T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m the gamer who plays certain titles to death, multiple replays exploring every option. While this makes sure I squeeze every ounce of enjoyment for every dollar I spend, it also means I miss a lot of games. Last month PS ran a sale on old titles (probably to increase digital sales do they can justify banning hardcopies) and I finally got around to buying Red Dead Redemption. I’ve been hearing about it for 16 years, so I figured I should get around to it.
I was unimpressed.
I really tried hard to judge it compared to the games of its era (Fallout 3, New Vegas, GTAIV, ACII). Even against its contemporary peers it seems, well…. kinda boring.
The main story arc, John Marston trying to escape a life he never really chose and become something better, is a classic Hollywood redemption story. It’s well written and includes the top-notch voice acting we all expect from Rockstar. It’s not a particularly unique or a fresh concept, but it is an engaging tragedy. The foundation is solid. That’s not the problem.
The game is deliberately slow. The first few hours are “ride horse, talk to ranchers, herd cattle.” Which is great if forcing future cheeseburgers into a coral is your idea of a fun Thursday night. I’m sure they had their reasons for the slow pacing, it’s a deliberate break from the usual dynamic of starting an RPG; action, drama and grabbing your attention immediately. I kept waiting for the hook and it never came.
It didn’t help that while the tutorials for herding cattle and riding a horse were exhaustive, the explanation for how to win a duel was brief. There’s no feedback, so I lost every duel until I got pissed, went into online help guides to figure out what I was doing wrong.
I thought the hunting would be interesting…. until I got mauled by a grizzly or cougar for the 5th time. I kept thinking I was doing something wrong, was missing a key detail. Like with the gun duels. Nope, sometimes apex predators just teleport in behind you, murder your horse and kill you before you can get off the ground.
(Side note: the very first animal I shot and skinned was a jackalope. I didn’t realize this was a special thing until later.)
I kept hunting, eventually figuring out the spawn rate and how to handle the magic teleporting murder bears. I collected wolf hearts and boar tusks and cougar claws and deer guts and rabbit teeth and beaver toes and whatever the hell else. All this stuff has to be useful at some point….. Right?
Actually, no. Just for money.
I wound up with a few hundred feathers. Vultures and hawks and eagles and crows and owls. I was sure at some point there would be a reason.
Actually, no. Just for money.
Don’t even get me started on the flowers. I spent hours roaming the deserts and forests picking these damn things expecting there to be a point where they became useful. I mean, there has to be a reason….RIGHT?!?!
Nope. Just more money.
30 years of playing RPGs taught me all this stuff had to have utility at some point. I don’t know who thought a western RPG would be improved by picking flowers, but this guy needs dealt with. It’s probably just to add game hours collecting… stuff.
Boss: “Alright guys, we’re still only at 60 hours. We need to get to 75 hours to justify the price point. I need ideas.”
Lackey #1: “Whorehouses?”
Boss: “Nah, to GTA.”
Lackey#2: “Gun mods?”
Boss: “Ehhh no, to FPS-ish”
Lackey#3: “Base building?”
Boss: “Meh…to complicated.”
Lackey#4: “umm… Flowers?”
“I LOVE IT!”
Maybe they felt like botanists were an under-represented demographic in AAA game titles. Or maybe they were just desperate for content and couldn’t figure what else they could add to their study of muted brown landscapes. All the side quests were disconnected; each task is it’s own closed loop.
Go hunting, earn money, possibly get mauled by a spontaneously emerging grizzly.
Pick flowers, earn money.
Hunt bounties, earn money.
Gamble, earn money.
What is there to do with that money? As it turns out, not a whole lot.
You could get a new outfit, that’s a slightly different shade of brown than the one you’re already wearing, that grants a slight perk to accomplish one of the meaningless tasks faster. Doing well at gambling gets you an outfit that allows you to cheat at gambling. Picking lots of flowers earns a perk to pick flowers more efficiently. Tragically there is no outfit to prevent a grizzly bear from appearing behind you right after you get done skinning the last one that jumped out from behind a patch of grass.
