Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

Que jogo incrível!

Eu joguei ele logo no lançamento, e até hoje abro de vez em quando para desbravar o mundo que, mesmo após 2 anos jogando, não pude descobrir todos os detalhes.

Com toda certeza esse foi um dos melhores jogos dessa geração, com um dos melhores mapas abertos, podendo interagir com todos (ou quase todos) NPCs.

A relação que você cria com todos da gangue do Dutch, é sensacional! Seja por ódio (ao Dutch e ao Micah), Carinho (Tio Bill, Arthur, John), ou por simplesmente terem uma personalidade incrível (Hosea, Lenny).

Com toda certeza, minha missão preferida é a que o John chama todo mundo para resgatar seu filho, Jack, de um sequestro. Toda a trama de ir até a mansão que ele estava, invadir e incendiar tudo, fora incrível.

O sistema de caça também é bem interessante, eu particularmente acho um pouco enjoativo ir atrás de todos os cento e poucos animais, entretanto é divertido caçar os animais lendários.

Fico triste pelo Online ter sido um fracasso, creio que, se tivesse uma pegada do singleplayer, onde fizéssemos uma nova campanha COOP com nossos amigos, seria muito melhor do que é o formato de hoje em dia, onde tem umas missões bem ruins, e a única coisa legal é sair laçando NPC e surrar o amigo.

I played Red Dead Redemption II over 22 long months. I bought the game on launch, swept up by the marketing and incredible reviews. When I first played it, it was a glorious piece of work to take in. The world is so expansive and detailed it feels almost uncanny. The comparison on everyone's lips at the time was to the HBO series Westworld, which takes place in a Wild West theme park that offers a "more real than real" series of pre-scripted scenarios that patrons can explore at their whims.

This detail extends to the user interface. Rockstar games are famously encompassing, but infamously clunky. It's hard to adapt gameplay to include systems for shootouts, melee brawls, horse riding, poker, dominoes, card collecting, hunting, fishing, cooking, crafting, bathing, and weapons maintenance among other things. At first I loved this holistic design approach. I love the design of the main character Arthur Morgan, the way his hulking frame feels as heavy to move as a real body and the way his body reacts to what you eat, how you style your hair, etc.

I'm also a fan of Rockstar's storytelling. Red Dead Redemption offered a kind of palliative alternative to the incessant misanthropy of the Grand Theft Auto games, and this sequel ups the ante considerably. The deftness with which it portrays an American West on the cusp of modernity is really hard to find in all but the most classic films of the genre. Certainly a video game has never breathed such life into this setting. What differentiates it from the original is that this game includes aspects of the South and the Midwest, so in all it feels like a more encompassing portrait of the country at this time.

The game is broken up into chapters, and follows Dutch's gang of outlaws as they systematically alienate themselves in one territory after another (including a brief stint in the Caribbean). I loved getting to know the game's colorful cast of characters, including at the occasional party that they throw at camps. But this game is a prequel, and we more or less know how it's going to go. As the story begins its inexorable death march, it gets to be a bit of a slog as we watch its character commit misdeeds and missteps in real time. Its final stroke of poignancy is a subplot that involves a Native American tribe being forcibly removed from its land. Fortunately, in the very, very late stage of the game there are also some positive developments that left me feeling rejuvenated after the long journey.

Beyond the main storyline there are seemingly endless things to do. However, by the time I reached the later half of the game, I felt I couldn't or simply didn't want to bother with the plentiful side missions or add to any of my compendiums (basically catalogs of all the wildlife in the game). Whereas I loved the sense of being confined to the realistic limits of my character's physicality in the beginning of the game, I felt like I was imprisoned by it in the end. Part of the problem is the way the game makes just about everything that requires a menu (inventory management or checking stats) a pain in the ass. Honestly, I basically ignored the way my character progressed past the first couple of chapters. The stats themselves seemed to barely make a difference in the overall experience of the game.

I can't help but feel this was a real missed opportunity for Rockstar to include RPG elements in a more straightforward way. Instead they sort of buried them for the sake of a more realistic feel for users. But for me, that didn't make it any more fun to play. I think I would have really appreciated the back half of the game more if I felt more invested in the character I built beyond just the cosmetics.

On the whole, though, this game is an enormous achievement and in my opinion, a more sensitive and essential game than the original Red Dead Redemption. I think it makes full use of its scale and tells a story few other developers would attempt. Its knotty aspects are basically a natural result of this ambition, so they are easy to overlook.

