Western-themed amusement park, not a carefully role-played persona in a richly simulated world. However when the spell holds, when the stars align and none of the various elements contradict each other, it's the wild west simulation I've waited my whole life to play.
Posts
I haven't had a chance to play much of the game yet (I only got my copy yesterday), but there's something that occurs to me when you mention hearing gunshots in the distance and going on your way. In my brief experience so far with the game, when I hear gunshots, I *could* go on my way... but I feel compelled to intervene, even if it isn't what I was focussed on doing at that particular point. For example, while riding on my first trip from the ranch to the town, I spotted a man being attacked by a pack of coyotes near the road. What else was I to do but help him out? It was possible for me to just ride on by, and I likely wouldn't have suffered any mechanical consequence from doing so... but in that moment I just acted to save the man.
ReplyDeleteWhat I wonder is if there's a deeper, subtler sort of morality system at work in Red Dead Redemption than the usual "Kill a baby/Save a baby" choices most games that make a point of moral choice offer. This is a morality that operates not on the big, clearly delineated choices, but on the smaller, more subtle ones. A morality that is less about what one does, but what one does not do.
What makes this work for me is that the game allows the option to take or to not take certain actions. For example, my girlfriend was quite distressed when, in the course of playing the Free Roam mode with a couple of friends, one of them kept shooting horses. I was reminded of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun early preview of the game, where the writer mentioned checking to see if he could shoot his horse, and what occurred to me is that it is only by allowing players to shoot their horses that Rockstar provides the option *not* to do so. Without the ability to take the action, the choice not to do so is no choice at all. But in games, where agency is so often restricted by the limitations of design and technology, often the only way for a player to discover that a particular option is available unless they try it. In a sense, it is only by shooting the horse that the player can know they have the option *not* to shoot the horse.
As to the theme park nature of the game, there's a degree to which this is just a convention of open-world games that players must choose to accept. In the same way that a film shows only the relevant bits of a story, and generally the mundane, functional parts of life, such as going to the bathroom, are cut out unless relevant, most open world games cut down on the mundane, functional stuff, like for example the hours of riding through a mostly unchanging landscape that would be required to traverse a realistically-scaled world.
What's notable in open world games is that the player generally has the *option* of experiencing functional, mundane elements such as long travel times if they choose to do so. And many do, and the games provide for interesting and noteworthy experiences as a result of that choice. Many of my favourite moments from Fallout 3 have been when I've been wandering the wastes, and come by chance on a perfect-but-emergent combination of landscape and lighting. Those moments "when the stars align" are different for different players, and what I love about open-world games is that they provide opportunities for players to make their own.
I agree with you about the "not" doing stuff being a more interesting, subtle kind of moral choice.
ReplyDeleteAs for the "theme park" comment, I think maybe you misunderstand me. It's not about wanting more mundane stuff in games. It's about wanting a more robust, coherent world design. Rockstar has a certain way of doing open worlds, going back to GTAIII, but PC RPGs were doing open worlds years before that, in the Ultima series among others. Fallout 3, to me, feels like a direct extension of that legacy. I wouldn't call it a "theme park" world the same way GTA is, though it has its own limitations.
Nice blog post!
ReplyDeleteI agree with most of your observations; it does feel a lot like a RPG but at the same time, the game doesn't allow you to pursue the RP elements all the way.
I always play good guys, and my John Marston was a hero and a saint to the bitter end. This created some weird situations in the cutscenes where he appears as trigger happy and brutal. Also, after having completed one quest for both the government and the rebels in Mexico, I really felt an unwillingness to do any more tasks for the official side. But of course, you can't choose to stop doing their missions unless you want to drop the storyline. As a sucker for RPGs this is something I missed, but this doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the game a lot :)
Yeah. I think my ideal game would be somewhere between RDR and a Bioware RPG. I like the immediacy and simplicity of open world games, but I long for the deep story/word connection of non-linear RPGs. This may be why I liked the Ultima VII so much, because this is basically what it was. Though it was technically an RPG, it was actually incredibly light on traditional RPG elements (stats, etc.) and very heavy on narratively rich world simulation.
ReplyDeleteThere have been a few moments in RDR that felt like role-playing to me, that felt very interesting from a world simulation point of view in relation to me expressing my own take on the character. Last night I came cross a policeman yelling for me to capture two escaping criminals. I caught them, tied them up, and brought them back. My character specifically said he went through the trouble of bringing them back alive, before the policeman thanked me and paid me. As I was riding away I heard two gunshots. I turned around and realized the policeman had executed the two criminals point-black while they were still tied up. I felt furious about this, so I chased down the policeman and beat him unconscious. I didn't kill him but left him on the side of the road. The fascist probably deserved worse.
Although I had never committed a crime in the game yet, I felt this was an important thing for me to do. It made my wanted level go up briefly, but it was a small bounty and easy to pay off. Its moments like those that really feel interesting to me, and I wish the game was more focused on them, that they somehow "mattered" to the story. But I'm pretty grateful they're in the game at all. It's this sort of thing that I feel GTA never really approached.
Having played a lot more of the game now, I think I get what you mean by the theme park aspect, and I have to agree with you. What it feels like to me is a complete disconnect between the actions one takes while roaming the world between missions, and the story-based missions Rockstar have written. You get to play around between missions, and then you can go do a mission to see the next part of John Marston's story. Which is pretty much par for the course with Rockstar's games, I guess.
ReplyDeleteBut I share your appreciation for the added opportunities to make your own story for the character you play between missions. That's something that's been missing from most of the previous Rockstar games. The comparison I'd make is to Bully, which was a much better game than it got credit for, and allowed a degree of the story-making Red Dead Redemption has.
I kinda wish Rockstar would stop pairing rigid stories with open worlds. I think it's that combination that really makes the theme park feel significant. Also, while RDR suffers from this the least of recent Rockstar games, it'd be nice if they weren't telling stories of characters seeking redemption (C.J., Niko, Marston) using gameplay that encourages destructive mayhem. :)
Yeah, exactly. It's not that it's a "wrong" way to make a game, but it has certain limitations that are frustration for people who'd like a more coherent experience. This is why I'd love to see a game with world design like RDR paired up with narrative design closer to Fallout 3. That would really be something.
ReplyDeleteYep, the idea of changing the narrative design to something more like Fallout 3 was a recurring thought while playing RDR. I'm doing an exhaustive, thorough exploration of Fallout 3 at the moment, in the service of my PhD, and I'm really appreciating a lot of things about the way that game does its narrative stuff.
ReplyDeleteThe other thing comparison to Fallout 3 I kept making while playing RDR was to the random encounters. Fallout 3 has about a hundred different random encounters, that can take place in over 120 different locations. And many of those encounters are dependent on the player's actions. RDR, on the other hand, seems to have maybe a dozen different encounters, none of which have any relation to the player's actions. You keep running into the same situations again and again, in the same places, and they never play out any different regardless of what you do outside of them.
To extend the theme park analogy, it's like going to Disneyland and walking around between the rides, but not being able to go 30 metres without tripping over Mickey, Donald or Goofy, and each time they're played by a staffer who's never seen you before. :)