You can earn a ton of cash and buy a horse. Forget the fact that there’s free horses roaming around all over the damn place, or that you could just shoot the guy riding by, steal his horse, ride to the train station and pay a $20 fine. Nah… spend a few hours collecting 400 flowers, earn $1500 and buy a horse. That’s pretty much the same as any other horse and will get killed 10 minutes later by a grizzly.
The side quests had no purpose, which means they really aren’t quests at all. Why not let players choose what kind of feather is in their hat? Without purpose collecting feathers feels less like collecting and more like ritualistic bird murder.
Why not allow flowers to dye certain elements of outfits? Instead of a red scarf, now its green. Or blue. This is my version of John Marston. My John Marston wears a blue tie. My John Marston’s poncho is orange. These were basic gameplay concepts that were missing, even by 2010 standards. Give players some kind of agency.
In AC: Brotherhood Ezio collected goofy things like shrunken heads and ambergris, but they helped craft new weapons, rebuild Monteriggioni, unlock unique armor or train more recruits to do more complex missions.
GTA: San Andreas had graffiti tags, horseshoes, stealing special cars, secret jumps and oysters. But these had effect, they mattered. Oysters made dating easier and improved swimming, which was important for some missions. Tags made your gang stronger. Money was important because there were things you had to buy to progress in the main story arc. Clothes, haircuts, tattoos, car modifications and helicopters. Money mattered, collecting mattered. Which made the flowers and feathers in RDR so weird because Rockstar already showed they knew how to weave collecting objects into core gameplay.
It took me 40 hours to realize what was bothering me. RDR doesn’t lack content, it lacks connectivity. The frontier is full of things to do, but no reason to do them. After killing my 78th bear (Literally. I finished the game with 82 bear assassinations. Which still doesn’t feel like enough) I wasn’t thinking about bears, but why Rockstar built so many systems that never seemed to matter to one another. Other than something for completionists and trophy whores to chase. I’m not so arrogant as to think they forgot how to make a video game. Pretty sure the folks at Rockstar know what they’re doing. So, this had to be a conscious decision to NOT connect these things. Had to be. I just don’t know why.
I’m guessing Rockstar wanted this game to be purely focused on the story? The atmosphere? The backdrop? Which, if they didn’t want the game to just become a treasure hunt, chasing feathers, pelts and boar tusks to make a bedazzled set of saddlebags, then why have them at all? If they don’t add anything to the narrative….. don’t add them.
I just never connected with it. It wasn’t the bears. Or the flowers. It wasn’t the painfully slow pace. It kept presenting me with things to do that seemed narratively ridiculous. Hunt and Gamble, or don’t. Be honorable. Or infamous. Track down every bounty possible, or not at all. None of it changed the world or the narrative in any meaningful way whatsoever. It didn’t make the ending more (or less) satisfying. Which all reminded me of a conversation I had with all the guys who were in the D&D saga that created this entire website:
What is an RPG? Do you want to Play a Role that has been written for you to inhabit? Or do you want to Play a Role that you have some agency over?
Bad and Wrong Music Lessons
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Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Hey guys! The images in this post have been subbed out and replaced by graphics created by our little ‘art department’. The AI here was entirely my fault, I failed to let Pat know that we 1. Have a little group of people volunteering to make graphics (myself included) whom are at his disposal. And, 2. We do not use AI on this site.
I was only made aware of the AI this morning and it took us several hours to create the graphics now here.
The ‘quality’ might be lower by some standards but it took human beings to make them and that is more important in our book. Regardless of your personal feelings about AI, good or bad, it will not be here. We take a great deal of time to create both our writing and graphics, and to have AI muddy the waters of that effort would be a disservice to both our graphic designers and writers. Sorry for this miscommunication and resulting graphics. and thank you all for being civil.
Thank you, I appreciate the change. Just wanted to let you know that clicking the second picture still links to the old AI version, in case you want to fix that.
That was my bad, I forgot to change a line of code. It’s fixed now.
Really appreciate the change. Thank y’all <3
I miss your writing, Bay!
Really really REALLY appreciate this!!
