Red Dead Redemption II

Good Morning Friends! I spent another night roaming around the countryside in Red Dead Redemption II. This is something that I have been told by friends who have played the game… but this world is damned gorgeous. Once I managed to slow down my own pace of only tackling a single quest at a time, the entire pace of the world seemingly slowed as well. I sat down to play this and before I knew it three hours had passed and it felt like minutes. This is really only something that happens to me in a large way when I get into the “just one more turn” cycle of a 4x game. There are so many times that I am on my way to do one thing, and a side event will pop up that catches my attention. I lifted a horse off a lady and took her back to town for example. I dig the way that the game gives you temporary waypoints for these activities without completely removing what was your previously tracked waypoint.

When I first started the game over a year ago, it was after playing Witcher 3. As a result, when it came time to name my horse I named it Roach since that horse was such a reliable companion. So far this Roach also seems to be an overwhelmingly reliable companion. Similarly, Roach seems to always be tied up nearby whenever I need a ride. I got waylayed by the O’Driscoll gang that just happened to have a stagecoach. After dispatching my assailants I hid their bodies and took the Stage Coach off to the fence to get a little pocket money. I wondered exactly how this would work, but after parking the Coach in the barn… my trusty Roach was tied up on the fence line waiting for me. It seems like I picked a fitting name.

The other thing that I have noticed is that while I am a bandit… I tend to make the good guy choices more often than not. I did not like being an enforcer for a money lender, and quite honestly wish I had an option to just give them some of my money as a result. It seems like I make more than enough money killing O’Driscolls who are constantly hunting me it seems. I made the mistake of riding into Blackwater the other night when the waypoint system went nuts and tried to take me through there. It is disturbing just how fast the roaming bands of lawmen found me. I’ve got someone down in that area that the game is pointing me towards and I am not really sure how best to get to them.

All in all this game is acting as the perfect diversion to keep me from burning out on Path of Exile. The new season dates have been announced and I know in a few weeks I will be grinding up an entirely new set of characters. I am pretty set on playing the Inquisitor, and as a result, I am cool to taper off my playtime for the moment and dive into something completely single-player. It is funny how for me at least I have to be in the right frame of mind to attach to a game. This was true for Guild Wars 2 and Path of Exile that I bounced off so many times, and has been true so far with Red Dead Redemption II. I have to be in the mood for a specific sort of game experience to really open up to it. I think this is why the whole AggroChat Gameclub thing galled me so much in the past, is that it forced me to play a game that I wasn’t necessarily into it at that exact moment… and wound up ruining the experience of playing those games because my brain viewed it as homework.

Sometimes I get hit by a whim and have to indulge it. Last night was one of those nights and the particular whim was to boot up Red Dead Redemption II and see if I could get into it. There is something about the style of game that Rockstar makes that I do not love. Namely, I greatly prefer the open-world questing style of something like Witcher 3, where I can load up on a bunch of quests and then do them willy-nilly as I roam the countryside. RDR2 however requires you to focus on a single quest chain until it is complete and harkens back to an older on-rails style of mission-based questing. I think this realization ultimately caused me to bounce from this game when I first attempted to play it. However knowing this and expecting this, I had hoped that maybe I could return with the right frame of mind and actually enjoy myself.

In the grand scheme of things I think it worked. I enjoyed my evening roaming around on horseback and doing small adventures, including busting a character that I do not like very much at all… out of a jail. That mission was “a lot” but we survived… but I am guessing I won’t be able to go back to the town of Strawberry very soon. I also spent some time saving a drunkard preacher from getting hit by a train and am slowly working my way through the quests that I know I have. I am guessing there are also bounties that I can run for the local sheriff, which might be a good idea given that I have done a few unsavory things lately.

Arthur Morgan is a really interesting character because he is not exactly what I would expect from the hero of a western adventure. He seems like one of the background characters from something similar to a Bioware game… that has been suddenly thrust into the forefront of the adventure. He is not unlikeable but also not terribly charismatic either. I guess this quality makes it fairly easy for you to insert your own intentions into his character because he doesn’t seem to have any particularly strong leanings from the start. It seems like his defining characteristics are his reliability and willingness to do whatever needs to be done. I have a feeling before we finish this adventure that those traits are going to be used and betrayed.

I am uncertain how often I am going to be returning to the winding world of Red Dead Redemption II, but I enjoyed my time spent better than my last foray.