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How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2
- cletus 8y agoLots of respect for Rockstar but... Add FL I alone on that I thought GTAV was at best soulless and at worst terrible. I almost stopped playing when Trevor became available. Whereas GTA4 was genuine satire (Republican space rangers anyone?) the sequel had poor characters and I honestly have never gone back to it since finishing the main storyline, the first time this was true in the series. Anyway RDR2 Looks amazing. I bought an Xbox just to play it. Who knows how long it'll take to get to PC but I'll buy it again when it does.
- mercer 8y agoI quite liked GTA4 but just couldn't get into 5, in part for the reasons you mention. RDR2 on the other hand comes close to giving me the enjoyment that RDR gave me (and surpasses it in some ways).
- culot 8y agoI don't think the last one ever made it to PC, I assumed this one also would never get there.
- giobox 8y agoWhile it’s true RDR 1 never made it to PC, with GTA V rockstar invested a lot optimising their tech stack for PC - it’s a huge leap in quality over the pretty poor port of GTA IV. GTA V’s PC port was also financially an enormous success, it cemented a place in Steams top seller list for years thanks to the success of GTA Online. Couple this with the leaked RDR 2 PC developer job titles that have been discovered via oversharing Rockstar employees on LinkedIn, I think there is a good chance RDR2 follows the GTA V release model and a PC version hits 12-18 months after console release. I bet a significant number of gamers ended up buying GTA V twice at full price thanks to the staggered release schedule last time (I and many friends certainly did), I’d not be surprised at all if this factors in their decisions.
- cjf4 8y agoThe story in that game was an awful pastiche of 90s era action movies. No nuance or depth to any of the characters.
- onlyfortoday2 8y agotoo bad the game is not good, mundane and boring :(
- bitwize 8y agoAre you kidding me? My sister just about lost her boyfriend to that game.
- onlyfortoday2 8y agonope. poor mission structure, boring characters, annoying controls rockstar have not really implemented anything new with this game that was not in the first game. it looks great tho!
- aphextron 8y agoTo each his own I guess, but it’s being universally acknowledged as GOTY.
- onlyfortoday2 8y agoits the gaming press lol i wouldn't trust them as far as i could throw them
- ekianjo 8y ago> being universally acknowledged as GOTY. ... by the gaming press who is well known to sleep with big publishers. RDR2 may be very good but I would anyway focus on what actual gamers say, and stay away from game journalists' recommendations.
- parabx 8y agoI am a gamer, I've played the game and loved it. Different people, different opinions
- haberman 8y ago
- tkiley 8y agoI haven't played a big-budget game in years, but I decided to give RDR2 a try, specifically because reviewers described it as slow and boring. I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride. On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other hand, it revives the sense of wonder that I haven't felt since I learned to treat games as something to win rather than something to get lost in.
- abledon 8y agoI feel the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of single player games ... it’s like I gotta have a multiplayer competitive at all times , if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears , Meh who cares not fun haha
- ajmurmann 8y agoThat is a shocking statement. You are there to hear the tree falling in the forest. Are you saying that your reason of playing video games is to get acknowledgement from others? I find this shocking because it's incredibly in line with discussions and articles that claim that a large portion of younger men had been deprived by society from getting a sense of belonging and accomplishment and is now using video games as a bandaid for that.
- rabbitonrails 8y agoDeep breaths. monkaS
- nullstyle 8y agoThis is a unfortunate statement, as there are many reasons to game. I'm guessing you havent really spent much time gaming. For me, the most important part of gaming for me is sharing time with my far-flung-friends. We're not watching a tree fall, we're building a campfire together. Sharing GTA5's space with 7 friends is much better than a group video call with the same crowd, for example. Acknowledgment from others doesn't even rank on the list of reasons why I game.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- empath75 8y agoI’m sort of ambivalent about the game and it’s largely because I have two young kids at home and have maybe an hour at a time to play and the amount of what I would call ‘empty’ time in the game really stands out. There have been times where I’ve done all the work I need to do to get some unbroken alone time, spent 40 minutes playing and gotten absolute nothing accomplished which really sucks given that it might be the only time I could play that week. I get that it’s atmospheric but as a dad game it just sucks. I’d like to be able to load the game and play through a couple of missions quickly without all the faffing about brushing my horse and crafting and hunting and what not. Basically my life is full of enough chores that I don’t need games that simulate doing more chores.
- dweekly 8y agoRequest for service: Dad Game Reviews. Games that are fun to play and more engaging than the mindless idlers and puzzles that are out there today but support meaningful episodes of 30-40 minutes.
- culot 8y agoSite name idea: Dadgum Gaming
- Sylos 8y agoThe entire genre of roguelikes might fit that. Because they generally have this permadeath mechanic, every step in the game is meaningful to not losing, and the game developers are also kind of forced to make every part of the game fun and not too tedious or superfluous, as you'll generally replay them many times. I currently quite enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which you will need a free afternoon to get into, but after that, you can even have meaningful episodes of 5 minutes. You're not gonna complete a run in 5 minutes, that's rather gonna take 8 hours (though the world record is at less than 30 minutes), but you can load up the game, play a few hundred turns and then save and quit easily in that time. http://crawl.develz.org/ http://crawl.develz.org/
- sosborn 8y agoI think Wired used to have a column like that.
- pier25 8y agoJust today I started playing it, and it's really impressive. It's like being in a Cormac McCarty novel. I imagine the pacing, realism, and atmosphere is not for everyone, but if it is your cup of tea this is (so far) a masterpiece in single player gaming.
- monochromatic 8y agoI see it as more like being in Westworld.
- pier25 8y agoGood point!
- onlyfortoday2 8y ago"a masterpiece in single player gaming." why?
- pier25 8y agoEvery aspect of the game is gloriously hand crafted. Writing, graphics, sound, etc. But I think what makes RDR2 unique is that it really transports you to a particular point of space and time through the eyes of a character. Visually it's very cinematic, but I feel it's much closer to literature in the way it immerses you into the world, the characters, and the conflicts. Personally, I've never seen a game with this focus and this level of scope and quality.
- corysama 8y agoIf you like this, you can find more at https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMakingOfGames/
- cpeterso 8y agoGDC posts videos of game postmortem presentations from the games' developers, including classic games like Bard's Tale and Another World: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0xiYb8_P_cTAr https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0...
- kordlessagain 8y agoI used a video's frames of myself playing RDR2 to train a neural network. I then showed it a photo my son took of some cows at the in-law's place. Here's what happened: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sDTofashQdDSUJMdA https://photos.app.goo.gl/sDTofashQdDSUJMdA The network was trained with https://nanonets.com https://nanonets.com, if anyone is interested. Interesting stuff, given the knowledge came from synthesized horses. I did not train or segment any other entities other than Arthur and his horse. Labels were 'horse' and 'human'.
- e_proxus 8y agoThere are cows in the game too. Did you use those in your training set?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoRDR2 starts out almost as an anti-game, then progresses through a phase that feels like a stereotype of old westerns. I think it jerks you between the two extremes to set up the second half of the game, which involves much more drama, racial overtones, and more examination of the death of outlaw life that the game’s promise is built on. There are two main criticisms to me. (1) the dialogue is very cheesy and superficial too often when it would be better to just not have it at all. More segments of deep sparsity, even when other characters are around you (think Shadow of the Collossus) would make it even more desolate and impactful. (2) The mechanics of the controls and indicated special instructions are sometimes clunky to the point that you fail missions or miss out on things accidentally just due to the control system. I know this will never be perfect, but it is frequently so bad in RDR2 that you are very aware of it and frustrated by it as you complete tasks. Despite this, it’s easily one of the best games I’ve ever played on multiple dimensions. It makes me very excited for Death Stranding as well, which I think will be something of a sci-fi / dystopian variation of what RDR2 is.
- onlyfortoday2 8y agowhat exactly makes it one of the best games you have ever played?
- mlthoughts2018 8y agoSeveral things. The scale of technical achievement is by far more impressive than anything that came before. Metal Gear Solid 5 might be the closest thing in terms of open world technology, but RDR2 is far superior to it. The anti-game aspects create a very different dramatic experience than most games. Sometimes you just ride along with another character and do nothing but observe what happens. Other times your plans get derailed in an Inception sort of way and you end up halfway acrosd the map doing something you never intended, none of which has anything to do with the story. This happens in ways that are much more organic and natural than previous similar mechanisms in e.g. GTA games. The story deals with a lot of themes that have more impact because of coming across them in an open world (stumbling into KKK meetings, seeing lynched bodies hanging in swamplands, tracking down a gang that tortures animals, finding evidence of families split by slave trade, and many more). The main story is compelling and well crafted, but the fuller picture from the pastiche of stuff in the world makes it feel effective, and the scenes of blood-thirsty wild west action feel more like uncommon punctuation marks than important aspects of the plot.
- shocks 8y agoThe game is good but the controls are so bad it's comical. Don't try and get on your horse if someone is standing near it because triangle is also "get into a fight with that person". You can back out of the fight, but not with the circle button (which is so often the "go back" button) - this time circle is the punch button! Basically the core game loop is: move a bit, look in the bottom right to see if you can press some buttons to do a thing, do a thing or move a bit more.