Red Dead Redemption 2

this is one of those games where i find the ui really fuckin’ hard to read on a tv from a decent distance

i died right at the end of a long walk n talk mission. i can see myself never picking this up again

apparently this game has like ghosts and draculas and ufos and shit in it

they just can’t restrain themselves can they

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Well the other one had Bigfoot (and the devil, but they’re never explicit with that one).

There’s also a ghost train in this one too, among all the other stuff.

Lots of weird things happen at 2:00 am.

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How is paranormal stuff not awesome

edit: just to add, and maybe this particular situation has been mentioned before, but I made the mistake of riding into the swampy bayou area in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm like it wasn’t a big deal. outside of town I heard a woman crying for help… went to see what was up. she was in a nightgown on the ground, clawing at the mud and screaming, and wouldn’t respond to any greetings or offers of help. I got close to her, when she pulled a knife and lunged at me (“ah SHIT!” Arthur literally said, completely appropriately). then she ran away into the night. before I knew what was happening I was accosted by a group of the undead who murdered me very quickly. this was before I had any idea there was paranormal stuff in there, so I was pretty blown away. what was even better was after I re-spawned or whatever, it’s the next day, and I’m in this little fishing town talking to people, the place I was heading for the night before. the feeling of being in an environment which you know or believe to be haunted was palpable. there was an almost Lynchian sense that the friendly faces on the people who lived there were a mask hiding something dark and evil under the surface. I really wanted to like, ask the people there if they knew anything about the woods or whatever, but nobody seemed to want to acknowledge. Maybe Arthur would just chalk it up to a nightmare… this is the kind of world-building role-playing stuff that this game does extremely well IMO, and the paranormal stuff just puts it onto another level.

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yeah that’s actually pretty cool

i guess i like the idea of paranormal stuff in the otherwise serious Western Experience game if it is done subtly and in a way that feels tonally of a piece with the rest of the game, but the thing i read on the other ufos or whatever made it seem more like a kind of ARG scavenger hunt thing that was there to tease DLC and whatnot

but the more i think of it the more i like the idea of a hyper-realistic game that just happens to also have a single dracula living in some distant corner of the map minding his own business

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It’s extremely subtle, hidden to an extent that only their huge budget allows. I think 80% of players will see none of this, and the rest will only catch one or two. It’s built to inspire fan community talk and as shareable stories, not to meet the standard money spent/player time raito.

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Yeah, there are still seemingly unsolved ufo mysteries in GTA V that are just there to be there for people to stumble on and talk about online and form communities around. I still hold out hope that there is an unlockable jetpack in that game somewhere and someday someone will figure out how to access it.

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Interesting, I actually read the town paper in Valentine at one point and it mentioned a cult and its influence on the town. I didn’t pay much mind but then riding through the woods I spot a madman wading into the middle of the river caterwauling about some apocalyptic vision. He gets uncomfortably close to me and then shambles towards his makeshift alter in the bushes somewhere and takes a nap. I still don’t know what that’s all about.

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part of the cult around SotC is built exactly on these 20% who explored the landscape and left no stone untouched - and i guess the golden fleece(?) collectables in the PS4 remake are a result of their efforts, so you could argue that the players’ engagement could be responsible for their efforts to hide away a few nice things that should not be there…

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Yeah, I have a bone to pick with explicit collectables in Shadow of the Colossus; one of the beautiful things about that world was when it chose to express its human craft, while hiding explicit acknowledgment of player exploration through collectables. It found a balance that felt more like real-world exploration; meaning without gamified encouragement that blinds people to their surroundings.

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I do love that the collectible of SotC is those lizards/fruit and they give an impectiple boost to your stats.

Like I wanted to finally see the top of the tower but it would apparently take beating a the game at least three times over.

And uhh < smallestprintpossible>the game isn’t that fun once you control the stress it produces

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They should have just used those weird goat cave paintings instead of the generic sparkly collectibles. SotC is exactly the kind of game where I was almost expecting my efforts to explore all the nooks and crannies to be rewarded with just odd details like a faded mural or wooden carving.

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Maybe this belongs in the proper/separate SotC topic…

… but a decade later, I tend to think of the game being mainly about overcoming fear (or rather, different kinds of fear)… not as literal as it is shown in ‘Reign Over Me’ , the odd offshot Sandler flick that’s actually watchable, but more in the sense of the player having to man up and face a variety of things, topics or aspects that can (and will) hurt you, or, talking on a more abstract level, just there to hinder your progress.
However, the interesting thing is that this feeling mainly comes to the fore when you’re re-playing the game, because during the first run, you are busy with figuring out what to do, how to do it, what will come next etc.pp.

It’s only after you (should) know how you have to approach each colossus, that you may realize that there are some colossi you ‘like’ to be up against, and you even may feel a bit sorry for some of these majestic beasts, whereas there will be a few you’ll gladly leave behind as dead as possible, and it is the latter category I find interesting:
When playing this game time and again over the years, sometimes these colossi evoke disdain (as in not wanting to face them or feeling like progress being hindered by them), sometimes they just feel obnoxious, and more recently, i also started feeling a bit sorry for them - until now though, never have I felt bored when facing one of them, and considering that i must have finished this game at least ten to fifteen times already, that’s an impressive feat for a game that’s basically just 16 bosses.

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Online looks jank as fuck. But I guess if you like the main game you’re going to like it. There’s even a story

I think I had all the Red Dead I can take from the very long single player. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my time but the further I get from it the less interested I am in the same gameplay feedback loop. I played through the MP tutorial last night and it’s about what you’d think I suppose? The mugshot you take when you create your character is cute but I’m pretty uninterested in the story hook. The story NPCs all weirdly feel like low-budget versions of the single player even down to the way they animate. Maybe I’m projecting.

The “gold bar” currency is something you either very very slowly accumulate or you spend Real Money for and it seems like a lot of things are locked behind either paying cash money or grinding Free Roam missions til you can afford them and have Ranked Up enough to unlock (which “Gold” also circumvents). I guess it’s fine if you’re really clamoring for more RDR but I’ve happily had my fill for now.

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is it criminal that this game doesn’t have side saddle riding like mgsv

(yes)

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working on a frag video

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