If you wanted to find the game that some will say, in the future, is our Citizen Kane, then look no further than Red Dead Redemption. Now there are games with better plots than Red Dead Redemption, there are games with some better gameplay than this game. And on the surface the game is nothing but Grand Theft Auto with a Western skin, but what Red Dead Redemption is is the future of gaming.
SENSE OF PLACE
In Oblivion I felt like I was in Cyrodiil: the forests were living entities, the land huge and varied and I felt like this place could exist … until I arrived in the sparse cities and talked to citizens. With it’s forced and unflattering conversation camera, stilted voice acting I was immediately pulled out of the world. In Fable II, a game that is very similar to Red Dead Redemption on many fronts, the situation was the same: look at a character or try and ‘interact’ with one and the game made you very aware that that’s what it was: a game.
Red Dead Redemption is the exact definition of Verisimiltude in gaming. Like Oblivion, the land feels alive: animals are everywhere, the locations varied. Mexico at night feels very different from the bleak and bleached Mexico of the day. The beautiful stillness of Tall Trees and the northern reaches of the mountains is an awe-inspired sight: Sometimes I fire up the game to just travel up there.
Each town has its own character: McFarlane’s Farm has a barren sadness about it; Armadillo is a gutted but alive dirty monster; and BlackWater has the sterile and ordered foreshadowing of what many cities later in that century would become. And one of the main things about Red Dead Redemption which sets it apart from other games that try and capture the feeling of a living town, sandbox-style or not, is that each character feels internally connected to the city. Any cityboy will tell you that you can stop in the main artery of a street of a city they are from and point out characters and formulate how they are connected to the city. Not even Grand Theft Auto IV or what we did in Mass Effect 2 did this to the extent that Red Dead Redemption did. GTA IV had far too many characters that were just background noise: they didn’t have any more life than the flags hoisted on the flagpoles of hotels in that game. They were there to make the city feel alive, yet they didn’t feel alive at all. In ME2 the characters you could talk to in Omega felt completely connected to that location, but the other characters felt stilted and were no more alive than the neon signs that buzzed around. In Red Dead each character had a purpose in that city and you got to know these characters the more you visited these locations. Now the reduced number of pawns compared to GTA and the simplistic interaction compared to ME2 helped in that: the team could develop the personalities of these characters — what they did and when — a lot easier and without as much overhead. But Sam and the team at Rockstar were smart: it isn’t what you say to characters, that establishes relationships in real life, it’s how you interact with them.
Let’s look at some of my experiences as an example. I visited Armadillo a lot in the game: how could you not — it was the center of New Austin and had the most varied amount of shops. I took to playing poker just about every night and one of the people in that poker game was Herbert Moon. Well wouldn’t you know that the bastard was always winning. And wouldn’t you know that at 10am when I would get up from those drinks and that poker game and go pick up some chewing tobacco from the local shop he would voice his usual hateful anti-Semitic comments. When he was robbed — and he was frequently robbed — I had to stop myself before helping him cos I was sure that that smug bastard was always laughing about my bad poker playing. “Too bad about that game last night Marsden.” But yet I always helped him. I hated Herbert Moon, yet I always looked forward to seeing him at our poker games.
Now let’s look at how this relationship was established. I never had a conversation with him. I never did a mission with him other than random robbery events. My interaction boiled down to him simply being at a poker game, and the game being coded to react to me if we did, and if he won (which he always did). It’s a small thing, but I felt like I had more of a connection with him than I did with any character in Oblivion.
The game is filled with reaction: reaction to what you did, do and where you went. If I went the righteous path, there was a simple change in how people reacted to me when I arrived. As I progressed through the game, the newspaper boys and the townsfolk would react and comment on some of my larger actions or the events that were happening in, say, Mexico. If I shot a lot of Elk in Tall Trees, it would be some time before more Elk showed up. If I accidentally shot a civilian in a shootout in a town, a lot of the townsfolk would run, like in GTA or sometimes they’d come and inspect the body. But occasionally a gunslinger would pull his gun on me. If I didn’t holster, he’d start shooting and I’d loose honor if I killed him. One time I lassoed and hogtied a woman (for a certain achievement, it was completely out of character for me) and because I didn’t have my gun out, and it was in a bar, one of the guys in the bar started spitting at me and came up and cuffed me in the ear as I was carrying the woman out.
The point is: the world is alive and reacts to you, through scripted events in the story, and through dynamic reactions. The characters are given little nuances and combined with the high quality of voice acting, models and animation they feel alive. They feel alive. You don’t need long conversations with random people to make people seem real; to pull you into the world. In fact that is so unlike the real world that involving yourself with an arguing couple about what to do with an unborn child pulls you out. Small details that might seem unimportant details like lighting, camera work, voice acting and virtual acting all combine to help keep the player grounded in your world. Red Dead Redemption, while being a game that had very little to do with the citizens of the world has managed to keep that grounding, to keep the player so immersed in the world through a reactive world. And it’s that reactiveness that gamers, critics, and fans will always be referencing in games to come.
(The next article on Red Dead Redemption will focus on gameplay immersion and diversity)
