red dad redmepiton has some cool gunplay in it but like what else? nothing
ok so the problem with open world games being a lack of things to do, r* decided to put lots of random scenarios in rdr. that’s cool. but they weren’t really random because there are only like 10 of them and this is a game you’re supposed to play for like 20 goddam hours. so you’ll be wandering around on your horse and suddenly a guy will come up and say mr, i need a ride. and you’ve encountered this same situation 5 times before and you know he’s a horse thief, he’s always been and this encounter will never pan out any differently than him knocking you off the horse and riding away.
so this unarmed guy comes up to you and says mr, i need a ride. you calmly pull out your pistol and shoot him in the head. marston’s eyes glaze over with the pallid realization of the incredible disparity of force he has just used but it passes as you command him to sidle down off the steed and rummage through the pockets of the man he just murdered for like, five bucks.
and this is how all the encounters work eventually. see a lady asking for help by a wagon? shoot her in the head. see five cowboys riding in line formation? enter slowmo and shoot all of their heads. that’s it folks.
i guess i just wish the world was actually dynamic, rather than faking it with predefined encounters. none of the npcs are actually interesting. they have a lot of animations for walking around doing stuff in town but nobody actually has a personality or whatever, or even an interesting job. you are the only person who will ever take a bounty. you are the only person who will ever break a horse, or steal one outside of an encounter. you are the only one who will rob anybody at gunpoint. in fact, you’re the only one who will start a fight. the drunks in the saloon will always be there. the hunters will never stop hunting, never even return to town. the riders on the trail will never reach a destination. you are the only one making or spending money in the entire world. you are the only one doing anything for any actual reason. this is not a dynamic world. there is no autonomy. so you’re left having to turn to a handful of boring minigames for entertainment.
the only cool minigame is bounty hunting. but even that sucks because you’re plagued by bad guys spawning in the entire way back to town. which would actually be pretty cool except their horses move incredibly fast to catch up with you so it feels like you’re playing a bad racing game where the ai cheats; aka, all of them
speaking of bad racing games with cheating ai, horseracing fucking sucks because there’s no real skill involved in pointing a horse forward, so it becomes an exercise in rhythmic button mashing (hot?). wagon racing blows because tipping the wagon is easier than finding insecurities at champlain college. why do games do this? why would I want to race horses in rdedead redemtipon, a game about wild west bandits? fuck races. i bought this game to kill people with revolvers and period accurate weaponry, and possibly the laser-like precision of the protagonist’s thousand-yard stare. too bad the protagonist dies at the end and you have to play his effeminate son, basically the raiden of this game. at that point i wished there was a button to shoot myself. irl
