The Bumpy Road to Redemption

As Mr. Hollis-Lima said in his previous post, Red Dead Redemption is a fine game. I've spent far too much time playing it this week, and I have no doubt that I shall devote just as many hours to it next week. And yet Red Dead, despite its six-year development, doesn't feel quite so polished as I might have hoped. It's a great achievement for Rockstar, but I can't help but feel it should have been greater.

Red Dead Redemption takes place in somewhere in the Generic West in 1911. There are trains and telegraphs and occasional automobiles, but lives still come very cheap. I suppose that Rockstar wanted to tell a story about the end of the West, which is fine, but the Red Dead world seems too violent to be believable for 1911. Videogames always exaggerate, but this, to me, takes suspension of disbelief a tad too far. Aside from this, the game's worldbuilding is mostly sound, something of a surprise after the maddeningly poor open sequence, where Our Hero rides the train to the town of Armadillo and listens in on some of the most hackneyed, tedious, and implausible conversations ever committed to Blu-Ray. There's a satirical intent – one of the speakers may even discuss Manifest Destiny – but the complete lack of subtlety bodes ill for the remainder of the game. The writing does improve, but never enough to make one forget that ill-starred sequence.

While the West of Red Dead Redemption does offer many peaceful pursuits such as horseshoes, poker, drinking, herding, horse-breaking, and exploration, sooner or later the guns will come out. When they do, many players will be disappointed. There's a cover system, but it's awkward. There's no separate button for hand-to-hand combat, making non-lethal methods very difficult. There's a bullet time mode called "Dead Eye" that's a lot of fun to use, but it makes fights far too easy. Finally, there's very little to remind players that their weapons come from a different era. The guns aren't terribly distinct from those in games set a hundred years later; they just fire a tad slower. And perhaps because one sees the game from over Marston's shoulder, these virtual weapons lack the virtual heft that might make them memorable. I suppose they recoil, but I never notice it. I'm too far removed from the action to see.

Violence in Red Dead Redemption is fast, common, and not terribly effecting. The game borrows its aesthetics from films like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Unforgiven, but the great Western directors knew how to give their gunfights suspense and significance. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance may be an epic, but there's a grand total of one killing in the entire movie. Or consider the opening to Once Upon a Time in the West: We know to expect killing, but Leone brilliantly draws out the suspense with seeming inconsequential details like the dripping of water or a fly's buzzing. In Rockstar's game instant gratification rules. Perhaps it's a weakness of the medium?

Another problem is the game's save system. There's an auto-save system, and usually a manual save point is only a minute or two away, and, in the wild, players can even strike up a campsite to serve their saving needs. Unfortunately, Red Dead Redemption stops being player-friendly the moment the state puts a price on John Marston's head. Fugitives cannot save in their usual "home" areas, nor can they set up camps. You can't save the game until the bounty is paid or the crime is pardoned. Unfortunately, it's very easy to accidentally commit a crime: the harsh Western climate breeds despair; policemen and civilians have the regrettable habit of throwing themselves between your gun and your target.

Once I lost half an hour of progress because I died without saving, on my way to pay my "debt to society." Cause of death? A glitch that threw my character hundreds of feet into the air. The game celebrated my eventual return to Earth with a display of ragdoll physics and the game over screen. I was not happy. Though Red Dead Redemption usually works very well, it has far more glitches and technical infelicities than most games with $100 million development tags. There's a good deal of clipping, some pop-in, and the occasional freeze. At least I haven't run into the infamous magic carts yet.

Red Dead Redemption is at least a very good game; it may well be a great one. Like Mr. Hollis-Lima, I look forward to playing more of it. I just wish the game had a little more polish, a little more subtlety, and far fewer glitches.