I’d rather have a defined story. I bogged down quite early in Balder’s Gate 3, and I think it’s because it felt like a middle management simulator. “Here’s a scenario of two people arguing, what will you decide in the moment with your limited information and toolset?”
But I mostly want to make numbers go up. I want more Clair Obscur. Or Disgaea. Too many numbers to even see anymore.
My definition is: It’s a video game with a fishing mini-game.
What about a fishing game with a character build mini-game?
I enjoyed the article (and feel much the same way about RDR 1 and 2!) but… that AI art is giving me psychosomatic pain.
There is a lot of low effort AI art out there these days, and I share your disdain for it… but I think the AI art in the article is well done. I didn’t have to guess who any of the characters were supposed to be.
All AI art is by definition “low effort.” The final result looking like the characters is not due to the prompter’s skill or effort. No effort was made to produce this, aside from entering a prompt and letting the plagiarism machine do all the work. Even cheap photoshop edits show more care and effort than this.
There is no such thing as AI art. This wasn’t an attempt to make “art”, it was an attempt to make a joke.
The most popular posts on this entire website are screen captures from a movie with text bubbles inserted. Those weren’t attempts to make cinema.
I get that everyone has personal feelings about AI. But the AI pictures aren’t the reason for the post. I’m not trying to sell anything, or pretending they are anything more than dry humor.
As far as I’m concerned, the joke landed.
You’ll probably still get criticism from anti-AI fundamentalists though.
I know what you’re going for, I appreciate the intent, and I know it’s just a silly off-hand joke; but I kinda miss the jank of having the characters photoshopped together like Shamus used to do.
*sigh*….. I miss him too. More than any of you. Believe me.
And I wish I could write and photoshop like he did. TBH just writing any of the posts I’ve made so far feels…. wrong. Insufficient. Not good enough. A cheap imitation.
This article about RDR? This was the 23rd revision. Took me 2 weeks. I’m not Shamus…..
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be an insensitive clod. I like the article, and for what it’s worth, even if I don’t know what the 23 revisions were like, we all are our own worst critics, as the saying goes.
Please keep writing.
I think you nailed the writing pretty good, so I agree keep at it!
But well. . . the only part that was off to me was how well the characters fit in the picture: I immediately went to “Wow, how did they even ‘shop that?” because I don’t hang around places that use generated images so it didn’t occur to me. I get that posts need images to break them up, and the joke was good (I’d prefer this over the repeated gifs used the in Supergirl post), but I agree that a bad Photoshop/GIMP edit would be just as good or better. There are online editors you can use to slap stuff together if you don’t want to install anything, I’m pretty sure the one I used before even had a simple enough tool to cut characters/objects/etc out of a picture (I can’t for the life of me figure out how to edge-detect and then fill an area with transparency ie: cut in GIMP, and am too stubborn to look up a tutorial), but I could see even just plain rectangular crops on a white background working.
Otoh, with further thought I can also see how this is an image that might want a closer level of detail, as the characters are meant to be conferring with each other about activities, so having them be obvious cutouts from different sources might detract from that. Following from there, my only criticism would be that the RDR guy needed more flowers in his arms, since the joke is flowers but reading left to right the flowers are just a small bunch that comes after the punchline, when having a huge armful spilling over would add a simultaneous visual element when it hits. I am also aware that coaxing those things into making a decent image can take a while on its own and the free versions have all sorts of limits on them, so you might have just been stuck with what you got. Comic paneling is also a skill that comes with time though.
Many people’s dislike of AI isn’t to do with whether it is art or disclosed as AI. Rather, for many it is about how much power AI uses to make these images, and how much real estate, drinking water and electronic hardware is used by the data centres that drive it, all while those things are getting costlier for everyone else.
For others it is about how it has essentially been trained via IP piracy, after the companies that are running them have been complaining for decades about games and music piracy.
And for yet others, it’s about how it’s existence as an easy go-to will pre-empt human artists from getting commissions, or even the motivation to learn the art in the first place.
AI in the form of chatbots are also being forced on people who never asked for it. Browsers and operating systems come with it built in now. Very few help lines still exist that don’t first (or only) try to foist an inflexible, clueless chatbot on the caller.
