You have all this choice, but Rockstar is going to decide for you about which doors work and which don’t. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2 has locked doors that you can’t open no matter what. The paradox of choice is that the more options you give a player, the more they will notice that they can’t do certain things. But then why can’t I also set the engine to top speed before jumping onto my horse so that the authorities have to try to stop a runaway train? It’s awesome that I have the option to hijack a train, kill all the guards, and then rob the passengers one by one. Interacting with objects and buildingsĪ lot of the things that Rockstar has added to the game are very cool. I can rob them, but I can’t bribe them, fool them into doing tasks for me, or get them to cause a distraction by lying to them. At least I can’t through the first 20 hours. Sure, I can antagonize someone until they want to fight me, but I can’t greet them until they want to join me.
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And it makes me realize all the things I can’t do.
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I like this system in theory, but it doesn’t really give you that many more options for how to approach the world. You can then either choose to greet a person, antagonize them, or shoot them. One of its most impressive features is that you can lock onto living things without pulling your gun out on them. Interactions with animals and people are a major source of player choice in Red Dead Redemption 2. Red Dead gives you more options than ever, and yet it is also constantly stifling me. This is especially noticeable when it comes to player choice. The paradox of choiceĪnd you see the realism breakdown constantly. But the issue is that it doesn’t even accomplish the thing that Rockstar thinks it accomplishes. To be clear, my problem here isn’t that searching through things is boring. I think that’s why something like Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey doesn’t even try to animate a lot of those kinds of actions. The problem is that the more animations you add to a character, the more I’m going to notice when it doesn’t match up with my experience. I’m going to tear the drawers out and mess them up looking for anything valuable. If I were looting some shack in the middle of the mountains after killing a bunch of rival gang members, I’m not going to slowly hold up a pack of cigarettes like it’s some precious possession. When I search for my keys or something, it’s a messy process where I move things around haphazardly with two hands. But as the person controlling Morgan, none of this feels lifelike to me. Morgan does not seem like some stiff robot like in a lot of other games. I get what Rockstar is going for with this. It is a painfully laborious process, but worse - it’s not how I look through drawers.
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I’m enjoying Red Dead Redemption 2 (so is Dean, who wrote our review), but it’s also frequently disappointing. I think it is the best game the developer has ever made, but it accomplishes that because it is also the “most game” Rockstar has ever made. It builds on top Rockstar’s foundation, but it does nothing to shake up or question those underlying elements. Red Dead Redemption 2 is the biggest example of the old way of building video games. Interested in learning what's next for the gaming industry? Join gaming executives to discuss emerging parts of the industry this October at GamesBeat Summit Next.