Hello everyone! Hope you all are having a nice day.
I read an article about the world in Red Dead Redemption 2 and how it does not matter at all. The writer made an argument that since, supposedly, hunting and fishing and other interactions in the world, do not help you build stats or fill some form of meter for collectibles, then there is no reason for the player to interact with the world at all, that the world is just window dressing. I should say that I disagree with the article wholeheartedly because I did interact with the world very much when I was playing the game. In fact, I started the game again after finishing it just so I could do more hunting or find more dinosaur bones or strange writings. But I stopped and thought, why I interacted with the world. In a sense, the writer is correct that if you do not do any of the side activities, you can still get by. While I would argue that shooting feels a lot different at the end of the game from its beginning because it is more precise and more powerful, I kind of agree that you can still get through the game without hunting or buying new weapons or even having resources such as meat or coffee or something else. After some time thinking about it, I realized why and I decided to write about it here.
But first, let's talk about the world in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. I love this game. It is perhaps my favorite AC game inching real close to AC:2 and Black Flag. One of the reasons I love it so much is its world which is full of wonder and activities to do like hunting legendary animals, tombs to discover, and so forth. I loved participating in those activities but just like other AC games, it seems like the world exists solely for my entertainment. Take the legendary animals quest for example. I stumbled on a big hog, had to kill it, and then a character tells me I should go hunt the other animals since I am the only one who can do it. She is from a group of legendary hunters but apparently they have never met anyone who could have hunted down this hog in all of Greece so they put all this responsibility on me. They are kind of correct. Which character in this universe has the powers that I do? Which one of them is descendant of the mighty Leonidas of Sparta? Which one can do a spartan kick on a dude? No one! Only I, Kassandra, can do it. So, in a way, these animals were all just chilling and waiting for me to rise and come and hunt them. It seems like their only reason for existence is to be hunted down by me. Without me, they would have had no purpose. It all makes sense since I am the chosen one and as chosen one does, she hunts big animals. The same can be said for other side activities. I am the only one who can attack bandit camps. find buried treasures, etc. There is nothing inherently wrong with this type of design but it is a factor of placing all the responsibilities on the protagonist by making them "the chosen one".
To be fair, in RDR2, only Arthur Morgan goes out and finds treasures, hunts legendary animals, raids bandit camps. But he is not obligated to do it because he is the only one who can do it. He does it because they are out there. For legendary animals, at first he goes with Hosea to hunt the bear for as an activity to do. After their first interaction with the bear, Hosea brings up his age and how he is too old to do these things anymore and gives the map for these animals to Arthur. So, there is no "only you can do it Arthur because you have been chosen". Moreover, the legendary bear is just living among other animals. And so is the wolf, and elk. You do see people from time to time, hunting animals so perhaps they could have stumbled upon one of these animals too had they had the map. Arthur is not special and the animals are not in the world because they were waiting for him to come hunt them down. The only thing special about Arthur is that he has got the map and so, he has a chance to locate them and hunt them down. This makes the world feel more authentic while it is basically the same thing as AC: Odyssey. Instead of creating the myth of a hero who is so spectacular that the world is designed to bend to his/her will, the hero is made out to be a lucky guy who has accidentally found himself to be in a privileged position, something could have happened to someone else in the world. This means if Arthur ceases to exist, the world does not fall apart but rather endures. In the world of AC: Odyssey, you are getting pushed to do these activities because you are the chosen one so the world is desperate for your attention. In RDR2, you just get a nudge and the world does not care whether you oblige it or not, or at least does not show that it cares.
