Red Dead Redemption

i juuuuuust now got to ch. 3. for some reason i'm determined to get the satchel upgrades, so i imagine a lot of hunting time in my future. i don't mind that, though. my favorite parts of the game are generally when i'm out in the environment doing shit. i have liked several of the missions, though. the one early on where that ends with a blackout in the bar was a fun one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/opinion/sunday/red-dead-redemption-2-fallout-76-video-games.html

After its October release, Red Dead Redemption 2 earned $725 million in just three days, giving it the highest-grossing opening weekend of any entertainment product — ever. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen this at this box office, it’s because it’s not a movie. It’s a video game.

To put those numbers in context, this year’s biggest Marvel film, “Avengers: Infinity War,” grossed about $640 million worldwide in its opening weekend.

yeah, that stuck out to me too. although after a little digging i found that although it's the biggest three day weekend of any entertainment product, it's not actually the biggest 3-day launch. that belongs to GTA V, which made about a billion in the three days after it launched on a Tuesday.

the rest of that article is pretty bad though, which i know is shocking given that the author works at reason.com. his premise is that videogames aren't taken seriously and that no one takes them seriously. which might be true among his pals and the older generations but doesn't really line up with what i've seen. in my interactions with people i've consistently found that people who aren't into videogames do actually show curiosity about them and are interested in them in sort of an intellectual way (as sources of innovation for narration, interactivity, digital experience, metaphysical stuff related to VR, etc)

Still haven't finished the epilogue. John Marston is a pretty shitty character after spending all that time with Arthur.

I’m not sure Red Dead Online when it hits will have the insane money making legs GTA Online does, but I think they’ll def be making boatloads off of this for several years.

I’m in Chapter 4 now and (minor spoiler?) a big city opens up with it. Really impressive, even if the frame rate takes some hard hits.

i'm also in chapter 4, and it's a little disappointing because i totally explored this city a couple chapters ago. i really goofed off a ton during chapter 2, avoiding the story entirely. but i imagine that the chapter 4 stuff will let me interact with things a little more

getting kind of annoyed with the whole 'accidentally step on someone's foot with your horse and somehow end up chased by everyone in the vicinity and wanted dead or alive' thing

Oh I didn’t even know that was accessible from the beginning, but that makes sense. GTA always had things locked off until you hit a certain point in the story.

I’m with you on the irritation of accidental assaults. Some of them have been so outlandishly comical in their escalation though. Recently accidentally tackled someone, punched them, grabbed them and half choked them out, and ended up shooting them in the face with a shotgun. Hitting all the wrong buttons at the wrong time.

yeah, i usually don't mind at all and get some fun out of it, but only get annoyed when i'm actually just trying to act normal and not create a ruckus

did you try to rob the doctor's office in valentine? that was a hoot

I haven’t robbed or fucked with anyone in towns (intentionally) because of the headache that comes with it. At some point I’ll get wild.

i usually don't, but they kind of dare you to with that particular location. someone in camp tells you about it, and i think someone in town mentions it too. it is....it gets wild. i spent a really long time trying to figure out how to do it smoothly (and failing), before seeing a little kotaku thing today about that particular mission and how shit always goes haywire no matter what

Oh damn, I wonder if that’s still available. Will investigate.

So I just pulled that heist. Failed the first time because a damn lawman straight up transported/glitched into the room and blew me away. Second time was equally messy and involved a shootout but nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. Got away relatively easily.

Did I miss something? Feel like any ~stealth~ mission in this game falls to shit in about 5 seconds for me and I inevitably Rambo my way out. Gotten pretty good at it.

did you get the schofield revolver? i guess that's the main reward for that lil' sidequest. there's apparently also a safe which i totally missed, which you can either blow with dynamite or pick (if you've "unlocked" that skill, pun intended)

when i got to ch. 4 i finally had enough money to buy a horse and totally deck it out without worrying about money. this is my perfect horse, which i of course named after my dog.

What type of horse was if

arabian

i know there's a white arabian horse that you can capture that's better, but my dog is black with a small white patch and so is this horse, therefore this is the best horse of all time imo

If it’s the gray arabian you can get at valentine, i believe it is about the same as the white one

getting kind of annoyed with the whole 'accidentally step on someone's foot with your horse and somehow end up chased by everyone in the vicinity and wanted dead or alive' thing

haha yeah, welcoe to a Rockstar game. I seem to have trouble knowing the difference between L2 and R2 and I punched my horse in the face instead of feeding it. Kicked me hard.

Liking this though. Hunting and fishing are very involved.

online mode will be available to some people tomorrow

https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/26/18112534/red-dead-redemption-2-rdr2-online-multiplayer-beta-release-date

Rockstar will launch Red Dead Online in beta form on Nov. 27 at 8:30 a.m. ET, and it will initially be accessible only for owners of the Ultimate Edition of Red Dead Redemption 2. The following day, the beta will open up to those who played Red Dead Redemption 2 on its first day of release — Oct. 26. On Thursday, Nov. 29, those who played the game in its first three days of release (Oct. 26-29) will get access. Then, on Friday, Nov. 30, online multiplayer will open up for all Red Dead Redemption 2 players.

...

Players will create and customize their online characters and “tailor your abilities to suit your play style.” Players will be able to join a posse — up to eight players — and go out hunting and fishing, battle rival gangs, and fight other players in “spontaneous skirmishes and pitched set-piece battles.”

Red Dead Redemption 2’s online multiplayer mode will be free and available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The PS4 version of the game will have select exclusive content for Red Dead Online.

Great. So not ready for Howitzer Guy to find a handcar and terrorize the map.

NOTE: I have not yet played this game.

My only hope for not getting fucked as a loner is if we form an ILX posse.

ILX posse should spend most of the time sitting around a campfire and arguing about nothing.

Wut do u think we do on this metaphorical campfire

I've been talking about nothing on here for 15 years.

i plan to i plan on establishing a secret campfire where i talk at length about my depression

this game is bizarre bc it's both excellent + terrible. it's a really bad game but also i really enjoy playing it.

while drinking way too much moonshine, of course

would hang at your campfire

:D

free stringy meat snacks for everyone!!

Nothing better than throwing some back while telling tall tales of yore around the campfire

it'd be cool if we could share pics (just like the old west!). i've got some nice horseshit action pics

(not really, but i would make some)

Some of the scenery is kodak quality gorgeous

For whatever reason I assumed online content was like 6+ months out or something. Neat!

Red Dead Online makes a few changes to how players interact in the open world. First and foremost is the ability to set up your own camp. Much like in the main game, this is your home base where you or anyone in your possecan change your outfit or rest up. Camps are flagged as safe zones but players can opt out of that safety if they’re looking for a more dangerous lifestyle. Posses can be joined with a quick romp through a side menu, but there’s a “permanent” option as well. If you have $200 in in-game cash, you can set up a sort of official gang, making it easier to join up with friends.

i won't be on this til the weekend at the earliest, but let's posse up imo

i really wish i was playing this, but i totally would just be hunting for pelts and playing poker rather than doing mission related stuff for the main part

apparently most of the people playing online just go out on a murder spree, which is supposedly what people do on gta v online too which kinda sucks

I'm really not surprised by that i guess

It's the first day, zero surprise at that.

Also, probably what I'll be doing if there are enough NPCs that I can just roam through the countryside whacking Pinkertons and weird inbred cannibal cultists.

i'm up to level 8 on online.

oddly enough i have not experienced any griefing at all yet. very civilized.

if you haven't explored the west side of the map yet, it's pretty wild to be back over there. very nostalgic

Chapter 5 is... not very fun at all.

Don’t wanna be too spoilery, but damn if it doesn’t seem like an extended cutscene.

Chapter 5 improves at the end and Chapter 6 is great.

i wanted to finish the story mode before tackling online, but i'm still way back in ch 4 so i just put that on pause for a bit.

just spent a few hours in online. that was...weird. it's definitely a very different vibe than the regular game. i'm not sure if it's because most of us are lower level, but everyone is clustered together on the map way more than i expected. i thought it would be kind of a lonely thing where i'd occasionally run into people, but there are constantly that are less than a minute away, if not closer. it makes riding from mission to mission tense, because you're never sure if the other person will freak out and just kill you or if they'll ignore you. i've run into plenty of both already, enough to know to keep my gun ready. most of the time it hasn't been that bad but there have been times when i just want people to leave me the fuck alone.

the clumsy controls that are mainly just funny during the single player mode sometimes create frustrating problems in multiplayer - like if you're trying to pick up a key object while everyone's shooting at you, and it won't give you the Pick Up option until you approach it from one certain angle.

but generally it's really fun. i decided to quit for a while after the server starting crashing every 5 minutes. connectivity issues have been bad today, but that's true of all ps4 things right now, so maybe it's a larger issue.

How to play as naked nutless Arthur. Please note the advice to back up your save before using this glitch.

https://youtu.be/ZER1Z6uRECk

i quit video games like five years ago now, but i'm back off the wagon for this. and... it's a lot. like a lot of people i don't even know if it's good or not? but it is certainly engrossing.

some scattered thoughts:

i've found a lot of cool shit scattered on the landscape, much more entertaining than the main story -- which is itself pretty good. so i've taken to just picking a tiny square shack on the map and seeing what's up. rockstar seems to have put something everywhere.

have you found the cabin of the suicide ex-ice skater (his card is there)? or the cabin with two starved dead kids? or the abandoned plague town? or the cabin with the corpses of some proto-raelian cult? there are a lot of abandoned, dead things on this landscape.

i got attacked by some pretty scary "night people" in a swamp. i'm pretty sure i found their cabin, it had skulls and of course canned vegetables.

there was a line of dialogue that legitimately made me laugh out loud, maybe a first for a video game, but because it was past 2am on a work night i don't remember it.

i want to get better at hunting but everything is so badly explained -- ok how do i get the right feathers to make the right arrows to shoot the rabbits -- where do i even take these rabbit skins. it's all like this. there are millions of pieces of information but no clue how to get started on any of it.

people talking to you in any circumstance can unlock something. during a poker game, the camp cook said he lost his compass and now finding a compass is a minor collectible. the more you fuck off and get distracted the more things open up -- the more you try to do anything directly, the more impossible it seems

gunplay seems really difficult and i've been mostly avoiding it. i've been playing mostly as a goody-goody.

I want to say it's only genuinely good in the last chapter, everything you do has a weight to it that I've only experienced in the first Telltale Walking Dead game. But it took the time investment from the previous chapters (even when you didn't care about the cut scenes and all) to do that, I guess.

Have kind of lost interest in playing online because it sounds like such a grind, wish I'd kept a save somewhere around Chapter 3 so I could go fuck off and do more stuff as Arthur.

there was some line a stranger said that really made me laugh that was something like "art is bullshit fucking is the only thing that matters"