Warning: Fourth paragraph contains heavy spoilers for Red Dead Redemption.
Red Dead Redemption, a game I was ready to embrace an evolution of Rockstar’s aging open world design, wound up letting me down. I give credit to the rich atmosphere that perfectly captured the last gasp of the Wild West, but I can’t forgive marginally interactive design wrought with repetition. Red Dead was a linear cover based shooter cleverly disguised as an open world game. Neither its linearity nor its narrative-driven means to an end are inherently negative, but when placed alongside a truly open world game (such as Just Cause 2) Red Dead comes off as surprisingly limited with a lack of legitimate versatility.
You can’t disguise a bunch of meaningless options as true player choice. Grand Theft Auto III’s legacy, rather than its most endearing hook, should have been its slightly broken ability to allow the player to spite the directed experience and use their environments to their utmost advantage. Everyone had a way to kill GTA 3’s Salvatore at the close of the first act; stand on a truck and snipe from afar, speed ahead and build a blockade of stolen cars, or simply ram and toss over a few grenades. What you’re supposed to do was pretty clear, but how you could do it left a ton of room for improvisation. Since then, Rockstar has been hell-bent on creating a singular vision for an experience, leaving only meaningless choices up to the player. Switching guns or bumping the difficulty (through the menu or via gold medal quests replaying mission) do not serve as appropriate means of choice. There might be a little leeway on a few missions, but a majority of Red Dead’s missions are going to create the same experience for every player. Say what you will about Just Cause 2’s repetition, but at the end of the day its tools allowed the player to do a considerable amount of creative, crazy shit to get the job done.
What Red Dead did, gameplay wise, to set itself apart from the rest of the genre would have been worthy of recognition had I not already done most of it in Neversoft’s Gun. Herding cattle, hunting for sport, Irish drunks, rail car gatling guns, bounty missions, and shoot-the-rope hanging segments had already been visited in the previous generation. Given, Red Dead executed on these concepts about a thousand times better than Neversoft did, but I was surprised at the lack of originality in Red Dead’s extraneous gameplay. Random “instance” missions were a plus and the world looked absolutely beautiful, but beyond that it just seemed to push a few ideas rather than expand them. All of it worked very well, especially gunplay, which has been the subject of ineptitude in GTA games, but it quickly wore out its welcome. There hasn’t been a GTA (or open world, really) game since 2 that I haven’t felt compelled to 100% the statistical categories. I completed the narrative in Red Dead, completely all of the challenges in my journal, and did a few trophies within reach, but after that (and maybe 30 hours) I was ready to throw the game back in its case. It might come out for co-op if one of my friends picks it up, but I don’t see me going back to that well anytime soon.
Though passive on Red Dead’s gameplay, I was thoroughly impressed by what it chose to do with its narrative. The third act concluded in traditional fashion; a huge gun battle gave way to a ludicrous body count before a final confrontation with the sole remaining antagonist. Dutch’s suicidal anticlimax was a tad unexpected, but far from the fast one Rockstar played immediately thereafter. That wasn’t the end. I wasn’t done. An epilogue of sorts, after the dust settled I was tasked with a few (by comparison) mundane missions with my wife, uncle, and son. For once, the gameplay served the narrative, rather than the other way around. Spending time with his wife and son was the ultimate victory of Marsden, far more than the artificial tasks created by the Feds. It all built toward is imminent tragic downfall, of course, but even that lead to fantastic sense of revenge by the surprising new protagonist. Oddly enough it reminded me of Nathan Drake’s village recovery segment in Uncharted 2. Showcasing humanity in a game where you ostensibly murder hundreds of people is difficult, but both Naughty Dog and Rockstar manage to pull it off in marvelous fashion.
It makes me wish a similar disruption had been tailored to the gameplay, but we already covered that ground.
