A Late Look: Red Dead Redemption II - Article
by Mark Nielsen , posted on 07 November 2024 / 5,935 Views
Welcome to A Late Look, a series of articles where I take a belated look at games from yesteryear that I missed out on the first time around. Not quite review and not quite rant, it’s more a casual assessment of what I – the gamer of the future – consider to be each game’s strengths and weaknesses in retrospect.
This time we’re saddling up for a look at Red Dead Redemption II, one of the biggest critical and commercial successes of the last ten years. It conveniently went completely under my radar, allowing me to look at it now. I was ten years late to the first game, this time it’s only six, so at this rate I’ll definitely be playing Red Dead Redemption IV on launch day. I'm looking forward to that, but for now let’s see how the second game fares in 2024.
Strength: The Van der Linde Gang
Travel back to a time before former-outlaw John Marston got pulled from his farmer life in the first title, to when he was… well, an outlaw. While you might play as Arthur Morgan, in this game you become part of John’s old gang – the Van der Linde gang – together with Marston himself and other familiar and unfamiliar characters. While RDR2 also boasts a few other strong characters, this gang is at the heart of the game and, luckily, is also its strongest element, with plenty of faces and personalities that (almost) all get their time to shine. What adds all the more to the connection and believability of these characters is the living nature of the camp itself; it's your home base outside of missions, where the gang will go about their daily tasks and have conversations & arguments that you can occasionally join in on – there are even celebrations and songs around the campfire. Even if it’s mostly just flavor, the strength of this particular feature and what it adds in terms of immersion shouldn’t be understated.
Weakness: Red Dead Redemption II: Usability Nightmare
I must admit to have laughed when I saw RDR2 described as the current pinnacle of video game design (back in 2018) because, as good as it is, if there’s one thing this game should decidedly not be made a role model for then it's game design. Where to start? Perhaps the controls, as that’s where the issues are clearest. Unintuitive, often unresponsive, and with every button doing multiple different things depending on the situation. Worst of all, when starting up the game I legitimately felt unable to see what the controls were (on console) because when you open the control section in the menu it will auto-scroll through the different actions of each button with no ability to pause it and actually have time to read more than one button. It’s baffling that this control “overview” made it to release, and even more baffling that it still functions like that to this day.
Then there’s the fact that essentially every action, from opening your inventory to looting the myriads of corpses you’ll leave in your path, requires holding down a button rather than pressing it, which is certainly a choice (I’ll give it that much), but one that mostly adds to the clunkiness the controls already suffer from at times. There’s also the fact that while missions have plenty of checkpoints which you’ll restart from when killed, you can’t choose to do so manually, leading me to intentionally catch a few bullets in the chest at times to be able to start something over that had gone wrong. There was also one case of having to run off my own property to set up a camp outside in order to sleep, because apparently the bed inside the house wasn’t good enough.
Admittedly once you get used to RDR2 and are in the flow of things you’ll only rarely get pulled out of it by these or other cases of usability awkwardness, but that doesn’t change the fact that the game could most certainly have done without them.
Strength-ish: Rich Simulation
The first Red Dead Redemption was in large part wild west Grand Theft Auto, with a tad stronger emphasis on story and setting. RDR2 follows that tradition but also undertakes a new mission of its own: to bring as much of real-life as possible into the game. From having to brush your horse, clean your weapons, manage your characters' beard growth and weight, to the way your horse’s testicles shrink in cold weather (yes, that’s a real thing). I’m surprised they didn’t implement a tipping mechanic at the bar that affects your honor rating. Perhaps the one major exemption to this rule is the very gamey element of sleep restoring all stats. Multiple gun wounds? Nothing a little nap won’t solve.
In any case, RDR2 pulls out all the stops in terms of both attention-to-detail and adding systems out of everything it can, making for one hell of a wild west simulator – but arguably also a noisy one. Whether you think the positives outweigh the negatives or vice-versa probably depends more on the player than the game. Personally, I liked this focus for its novelty and uniqueness, but at the same time I’m glad not every game is like this, as there are often more important elements to focus on. That being said, I greatly appreciated the narratively-fitting wizening of Arthur Morgan throughout his journey, as I went the whole game without shaving once.