Red Dead Redemption

first thing i did when i had the chance was hogtie an innocent passerby and chuck them in a river to drown

my wife, sitting on the couch beside me, looked up from her phone and was like ‘wtf is wrong with you’

eheh, reminds me when I went all Westworld in the first one : there's a brothel at some point and after shooting the bad guys I hogtied all the prostitutes, put them in a single room then shot them all in the head. Then I tried to shoot everybody in the village but they kept respawning and nothing special happened like a huge police intervention or something...
being a psychopath is no fun.

Their game mechanic is interesting - aside from honor system, there's just very little reward in being a dick. Stealing stagecoaches and horses require long rides for low rewards, robbing campers nets you a couple of dollars. You have the freedom to be a psychopath but it's even less fun than doing it in GTA.

Revising my earlier statement, turns out Chapter 6 is fantastic. This is the first video game that's actually kind of moving for me.

Yeah, it's clearly more annoying than fun to do things against the law. Although it's quite easy to escape the police (at least in RDR1).

I rode past a man who died right in front of me and fell off his horse. No music, no cut scene, no interaction, just a random NPC natural causes death. I was wondering if the game would have killed him if I wasn't there to observe it.

He had 48 cents.

ahah, classy to take his money !

I rode past a man who died right in front of me and fell off his horse. No music, no cut scene, no interaction, just a random NPC natural causes death. I was wondering if the game would have killed him if I wasn't there to observe it.

He had 48 cents.

i keep thinking horse skeletons are dinosaur bones and standing in front of them waiting for a prompt.

finding all the dreamcatchers/bones/cards seems near-impossible!

It's one thing to find them, another thing to successfully pick them up as the camera glides past and highlights a pack of cigarettes you don't have capacity to carry

i found a couple cigarette cards

haven't even started looking for dino bones

I saw the same NPC falling off the horse and dying thing last night. I also looted him, but not before carrying him off into the woods so I could do it in hiding like a total weirdo.

He was carrying a dollar and change.

Ahah this game makes people do weird stuff : lots to work on for an analyst !

yeah i realized very quickly robbing people yields very little positive results

even some heists aren't worth it, but you kinda have to do some of them

same with killing random people, it all just lowers your honor rate, which is why i started aiming for a high honor rate

Don't you get wedding rings and such fairly frequently?

yeah, i've tried selling some and so far they've been valued at around $10

psst - when robbing people, the real money is in the saddlebags!! you can find gold nuggets and good tonics whereas usually they have less than $2 on them.

unfortunately, this usually means you have to kill them and their horse.

dangit! i even remember coming across that tip somewhere a week or so ago, and i completely forgot.

on the other hand, in the tradition of fallout 4 i am roleplaying as the dumbest guy in the west

When I'm feeling murdery I wander around trying to find one of the enemy gangs, feel shorted so far because I only got to slaughter two Klan rallies. (Yo, Rockstar, I'd pay for DLC that lets me just roam the west hunting Pinkertons.)

that’s what Online is going to be i think

Or some variation thereof

i would pay for DLC that adds equippable bifocals that enable me to see the dominos clearly

unfortunately, this usually means you have to kill them and their horse.

Again the game favours slow play here. You can soothe and pat and brush and feed the "orphaned" horses and they'll love you and then you raid the saddlebags - or you can fire straight in and risk being kicked to death.

is there any way to get rid of a bounty other than paying it off? when i first encountered a bounty in the game, i could have sworn that it said something about the bounty simply going away, if you waited long enough (though maybe i was mixing this up with just being WANTED). but i must have been especially evil during the first mission in Strawberry, because i have a $250 bounty there that hasn't gone away in weeks of game-time.

Once you're wanted paying it off is the only way. I think the bounty stays even if you die.

The guy who did the GI review never paid any of his bounties for the whole game. Thought that was a fun role-playing idea.

two things I look forward to when something gets popular: the porn parody and

https://i.imgur.com/UHC5AdW.jpg

Does anyone else have a laggy map screen? Maybe it's just on the standard ps4, but pretty annoying.

Had my young godson around today so the only thing I could show him was hunting animals. Spent a lot of time shotgunning fish.

I am pretty impressed by the amount of animals they've put in this one.

Finished chapter 6 last, not feeling compelled to do an hour of farmhand work in the epilogue right now.

last night

Even though this game embodies a lot of what I dislike about modern AAA games (story driven, hand-holdy, easy) I’m finding myself really digging it.

The detail, polish, and atmosphere put it on another level. Just an amazing world to sink into and experience. And I know the slower, deliberate pace is a dealbreaker for a lot of ppl, but I think that’s actually really neat and refreshing tbh.

Yeah I’m playing god of war now and not really feeling it

I know it’s a totally different type of game and I’m only a few hours into gow but still

Bought mortall kombat xl for $9 too

Ha, I have not played the new GoW, but the “weary bearded tough man teaches his son the ways of this harsh world” angle they’ve pushed to the forefront is v. much an example of that AAA ~story driven experience~ I do not want.

What games do you like

The Dark Souls series basically rejuvenated my interest a couple years back when I thought I was done with games. Also love the 2016 DOOM.

Dig those for a multitude of reasons, but common thread seems to be that they’re ruthlessly precise gameplay driven experiences that deliver the same adrenaline shots I had playing games as a kid. The ~cinematic~ experience in big budget games is mostly deadly dull to me. Red Dead is a rare exception because it’s just so exceptionally lavish and smarter than most of the other ones.

Yeah i can see that

I played the doom demo and it looked pretty cool, spooky but i like those types of games

So i got tuberculosis

― F# A# (∞)

Just got to that bit. This is where I discover that the recipe that guy gave me for curing everything is bullshit :(

I figure if I avoid story missions I can ride around getting in adventures forever without my condition worsening.

I'm doing a lot of coughing and collapsing around folk.

It's taking everyone far too long to twig that Dutch is a total fucking wanker and has been since the opening scene.

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)