Even before you stated your lack of evil intent, I had assumed no harm was meant. Of course! But any use of AI will come with this baggage, just because of what it is.
I’m not an online guy. I don’t have tiktok or IG or SC. I quit twitter in 2012 when it stopped being fun. I quit FB 30 seconds after I got my first invitation to join a game. I was on Discord for about 5 minutes and remembered why I don’t do the social media thing. The upside is I’m not as angry as most people, the downside is I’m usually unaware of all the things that make everyone else so angry.
I was generally aware that some people kinda sorta have feelings about AI and music and maybe some other stuff…. but I truly had no idea people would have this kind of visceral reaction to something that (in my mind) ins’t that much different than re-using a meme template.
As for AI itself…. I’m 53. I’ve literally been hearing about how computers will replace us my entire life. They were saying the same things 160 ago during the rise of the industrial revolution, too. AI is a bit different, but yet not. In the 1980s, especially around Pittsburgh where we live, the rise of automation and technology hit pretty hard and there was a lot of resentment towards anything that had a microchip. Lots of people lost jobs and entire communities were wiped out. We struggled, adapted, pivoted, and Pittsburgh is now one of the places where technology is born. Go figure. Not only did all the inventions we created before not destroy humanity, we thrived because of it.
Humans are at the top of the food chain because we can adapt faster than anything above single cell organisms. We can live in Antarctica or a desert on the equator. We can eat almost anything. We figured out how to survive on the moon and miles deep in the ocean, and the next closest creature to us hasn’t even mastered fire. Adaptation is our superpower.
AI, like all our inventions beforehand, will cause us a lot of grief in the short term, but we will thrive. Its what we do. So…. I guess it doesn’t bother me as much. For the same reasons a IMAC or IBM didn’t bother me 40 years ago, the internet and online shopping didn’t bother me 25 years ago. But I understand now that it does bother everyone else, so I won’t be using that anymore.
This seems correct to me, with the caveat that AI *might* kill us all to make way for paperclip factories.
If it doesn’t do that then after a period of adjustment it will be a net plus.
I’ve got to say, not a fan of the AI art. Love having you on the site, Patrick, but the AI is bothering me.
I can enjoy either kind of RPG – a compelling narrative that’s largely (or even entirely) linear can be tons of fun to play, just to see how it unfolds. At the same time, a well-told story that feels like I have some real influence over how it plays out can be just as engaging.
The key is that it’s up front about which it is. A game that sells itself as full of “meaningful choice” but whose only real difference is the color of the lightshow at the end is fundamentally unsatisfying. I picked up RDR when it was free with PS+ ages ago and tried to play it for about an hour, before remembering I don’t really like westerns, so I never really got into it. But it sounds like it was of the “bait and switch” type.
Never played the first, but gave up on Red Dead Redemption 2 after about 10 hours for almost exactly the same reasons.
A role playing game is one by which the mechanics of the game by virtue of its being played, tell you about the character. You don’t have to be good at improv or have a pre-written novel to roleplay in DnD, and even the powergamers are roleplaying- they’re just roleplaying as hyper-competent adventurers with no life other than the next mission. Whether you charge in or act carefully, spending a spell on some triviality or keeping one back for a particular purpose, any mechanical expression, action or inaction, says what and who your character is. At least, for tabletop roleplaying games.
Video games have both a broader and narrower allowance for what you can do. With no live DM and player group, you’re interacting only with what has already been made which can only allow for so much. But you can also spend as long as you want considering your turn, or move within and inspect 3d spaces in ways far more natural and precise than talking back and forth with someone. Many games can be played as other types of games they were not intended as (see: challenge runs), but they are usually made to support a certain variety of playstyles, which are sometimes called out so specifically that trying to do anything else feels like a punishment. Most stealth games tend to make it extremely easy to sneak up on enemies and punish the player for not doing so, sometimes to the point that they’re actually puzzle games masquerading as something else (of course, so are hardcore combat games, or basically anything else turned far enough).
I’m not sure I’ve ever really got the “play a role given to you” concept. Yes, you hand an actor a set of lines and directions and they play the role, but usually you hear about the best performances being where the actor was so in tune with the character they started altering their lines and making stuff up- the role becomes theirs (as mentioned in recent thread). Sometimes you can tell an actor is trying but they’ve been given poor lines and direction, and I’m sure that means some performances are great because of the direction that we never see. Hand a premade character to someone for DnD and even though they didn’t create the character, how they play still tells a story, even or especially if they don’t know and you didn’t tell them how to play it (and whether people would consider it a ‘good’ story).
Video games are not movies, but many of them seem to act like movies, where the player’s performance has nothing to actually do with the movie. A story has been written, maybe with a couple of choices or paths, and the player alternates playing the game and watching cutscenes. This is neither playing a role that you have agency over, nor is it playing a role that has been written for you.
Other games have very little narrative at all, and people will take the results of the gameplay and read them as stories. Playing Darkest Dungeon 2 recently for example, I had a run where Dismas the Goddamn Hero just kept beating stress rolls and dragging the rest of the arguing children to victory- and I’m pretty sure the game reflected this, actually giving him bonuses that made this more likely to happen again in the future. Or another run I don’t recall the details of, but right after seeing more of a character’s backstory at a shrine they basically got the entire rest of the party killed (missing, failing stress rolls, etc), ending all alone actually saying “No! Anyone else but me!”- Indeed, you made sure they all died first, and now it’s just you left isn’t it? When playing a Darkest Dungeon title you, the omnipotent player of the entire party, your choices of which characters to favor in certain situations can be read as a story, as well as the series of random die rolls that govern the game. In this way it is far more of a roleplaying game than many “RPGs” where you alternate playing an unstoppable respawning murder-hobo that happens to have some level-up choices and then also watching some cutscenes.
What I want to play of course, is stuff that’s good. Games where you play a game between cutscenes can still use that gameplay to elevate the telling of the story in ways that a simple movie cannot, and can be good. Games where you are handed a character and then you play them however you want, can be good, as can games where you create a character. Games where a story emerges from the gameplay, and those where there’s really just a framing device and you’re here for skill stimulation, are good. In all cases you usually have to know what you’re trying to create and how to create it, but sometimes people accidentally create things they didn’t mean to which are better than they would have expected.
What I don’t want to play are slop simulators where the devs make a couple bad sandbox maps, dump everyone in to fight each other, and then charge infinite money for skins. (The new) Marathon’s vibes and tense stealth gameplay were good, but once I’d uncovered enough of the story and started playing in groups, I ran out of give a damn crushingly fast: the most effective way to do any quest is to just solo spam free kits until you get lucky, there’s no reason to fight people except that said people want to fight each other, etc. From what I’ve read it sounds like ARK added more and more actually level-designed content over time, but I tried getting into it with the first game and it’s just not a game, it’s a sandbox for people to fight each other in but with dinosaurs. But then, neither of those claimed to be Roleplaying Games. Everything has level-up screens nowadays, been that way for years (it’s literally in DOOM), but a few choices between this or that ability and number going up do not make something an RPG,
At the very basic level, an RPG for me has to involve some kind of mechanics where you can grow and develop your character’s powers and abilities. Sometimes/often this involves a well-structured and defined levelling system, but it doesn’t have to be. For example, the Deus Ex games don’t have XP or levels, but you can unlock and improve abilities as you use them or by finding upgrades, and this can drastically change the gameplay or your paths through the game. If the game meets this criteria, I would classify it as an RPG; the setting (fantasy, sci-fi, historical) or genre (real-time, turn-based, FPS) makes no difference.
On a personal preference level, of even more importance is the ability to have your actions and choices affect the outcome of the story somehow. While I would say this factor is not critical for a game to be classed as an RPG (many older RPGs, especially from the 8 and 16-bit era, have linear storylines that are not affected by your decisions in the game in any way, if there is even such an option), many players do expect it out of RPGs today, and I personally find the greatest enjoyment in games where your actions/choices can actually determine what happens in the end. (Conversely, this is also why I strongly dislike RPGs where you always get the same ending no matter what. It feels like you basically have no agency in the story/game at all.)
Other factors like inventory systems, crafting, gathering, minigames etc. are just fluff and window dressing to me. They can be fun and entertaining in their own right, but they do not really make or break whether I classify a game as an RPG. (They CAN, however, have huge impacts on whether a game is actually fun to play. Having a fun little racing minigame in an RPG is one thing; forcing you to be GOOD at the racing game in order to win the game is not fun.)
This is pretty much where I’m at. Even if the decisions I make are purely superficial (like choosing Triss or Yennefer, or whether to blow up Megaton) and the main story arc has a fixed, rigid resolution, at least I had SOME input. For this reason I don’t think Metal Gear or RDR are RPGs.
Kotor, yes. Last of Us, no.
Gods, it’s tricky to say what an RPG is when there’s such a massive gap between jRPGs (or console RPGs) and Western RPGs (or computer RPGs). The only thing I think they have in common is that character statistics are the main deciding factor in conflict, but that would exclude Demon Souls style games when I would definitely class DeS as an RPG. I suppose it’s one of those ‘I know it when I see it’ situations.
I feel like the second game really nailed what they were going for: the ability to just exist in a fairly well made simulacrum of a particular vision of the American frontier. Everything it does is in service of that goal, and it mostly succeeds far more than RDR1.
But if that’s not what you want from a game, it’s all for naught.
They are both games that I desperately WANT to like.
I tend to fall into the camp of an RPG being a game where you play a role in a world, and so can play in the world the way your character would. You can have a defined character and do that or create the character yourself, and it can be linear or open, but ultimately you have to feel that you are in the world as your character and not just entering into tactical combat with an inventory, skills and level ups.
As examples, my three best roleplaying games/experiences are (in no particular order):
1) Romance of the Three Kingdoms VIII. This was very open world, but for the most part your character wandered around, was hired by leaders to work on things, and so did combat and fixed walls and so on and so forth, but could also get married and could have familial relations and the like, and so roleplaying events emerged out of the strategic ones, including one case where I quit working for the leader I was working for because he asked my created character who I created as the son of the character that I played a previous run with to encourage the father to defect, which I considered dishonourable. It was indeed about playing as your character in that world.
2) Knights of the Old Republic. This didn’t go into much detail with things like (Lie) options, so for the most part you could react to what was happening in dialogue, at least, the way your character would. I remember that my first character responded to Malak’s taunting over how the big revelation must make me feel with that it didn’t bother me at all, but then professed later that it bothered him a lot, with the reasoning being that he wasn’t going to let MALAK see that. Without a (Lie) option, I can decide on the fly what my character is thinking, which fits back into Gimli’s comment in DM of the Rings: you can tell my character what it has to do, but not what it has to think.
3) Persona 3+: The S-link portion lets you, for the most part, decide who you want to hang around with and/or romance and so seems like a life simulator tailored to the character. And everywhere else, you are given the choice of some options in conversations that let you express what you’re thinking about the situation, to at least some extent. Persona 3, to me, was the first game where I really felt like I was playing a full RPG.
I also like The Old Republic for this, as evidenced by my TOR Diary series on my own blog: because there are usually Light and Dark Side options but there aren’t really any consequences for not being consistent with them, you can play your character how you want to play them and not be too restricted, other than by the dialogue choices themselves.
For whatever it’s worth, I really enjoy your writing, Patrick, and I hope that you will write more.
You have your own unique voice and style that I appreciate.
Perhaps it will get easier the more you do it?
I 100% agree with you about rockstar games feeling like a jumble of completely unconnected systems, but I think you’re setting yourself up for even more disappointment going in with RPG expectations. If you treat it like an open world action game with some RPG elements stapled on it’s slightly less disappointing. My favorite thing by far about that era of rockstar games (all two of them) was the euphoria physics engine. The exaggerated way the NPCs are physically affected by your gunshots makes the gunplay very satisfying and fun in a way you just can’t get with canned ‘pain’ animations and a healthbar going down. I didn’t realize just how much I appreciated it until GTA5 came out.