Taming the Open World

Grand Theft Auto IV was a great game, but it had its problems. Most notably, it suffered from a crippling discordance between its gameplay and its story. Merely a few hours into Red Dead Redemption, I already feel as though it is shaping up to be a considerable improvement over its spiritual predecessor. Red Dead has an advantage over Grand Theft Auto: cowboys are so very cool, and that type of cool has largely gone untapped by video games. Rockstar has captured every conceivable nuance of that cool in this game, but the genre's effect on the overall experience of the game runs far deeper than most will probably realize. Red Dead is thoughtfully designed to portray the Wild West with true complexity, neither allowing any of its facets to obscure its blemishes nor mute them. While capturing the cool of being a cowboy is one of this game's strong points, the way the game captures the ugliness may just prove to be its most enduring achievement.

Capturing that cool is no small achievement, and Rockstar finds it in the details. If the player taps the up button on the directional pad, the protagonist, John Marston, whistles. No matter where he is, this results in his horse running into the area. It is a great feature from a gameplay standpoint; hijacking as a means of transportation, the go-to in Grand Theft Auto, would be rather difficult in an open desert. (Also, Marston is trying to go straight, gorram it.) Far and away the best part of this feature, however, is how it allows Marston to get a running start and, without ever missing a step, hop onto the horse the moment it comes running up alongside him. Once I discovered this stunt, I never began my travels any other way. It is just too freaking cool to not do. Galloping along a path, at full speed, into the sunset is such a thrill that I look back at Grand Theft Auto and scoff; there is no way that playing as a city-dweller could capture this feeling. It also helps that the few miles of land I have seen thus far are so visually impressive. Day, night, dusk, dawn, cloudy or clear – it is all beautiful. Details like the crystal-clear stars in a sky devoid of light pollution or, yes, even the lone tumbleweed puttering through a quiet town all draw the player into Marston's world.

This nuanced design extends to a careful control of Red Dead's tone as the player traverses its world. Nothing detracted more from Grand Theft Auto IV's story than a lack of such control. The streets were crowded with caricatures of modern Americans and with cars that bounced around the roads like pinballs. It was virtually impossible to prevent the protagonist from plowing down a crowd of fat morons, one of whom would then scream, "Cheesy vagina!" and squander all of a given mission's dramatic weight. It was amusing in a way, but it clashed with the game's very grounded narrative about a man seeking absolution for his dark past. There are no such problems in Red Dead Redemption. The game's satirical streak is woven much more subtly into the experience, and far more importantly, the game design does not force the player to behave in a way that disrupts its own main character's redemption arc. John Marston has an unseemly past, but he is trying to do better. Even at his worst, he has never been in it for cheap, violent thrills, and this game ensures that the player will most likely feel the same way. There are few pedestrians to run over on horseback and, if the player does manage to find one to trample, there is little comedic value to it.

The fact that Marston's morality extends beyond the game's core storyline to pervade the entire experience means that said storyline has exponentially more impact. When something disturbing happens within a mission, the player is actually driven to feel the emotion because the event is not buried in an experience full of whimsical, lighthearted sadism. Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City was full of obnoxious, self-absorbed jerks, but none of them perpetrated anything approaching the level of destruction that the player invariably did. Here, Marston only sullies his hands if the player truly wants him to. Consequently even the most sadistic player likely won't be completely numb to witnessing the spectacle of, say, a stickup ending with a shopkeeper getting shot point-blank. The player has not been complicit in a multitude of equally cruel acts, so the events are thrown into relief, and the violence carries weight.

One such instance of violence came when I witnessed a drunk man attempting to rape a woman outside of a saloon. My reaction was to draw my pistol and shoot the man. It not only left me with a strong feeling of righteousness but also the much deeper sensation that I was part of a believable moral landscape. Regardless of whether I had shot the man or simply walked away, my actions would have fit the scale of the game's narrative; it would not have been a bout of cartoonish sociopathy that the game would later have to forget in order to progress the plot. This consistency leads to a more immersive experience than the tonal whiplash caused by Grand Theft Auto's gameplay.

There is a tremendous amount of technical skill evident throughout Red Dead Redemption's world, and it leads Rockstar to the rare achievement of doing justice to the western genre in a video game. The game's careful modulation of tone and morality, however, represents an even greater achievement: Rockstar has elevated the medium of the open-world game.