Played physical copy on PS4.

I never really wanted Red Dead Redemption 2 to end. I knew it would--all good things do, after all--but that didn't mean I was emotionally prepared. But it is over. The credits have run. It's not a perfect game, but perfection is an unrealistic standard and in the world of reality where perfection can't exist, RDR2 is phenomenal.

The story plops us a number of years prior to the events of the first Red Dead Redemption. We take on the character of Arthur Morgan, a member of Dutch van der Linde's gang. It's in a Wild West where the "wild" is getting tamed; outlaw gangs are actively being scrubbed out by lawmen. At the outset Morgan, Dutch, and the whole gang are on the run after a botched bank robbery. It's a game of surviving, of trying to scratch enough money to escape, of forging an identity that can survive the new law-clasped world.

Some people are better at adapting than others.

The open world that Rockstar has created is breathtaking. Not just in how it looks--but it does look really impressive--but in how it operates, how it flows, how delightful it is to travel across. It's a huge map that provides a ton of different settings, from snow-capped mountains to arid deserts to humid bogs to grassy plains. I haven't tried travelling from one far side to the other, but I did go from about Stillwater Creek area to Emerald Ranch--two locations far apart, but hardly extreme ends of the map--in a horse drawn wagon and it took me over a half hour with the horses at a steady trot (ie, the default pace if you're just pressing A the whole time). In most games, a half hour of down time like that would be a death sentence; here you're so immersed in the world that it doesn't even feel that long.

The gameplay is the normal Rockstar schtick: Various missions (both main storyline and side stories, some optional, some not), random events, auto-lock based gunplay, running from the law, etc, etc. These have been staples of the Grand Theft Auto series, as well as the first RDR. But everything here has been slicked up so much since the first RDR that it's hard to imagine going back. I know that I will, and that I'll probably enjoy it (I enjoyed GTA 4 after playing GTA5, after all), but this is such a huge step forward in every facet.

It would be easy to call this GTA5, except with horses and old timey guns and Western settings, but to do so ignores the key differences between the two series. GTA is about action, even when you're just dicking around. It wants to be big and bad. It wants you to live out your fantasy of being a modern safe breaker, with Gone in 60 Seconds-style heists. And while GTA5 has wilderness and variety and hunting, you're always feeling the siren's call back to civilization. With Red Dead Redemption 2, you don't feel the siren's call of civilization--when you're in a city, you feel the call of the wilds. It's a game where you can load it up and spend hours riding around on a horse, hunting elk. You don't even realize the hours have passed; it's suddenly dark outside and the day is over and you think, "I'll just drop these pelts off at the trapper before I go to bed," and even that ends up taking an hour because you keep getting distracted by stuff.

I don't know how many hours I have in Red Dead Redemption--although I've been playing the story mode solely, and have been playing regularly since the game released and only today reached the end credits--but there are still areas of the map that I have not unveiled. I don't think I'm missing much--just some borders that I haven't trekked about the wilderness enough to uncover--but it is worth noting that the map feels huge before you reach the epilogue missions--but once you hit the epilogue, you get access to a quarter of the map that you didn't even know existed previously. Because what Rockstar did is (and this is kind of spoilery), they went and updated about 75% of the original RDR map and added it to the game. I only discovered one mission in the entire game that gets you as far South as Hennigan's Stead, but you can go on your own farther--into Armadillo, down to Fort Mercer, across to Tumbleweed, or the extreme opposite direction to Thieves Landing. I don't even know why they bothered, since there is no official mission--that I found--to get you any further than Hennigan's Stead--and even that mission could have been done elsewhere. It's just there. Maybe they're using it for online play, I don't know--I don't play online. But I'm pleased it is there; going back to those old RDR locations is ridiculously nostalgic.

I wouldn't want to say whether GTA5 or RDR2 is better, as both games showcase Rockstar as one of the best mainstream game developers out there. But I do know this: Red Dead Redemption 2 is a work of art.

The recent Telltale Games and Rockstar Games controversies had me thinking what we gamers can do to support the devs and condemn the awful labor practices of studios like those two.

This is a great article about that: https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/kzjvm9/game-developers-give-advice-on-how-to-make-their-industry-a-better-place

NOTE: Yes, I'd already made this post already, but I included the wrong link so I deleted it. Sorry about that, specially to bmo who wrote a lenghty response to it. :P