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Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game
- ilamont 8y agoI think this is pretty neat, not just that so many species are featured but some of the other natural behaviors (e.g. fox and turkey vultures feeding on just-shot mallard carcass) are replicated. Showed the article to my teen son, a big RDR2 fan, who was less impressed, calling it "sad" that someone would play a birder in that world. YMMV.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pavel_lishin 8y agoI wonder what he would think of the World of Warcraft panda pacifist: https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcrafts-pacifist-panda-has-reached-level-120-by-only-picking-flowers/ https://www.pcgamer.com/world-of-warcrafts-pacifist-panda-ha...
- schreiaj 8y agoCoupling those natural behaviors with the games audio cues let me hunt specific animals by listening more than walking. I didn’t think it would work but it seemed to.
- smadge 8y agoPlaying as a birder was definitely an option by design. There are in game achievements for spotting through your binoculars and “studying” each species of animal. It is not even out of character of Arthur Morgan, who often draws landscapes and wildlife in his notebook.
- tomc1985 8y agoEh, they are still in that "everything adults do is lame" stage. Just watch, he/she'll pick up knitting or something in 10 years
- hownottowrite 8y agoThe RDR2 environment is an amazing horseback camping simulator. Fishing, hunting, beautiful vistas... bliss
- techopoly 8y agoSide question, do you think there's a market for this sort of game? Outdoor simulator I suppose?
- chapium 8y agoHonestly, if VR improves its immmersion VR horseback rides could be quite therapeutic for the right individuals.
- shittyadmin 8y agoThere's definitely survival games in this vein that have done quite well, The Long Dark is probably one of the better ones. Quite playable before they even had the story for this kind of thing.
- jcl 8y agoReminds me a bit of Jeff Vogel's blog post about the first Red Dead Redemption: "What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild horses, capture and tame wild horses, and make one of those horses your new horse." http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-dead-redemption-and-my-failures-as.html http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-dead-redemption-a...
- Buttons840 8y agoRockstar should consider breaking their games down into sub games. They could build a G rated game about caring for wild horses and sell it for kids; they'd only have to remove content. In the full RDR2 game my daughter might have fun caring for horses, but she might also witness a random murder, pick up new words I'd rather her not repeat, witness a rape, who knows. I haven't actually played RDR2 but all of those thing seem like possibilities in a Rockstar game.
- spork12 8y agoThis guy is playing it all wrong. You're supposed to be out there robbin and killin.
- pnathan 8y agoThis kind of tiny piece by piece interaction with the world is something I desired in the late 90s, dreaming as a teen, but my rudimentary O(n) skills showed me was beyond the computers of the time. It's gorgeous & I love the potential that brims here. What if something was this complex and well built, but the storyline was removed - the player simply builds their own story, ala DF Adventurer mode.
- headcanon 8y agoI'm sure we'll get there eventually, its just much more difficult to write for. Even in Westworld, the interactions were semi-scripted, with packaged "quests" along the way. Some games come close though, the Witcher 3 includes choice-based gameplay with real consequences that last thoughout the game. However the developers still had to explicitly write each scenario as it unfolded.
- barrkel 8y agoDeus Ex had choices with real consequences lasting throughout the game too, fwiw.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoThe entire Deus Ex series is excellent. Well, there was "Invisible War" I suppose, but we don't talk about that one.
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- narrator 8y agoKind of a boring dystopia we have here. People enjoying the great outdoors from their climate controlled bedrooms. Good thing they only kept the cute animals in the game and not the mosquitos or black flies.
- pavel_lishin 8y agoBack in my day, we had to enjoy the great outdoors uphill both ways!
- thisismyusernam 8y agoBack when I was a lad, we used to get up before we'd gone to bed to go down the mines!
- UweSchmidt 8y agoWe did. People used to spend more time outside, more time walking. Older novels seem to mention animals and plants modern people wouldn't recognize. And of course there just existed more nature. We are destroying our environment and are losing many species. It's getting harder and harder to just enjoy a carefree joke about it...
- neuronic 8y agoI often think a lot about this, incidentally when taking long walks when not playing video games in my free time, and continue to arrive at the same conclusion: humans are merely evolution's self-brewed extinction event. A couple of severely consequential, yet random mutations led to an overtly destructive species. Keep in mind that evolution is just the name for the mechanism that allows DNA to continue self-preservation by means of replication and recombination, allowing it to persevere in altering conditions. So in a (sad?) way it is merely natural that many species die off as a consequence of our actions, as it was when the Permian-Triassic extinction hit. After all they are the result of our biology. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try everything to prevent extinctions and counter-act climate change. We do know that permanent loss of life is absolutely a possibility on this planet. While we might cause Earth to become more akin to Venus with our behaviour, the apparent evolutionary disaster might also pay off for DNA by allowing it to become interplanetary.
- gcbw2 8y agoThis sounds great for replayability... but does that even matter now that digital copy auth servers will be long gone before you want to?
- mirimir 8y agoFunny. John James Audubon, working in the early 1820s, didn't have a camera. So he shot lots of birds.[0] 0) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/John_James_Audubon_1826.jpg/315px-John_James_Audubon_1826.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Jo... Edit: Oops. Make that 1820s, not 1920s.
- sn41 8y agoPassenger pigeons were still around in the 1890s, weren't they? Is their omission deliberate since their range seems to have been east of the Rockies?
- thousandautumns 8y agoI believe the entirety of the game is set in a fictional equivalent of east of the Rockies, so I doubt it.
- Zimahl 8y agoThere's really not much equivalence to anywhere, other than the different biomes resemble ones you'd see in the US (outside of a side mission to Guarma, a fictional island near Cuba). There's a swamp area similar to Louisiana with a delta city called Saint Denis (pronounced San Da Knee). To the West (yes, West) of that is the 'southern' town of Rhodes with plantations and antebellum houses. Nearby is a former Civil War battlefield. Further west is the typical wild west frontier, with the nothern areas being colder and mountainous down to the more southern areas being grass and desert plains. In game there is talk about real places (like New York, Cuba, Tahiti) but there is little context to where those are in respect to where the player is.
- eire1130 8y agoin 1899, probably the only place you could see a passenger pigeon would have been the Cincinnati Zoo. They were extinct in the wild by 1895. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon