Red Dead Redemption

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"

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.

i agree that it's poorly explained. answers to your questions, and then a few general things that helped me:

- to craft different kinds of arrows (like Improved, which can take down larger animals with one hit, and Game, which are for killing smaller animals without damaging their pelt), you need "Flight Feathers", which you can get by shooting many kinds of birds that you run across. You can craft the arrows from your satchel (i think it's one of the options in the Items subsection) or in the fire way on the side of the camp (not the main fire, because that would be too simple)

- you can take the skins to the butcher in town if you're just looking for some money. you can also donate them to Pearson in your camp. to upgrade your satchel from Pearson you need a variety of different kinds of "perfect" (more on that in a sec) skins. you can just donate perfect skins to Pearson as you find them, and he'll add them to the inventory so you don't have to carry them all around with you at once.

- there's also a Trapper that you'll find as you progress. he moves from town to town. bring "legendary" pelts to him and he'll make you goofy clothing items.

- there are different quality levels of animals and the pelts you get from them. they have one, two, or three stars. when hunting, you can use your binoculars to see the quality of the animal. in the pic below you can see three tiny marks by the animal's name:

https://i.imgur.com/OKOfwZf.jpg?1

i think you might have to "study" the animal species before it'll give you the quality information. so when you see a new animal species and have an option to study it first, you should do that.

THEN, even if you kill a three star, pristine animal, you have to do it in a "clean" way that will preserve the quality of the pelt. sometimes you can do it by just shooting once, in the head or near the heart. but you improve your odds by using the appropriate weapon for the animal. again, i think if you "study" the animal or look it up in the compendium, it'll often tell you which weapon to use. improved arrows will help a lot, game arrows for small animals, using the varmint rifle for smaller animals instead of regular rifles, etc - all that stuff improves your odds. when you skin the animal it'll let you know what quality of pelt you ended up with.

It turns out that I did NOT actually know how to play dominoes.

i finished the main story last night (still gotta get through the epilogue, which apparently is quite long in itself) and no spoilers but i found chapter 6 tremendously moving, moreso than any video game i've played really. the ending was fairly standard but the side stuff around it held such a sense of sadness and resignation, and even though it annoyingly had every mission on the opposite side of the map from the next one, you start to appreciate this teeming wilderness in a different way. and it's coupled with the fact that you have the real world knowledge that it's all gone away or will be gone very soon, burnt up and ruined by the leviticus cornwalls of the worrld.

i wish they thought of a better way to do the legendary hunts other than "find the three glowing things which causes the animal to spawn directly in front of you then blast it in dead eye bc you can't ruin the pelt". feel kind of bad killing these beautiful animals in such an undignified way.

i had really high honor the whole time so i kind of want to do another playthrough with evil arthur.

i'm still planning on doing Online mode after i finish up the story, but everyone who hasn't tried it yet should log-in today for free shit:

"Rockstar’s changes come after an earlier announcement on Monday that they would be adjusting both the game’s economy and implementing bug fixes. In addition to increasing rewards and lowering prices, they are giving 250 in-game dollars and 15 gold bars to any player who plays the game through midnight PST today. It should be enough to help players make up for lost time in multiplayer playlists."

i guess they've lowered the prices of a lot of stuff in the shop, balancing prices etc: https://kotaku.com/rockstar-makes-early-adjustments-to-red-dead-online-s-g-1830912146