So, by not obligating the player to go and explore the world since he is the only person who can solve all the mysteries and hunt all the animals and such and instead letting the player know they could explore if they wanted to and the reward would be the exploration itself, I felt free. I knew there was no urge or hurry so I took my time and did the activities that truly piqued my interest. There are gameplay benefits for hunting legendary animals but I was interested in a few of them, for example the elk would have given me the ability to get better pelts, so I decided to go look for that one. In doing that, I felt like a hunter. I felt like Arthur telling himself what is important and going for it, instead of someone who just wanted to tick off some stuff on a to-do list. Without anything else attached to the world and the world being itself, I felt like I was living in it rather than playing in a large playground made specifically for me. I would go fishing to calm my nerves, especially when things started to look bad for the camp and me. I would set up my tent whenever it was night and a storm was brewing and I did not want to ride in that weather. I would cook a couple of things, set up the tent, read my journal, and sleep. In the morning, I would brew coffee to get energized and resume my riding. This all sounds crazy because, none of it makes that much of a difference. But it was because of lack of other factors being attached to these activities which would result in the game screaming at me: "I AM A GAME. PLAY ME!", I felt different. Also, because Arthur would run out of stamina and health core would drain, I knew my character would benefit from a sleep so I would benefit from it as well. I went treasure hunting because one of the maps I found was actually stolen from some poor sole so I decided to find the gold bars to spite him! I would go hunting mainly for improving the camp or just bringing food, because I did not want to be empty handed whenever I returned to camp after days of exploring outside of it. These are all me thinking like the central character. One of the reasons is to make the character a regular guy and make the world be there with or without him. This grounds the game in ways not so many other open-world games tend to do, because they think if they don't make every activity a big deal or every quest related to the fate of the world, then players would not have enough motivation to go explore it. It might be true, considering how the article was actually arguing the same point, but the exact opposite is true too as I just described. You can dismiss all of it but the game is so good at establishing a sense of place that, if you let go a little bit, you can be completely immersed in its world.
Another point I wanted to make for the world in RDR2 is to do with the narrative so it might be a little spoilery, even though I will not address anything happening in the main story, directly.
World is a hostile place to the people in RDR2, and not just the Van Der Linde gang. The mountains are fiercely cold and freezing, the swamps are filled with monstrous animals ready to pick apart people, and caves can be resting places for many unlucky people. As Arthur, you cannot dominate this world. You cannot run and jump on the rocks and cliffs without hurting yourself. You see many people getting bitten by snakes or attacked by other wild animals. It is a powerful, cruel world and it is also immortal. The gang and central characters can be brutal and powerful as well but they live a certain amount of time and with how things are going, that time is getting shorter and shorter. The sense of hopelessness characters get during the last few chapters of the story of the whole world bearing down on them is amplified by the environment in which they end up living. In the beginning, they are perched on a flat land overlooking beautiful landscapes, but over the course of the story, the environment becomes smaller and tighter and foggier, as if it is trying to suffocate them one by one. It seems to give the characters a message which is: I am immortal, you are not. I am not resistant to change, you are getting killed by it. I will be remembered but will you? This is coming from a world which these characters consider to be their homes. At one point Arthur says they are in a big country and somewhere will be found for them. But it does not seem to happen and everything gets smaller and smaller. This is what I perceived as I found myself not enjoying the exploration or hunting when there was no contextual reason for me to do it anymore and I felt as if the world had tuned its back on me and hated me. I don't know if everybody else had the same take on it but I don't think I am very far off the mark considering some of the dialogue and environmental assets used in later chapters of the game. I also think, I would not have come to these realizations had the world been as needy or submissive as other ones in games like AC or even Spider-Man. I think the most similar one was the world in The Last of Us which gave me the same vibe.
In conclusion, not every game needs to be the same. Just because RDR2 does not provide an obviously gamey reason to explore its open world, does not mean it is not worthy of exculpation and analysis. Every game has a purpose and most of the time the purpose is to entertain the players. But every now and then, we get a game like RDR2 or TLoU, or Spec Ops, or Witcher 3 which are doing something different with tropes of their respective genre. So, instead of dismissing them because we think video games are all just high tech toys, we could take a moment and look at them differently, based on their own context. If the world of RDR2 was not so fully realized and working functionally all on its own, then I would have agreed to call it unnecessary such as the world in Mafia 3. But the truth is, that is not the case here. I hope we can all grow more sophisticated as games are getting way more sophisticated to play.
Thanks for being here!
Signing off!
/Mehrdad
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