this type of thing always drives me nuts. the bodycount factor was the one thing la noire almost got right, if you ignore the side missions and the goofy shootout on the intolerance set. if they ever make their own team bondi-less la noire hopefully rockstar won’t just up the cannon fodder.
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I hear that criticism. While you can stick around long enough in the open world to see human and animal carcasses decay and get eaten by scavengers during a mission where you gun down entire posses of dudes you never have the chance to stick around and see what happens afterward because you usually have a few gang members with you and sticking around and not escaping will make you fail the mission.
I imagine this is so the game can “reset” itself and quietly shuffle all those corpses under the rug, otherwise you’d start seeing the town cemeteries fill up and expand pretty quickly. You’d be walking through town the next day past cart fulls of dead guys and everyone would be complaining about the stench and then you’d start asking questions like where the hell did all these people come from there’s only twenty people that actually live in this area.
I did a mission last night that resulted in a few corpses and the sheriff’s deputy I was working with said something like I’ll send someone along to clean this mess up later and for a moment I wanted to just hang out there and wait to see if it actually happened but a fellow gang member I was with said come on let’s go so we went. Now I wish I had gone back after the mission was over to see if there were still a bunch of dead guys laying around or if someone had “cleaned up” in the time between leaving that area and coming back.
They go to great lengths to hide the seams so you can’t see as easily how the whole thing is put together and this goes a long way towards making the game feel more “alive” than any of their previous games. However, once again the necessity for a body count (any body count, large or small) in contemporary 3D action games leaves dangling threads that naturally tempt us to pull at them and in so doing we undo all the magic they’re trying to create.
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I think the real failure is in that they haven’t figured out yet how to make a Western gunfight between just a handful of people into interesting gameplay. Why can’t you have two dudes on one side and two on the other and make that interesting. Without bullet sponges of course because that wouldn’t be fitting either. I guess because missing shots is boring as it doesn’t advance anything? But like you could have the player place shots in certain spaces so as to suppress the enemy or make them move a certain way or take out cover and the like. You could make a movie-style fight in a videogame, it’s not impossible, and then you wouldn’t need to kill 17 dudes each time
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honestly if yall havent seen the movie open range with robert redford the final gunfight is so videogame it hurts but mostly western gunfights usually were ablut supplying drama not action
for instance if you were to watch this video,
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Just make the guns and bullet ballistics as completely physically realistic as possible and bring the camera views way closer to the characters. That way everyone in a shootout will be missing their shots 95% of the time just like in real life and since the cameras are closer you can more realistically render the wooden barrel or barn you’re taking cover behind breaking apart and shattering with each and every round that hits it. Have gun smoke hang in the air and become a haze that obscures your view during the battle so it gets harder to see as the fight drags on.
Then when you reveal it market it as THE MOST REALISTIC GUNFIGHTS EVER to set the expectations to the appropriate level, otherwise people will hate it because it doesn’t feel like Call of Duty. Boom. There you go. Now every gun battle between even just a couple people is epic. After that it’s all on the designer to pace them with the rest of the game’s story and activities.
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I’m being very critical of this game but it’s because Rockstar is important and they carry the torch in a lot of ways. What they do goes a long way to define videogames as a whole. I mean GTA5 is the best selling piece of media ever created in the history of this dumb world. I expect a lot from them and they took more than half a decade, hundreds of millions of dollars and god knows how many man hours to put this together.
It’s not doing enough for that type of investment, rather, I’d say, it’s going in the wrong direction, even.
That’s the last I’ll say about it. I don’t want to get on people’s nerves and I think a lot of people are enjoying it and so they should. It’s a great game in its own right. I watched probably 20 hours of it. I have some idea. I used this thread to sort my thoughts on it and well, that’s what you get. I do think it’s important to dissect it
This goes in the complete opposite direction of what I was half-suggesting but I like it nonetheless. That’s another way! There’s so many ways
Now if we can do something about Arthur Morgan, robocowboy, taking more shots to the face than Jenna Jameson and living…
Oh you’re not getting on my nerves. My buzz is unharshable. I actually truly want to play THE MOST REALISTIC GUNFIGHTS EVER (that should just be the title of the game). Dissect away!
does this mean you haven’t actually played it yourself? cuz I would be bored as fuck watching this game for 20 hours but playing it is a completely different story.
as an aside (not trying to be a jerk): videogames must be the only medium where people can form opinions based on experiences with the product which are further mediated by watching another player playing it. like you can’t do that with movies or books. you can read reviews or other people’s takes on it but you can’t actually watch them watching it. whether those opinions are legitimate is another story.
sure you can, there’s stuff like Mystery Science Theater 3000. Also audiobooks are basically you watching a person read a book out loud
I’ve watched a lot of videogames being played and I’ve played a lot of videogames and yeah, there are some small differences in experience that I could tell you about. I’ve watched let’s plays and then played the game and thus know what that difference is like. And so I can also tell you that on the whole it doesn’t preclude you from forming opinions on a videogame if you just watch it being played instead of playing it yourself. I don’t have a problem with it. But that’s just another opinion
EDIT: like, I’m not commenting on if the controls are confusing or not because obviously I haven’t experienced that. I’m commenting on what I can safely comment on
the horses in this game move and ambulate like real horses
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Make every game Receiver
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This was my life tonight. It is just so hard to spot squirrels, it is the odd case where it’d likely be easier to hunt one in real life than in this game. Heck I walk past a dozen or so of them a day, I don’t know what is wrong with the RDR 2 environment but if squirrels are around in an area, they are generally really all around an area.
I felt bad about not accomplishing my hunting goals so I took a break to shake down some non-english speaker for money. I blame the squirrels.
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I was traumatized by having to put a screaming deer out of its misery so I haven’t shot a single animal in the game since.
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Last night I bought myself a really nice fancy outfit in Saint Denis and some new riding gloves, got a shave and a haircut at the barber and then played a bunch of poker and blackjack before getting into shenanigans with Dutch and Bill. Tonight I went fishing with Kieran and collected a debt from some poor broke bastard in the mountains in West Elizabeth.
It shames me to admit it but I kind of like being a debt collector in this. It’s just brutal. These people are broke and vulnerable and we’re preying on them and when I go to collect and see them in their sad, sorry situations Arthur is just like fuck you pay me. I should not be enjoying this but I am.
ive had to do this in real life on the side of the road so thanks for warning me
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an achievement of this piece: it has such an absurdly high budget, yet has a heart and a soul to speak of
its weird to look at a rockstar game and feel like your emotions whilst playing it are valid. ive only ever felt like that @ keita takahashi-involved things, horror, and indie stuff
i cried after i played dark void (2010) because i knew the development must have been so nightmarish and terrible to be a part of and im sure after i beat this shit im gonna cry thinking about that same thing. and i will be on acid whenever that happens
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I can’t get enough of talking to Dutch and hearing him flail around in his depression and pretending to be a leader, caught up in pop-philosophy of The West as his faithful dog Arthur does the work.
I love that they can write subtly enough, and over long enough, to run obnoxious drunk Uncle into the camp’s Keeper of Songs
holy shit the drunk mission
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this reviews, i dont like it right now but ill play more