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Red Dead Redemption 2
Dec. 25th, 2020 08:49 amI love Red Dead Redemption and have been excited about trying RDR2 since it came out in 2018. It was on sale a couple days ago, so I finally bought it.
The world is immense, and so full of things to do! Creatures to study and track, plants to locate, fish to catch, legendary animals to hunt. The collector in me could be very happy spending hours finding all these things to fill in the entries in the in-game compendium.
The graphics are gorgeous! Whether riding through the rocky landscape or playing poker at a makeshift telegraph wire spool-turned-table, the detail of everything is amazing. I want so much to spend the approximately 77 hours it takes to do all the primary story content and extras in the game.
But I can't. The character I'm playing is simply not someone I can enjoy being. I've only played a couple hours and have had to kill guards on a train my gang is robbing and threaten two different witnesses to what I did with death. The next work I'm supposed to do for my gang is to find three people who've borrowed money from our loan shark and extract it from them. On top of that, I went into a bar where a friend was talking to some women, probably sex workers. Without confirmation (or choice on my part) I asked one of them "So how much do you cost?"
I confirmed last night via reviews that, while you can do your best to make honorable choices and refrain from killing innocent people unnecessarily, this kind of horribleness is an inescapable part of the game's story.
I was trying to think last night of something in my life to analogize this experience to and I remembered starting to read "Lord Foul's Bane," the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. The books are held in high regard by critics and readers alike and represent a vast, immersive world to be lost in for scores of hours. Shortly into the first book, I read the scene wherein the protagonist rapes someone and I gave up. I just couldn't keep going and enjoy what I was reading.
I feel like that with RDR2. There's so much amazing content there that I *know* I could happy spent many hours losing myself in. But not as that character. That I can't do. The protagonist of the first RDR was a former gang member (who is actually in your gang in RDR2 - it's a prequel), but while the moral choices for him to make are often complex and the world is often a dark one, I could make choices that left me feeling like I was genuinely doing my best to be a good person. I think that's mandatory in my escapist fiction. Because it's not an option in RDR2, I just can't enjoy it.
I'm going to see if we can return it.
The world is immense, and so full of things to do! Creatures to study and track, plants to locate, fish to catch, legendary animals to hunt. The collector in me could be very happy spending hours finding all these things to fill in the entries in the in-game compendium.
The graphics are gorgeous! Whether riding through the rocky landscape or playing poker at a makeshift telegraph wire spool-turned-table, the detail of everything is amazing. I want so much to spend the approximately 77 hours it takes to do all the primary story content and extras in the game.
But I can't. The character I'm playing is simply not someone I can enjoy being. I've only played a couple hours and have had to kill guards on a train my gang is robbing and threaten two different witnesses to what I did with death. The next work I'm supposed to do for my gang is to find three people who've borrowed money from our loan shark and extract it from them. On top of that, I went into a bar where a friend was talking to some women, probably sex workers. Without confirmation (or choice on my part) I asked one of them "So how much do you cost?"
I confirmed last night via reviews that, while you can do your best to make honorable choices and refrain from killing innocent people unnecessarily, this kind of horribleness is an inescapable part of the game's story.
I was trying to think last night of something in my life to analogize this experience to and I remembered starting to read "Lord Foul's Bane," the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series. The books are held in high regard by critics and readers alike and represent a vast, immersive world to be lost in for scores of hours. Shortly into the first book, I read the scene wherein the protagonist rapes someone and I gave up. I just couldn't keep going and enjoy what I was reading.
I feel like that with RDR2. There's so much amazing content there that I *know* I could happy spent many hours losing myself in. But not as that character. That I can't do. The protagonist of the first RDR was a former gang member (who is actually in your gang in RDR2 - it's a prequel), but while the moral choices for him to make are often complex and the world is often a dark one, I could make choices that left me feeling like I was genuinely doing my best to be a good person. I think that's mandatory in my escapist fiction. Because it's not an option in RDR2, I just can't enjoy it.
I'm going to see if we can return it.
