The horsey system definitely feels a lot more complex and fiddly than one would likely imagine it to be on first glance. Maybe a little like real horse riding! I think X keeps pace with whoever you’re following but you still gotta steer horsey through less obvious turns of the trail
I am more confused by how exactly the X tapping/holding works in terms of horsey speed levels vs holding forward on the L stick. Hold forward and tap X? Hold X? Double tap and hold X? Nothing seems obviously correct. I wish I had a scuf with those paddles because it’s pretty damn awkward trying to move the camera around on the horse (to shoot wolves or whatever) while doing whatever I’m supposed to be doing with the X button to keep moving
Also as ever I suck badly at aiming with a dual shock but it’s fun learning the rhythm of the different guns. One trigger pull to cock the rifle then another to fire, repeat, etc.
Arthur keeps four or five pictures at his tent among his personal items, one of them is his dog. I don’t know if this dog is still around or if it’s from his past but I haven’t seen it so I don’t think it’s around anymore.
Arthur is not a good person because he has done and continues to do some really bad things but he likes dogs (I make him pat and praise the dog hanging around Valentine) and he keeps a framed picture of a dog he used to have next to a framed picture of his father, which is a mugshot (and likely the only picture of his father that exists).
I cannot underscore how unintuitive some aspects of this control scheme are. Depending on circumstances, picking stuff up might require square, or triangle, or I think at one point I was using L1?? Also I’ve tried to target someone to greet them only to accidentally shoot my gun three times now. And after the first hunting mission, are you only supposed to bring animals in piecemeal, or am I right that there’s a way to donate whole deer that I just haven’t figured out yet?
Yeah it totally has a gta4 vibe. Now I never got anywhere in gta4 but I respect it. RDR2 probably also isn’t for me but I get a kick out of it that a lot of “bros” are going to play it and be really confused
I’m certainly going to watch more of the let’s play. It’s a pretty game
I bought this last night on amazon because it is $30 cheaper than in the store, but I also got it with a Solaire of Astora Amiibo that apparently takes ‘1 to 2 months’ to ship, so I guess I can look forward to being bored and/or confused by this in december
the first mission with lenny was one of my favorite things in this game so far
i decided to walk it back to town the next morning since my horse was still there and there was a nice morning mist, on the way i helped a guy with a snakebite, met a dinosaur hunter (i had already found one bone and arthur actually acknowledged this in the cutscene), and got run over by a mad buck from behind when i decided to try jogging a bit of the way. when i got back to my horse, arthur said “been a while boy” as he finally mounted. this is pretty great.
Yeah, I’m a little surprised by how often I’ll notice that I have a choice between two missions, I go and complete one of them, and then when I do the other, the characters comment on the events of the first mission. I hope Julie will try this despite all the animal gore, because I want to see what happens when she does things in a different order than I did.
I’m starting to think this has more in common with what I think of as a Proceduralism game; the micro-genre of Papers Please and Cart Life that use performative action to inform and tell stories. It’s closely related to simulation but the focus is not on a consistent realistic human-machine interface to master, but on achieving a decision space close to the mimicked role that puts the player in a mindset. Small narrative detail, like objects that hold narrative but are justified in world, is a key marker of this type of game that sims ignore. In Red Dead it’s the letters and photographs and diary and you see something like Papers Please stick closely to presenting these things in in-world justified forms.
In short, I’ve spent a half dozen hours and it’s all been Bonnies farm and almost none of it has been the creeping GTA cynical carnival of the first game’s snake oil salesman and gravedigger. I spent an hour meandering around camp and sitting in different chairs because it felt like performative role playing.
That inclination is exactly made me walk back to down after my bender. I thought I’d caused enough trouble than to go and just steal a passerby’s horse, having to make the walk of shame back to town was a kind of penance, it felt like the right decision for the character at the time to act out. there’s certainly a kind of fun for me to creating a performance while playing games.
And they reinforce that that type of decision matters in enough micro systems (return a stolen horse and the owner will forgive you(!)) that you start on your best roleplaying behavior all the time!
Right, I don’t mean to suggest that this feels like they were inspired by those other games, but they’ve taken it far enough down this track that it’s the primary makeup of player experience now, and we’re all feeling that it’s…different.
I think it’s finally moved in this direction they were developing enough to be a genre shift, not an open world goofbox anymore.