Icemael

@bathala: It's definitely a very action-heavy game, but if you play it in a dark room by yourself, with headphones on, the volume turned up and the difficulty set to Hard or above, it won't exactly be scary, but certainly very atmospheric and tense. Play it while trying to be entertaining for a stream, constantly talking to multiple friends over Skype about unrelated things, rushing through every part of the game and paying no attention to anything going on and you will have the experience seen in these videos.

@fedallah said:

That's old English, not Norse. There has never been any reference to Saturn in the names of the weekdays in the Nordic region. In old Norse the name for Saturday was laugardagr = "washing day" (i.e. it was the day of the week when you took a bath) and all modern Nordic languages retain this, e.g. "lördag" here in Sweden.

Naturally, we also retain the tradition of only bathing once a week. That's why people here can enjoy surströmming as a delicacy -- our battle-hardened noses don't even notice the smell.

This looks unfinished. The visuals, I mean. It looks like a proof-of-concept build with hastily and sloppily thrown together placeholder art that was never meant to be shown to the public. The offensively awful colour composition, the lack of aliasing, the ugly blocky models, the cheap smudgy textures (on the surfaces that have textures at all), the fonts, the way object names and outlines look when they show through walls etc. etc. This Chung guy should have found an artist to collaborate with. One-man game development is best left to multitalented people (and even those are better off working with a good team).

@bbqbram: If I want a good Western story with good Western aesthetics and don't care about game mechanics I'll go watch some Western films that pull off the setting, the music, the characters etc. a billion times better than anything Rockstar could ever hope to accomplish. Not only do The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Unforgiven have infinitely more "soul" than Red Dead Redemption (which has a "soul" only by video game standards), they also don't insult me by having me spend the vast majority of the time playing a bad video game instead of enjoying the story. Imagine if while you were watching Once Upon a Time in the West the movie was interrupted every once in a while and you were forced to play a dull, drawn-out, poorly designed combat sequence to get to the next "cutscene." Going through the story path in RDR was sort of like that, only with worse cutscenes.

There is certainly a fun novelty to being able to run around in and interact with a well-realized Western world, but that only lasts so long when the part where it's interactive is trash. The combat system and mission design in RDR are so bad that I suspect the game would actually have been significantly more enjoyable if there had been less interactivity.

@humanity: The combat scenarios all involved either a) shooting people in open areas without cover, which there is nothing interesting about unless it involves things like spacing, crowd control, high-speed dodging, precision aiming to set up powerful follow-up attacks etc. -- the kind of things you'll find in varying degrees in games like Resident Evil 4-6, the Dead Space series, Vanquish etc. and absolutely none of which is in RDR, where instead you just have dumb simplistic shooting with no nuance whatsoever -- or b) shooting people in areas with cover. Now, one of the most important parts of the combat in a game with a cover system is the level design (unless it's something like Vanquish where there's so much else going on that it would've been a great game even without any cover system at all), and in RDR the level design barely even exists. I'm not talking about random encounters in the wilderness where obviously it's not going to be a complex interesting environment, I'm talking about the areas designed specifically for combat scenarios in story missions. It's like no thought whatsoever went into making any of those areas interesting to navigate and position yourself in. Not only do you not need to think about tactical positioning and repositioning given how trivial the encounters are, you couldn't even if you wanted to because the environments don't allow room for it.

It's just poor design all around.

I remember this game being sort of like the worst of the Assassin's Creed games. Beautifully realized world that's fun to travel around in, but bad mission design, bad combat system, bad controls, bad game design all around. But big complex cities packed with people, architectural wonders and multi-story buildings to climb and jump between are more interesting environments than a big flat wasteland with a few tiny half-empty towns, and blending into crowds, fighting with a large variety of melee weapons and jumping down on dudes from rooftops with dual hidden wrist blades is more fun than doing nothing but shoot guys with some of the worst third-person shooting controls of the last generation.

This is nonsense. Was Nathan Drake designed, written and voice acted by a wisecracking acrobatic treasure hunter who risks his life repeatedly and kills hundreds of people with no remorse? How many dwarves are written, designed and voice acted by actual dwarves? What about soldiers? Scientists? How many children, male or female, aren't voice acted by adult women rather than actual kids? How many kids are written by kids?

This doesn't just go for video games. Take the film Gravity. Are Sandra Bullock and George Clooney actual astronauts? Is the director? The writer? Or take Shakespeare's King Lear -- how many kings and princesses were involved in the creation of that play? Was Shakespeare just a cheap hack paying "token lip service" to the kind princesses of the world when he wrote Cordelia? What about all the novelists who speak through the mouths and actions of a multitude of characters that are wildly different from each other and also from the authors themselves? Was Melville a one-legged man who hated a whale with a passion? Was Mary Shelley an 8-feet-tall artificially created monster, and also the Swiss male creator of that monster? Was Tolstoy a woman involved in an affair, and the man she was having an affair with, and the man she was cheating on, and numberless other related people of varying ages, classes and genders? Isn't the fact that they weren't the very thing that makes their talents so impressive, and that allowed them to create the great masterpieces that they did?

When you say that "the message is that our experiences matter so little outside of token lip service that anyone might take up the torch and create a simulated version of us," you are spitting on the entire history of art. It's the job of artists (whether authors, painters, film directors, actors, video game designers etc.) to create simulated versions of people and events that are, to a greater or lesser degree, foreign to them. It's what they've been doing for thousands of years -- probably way longer if we include oral tradition -- and you will be hard pressed to find even a single great masterpiece that does not contain countless examples of just that. It is so essential to art of all kinds that one could even use it as a pretty good (but hardly perfect, since there are other relevant factors as well) metric of an artist's capabilities: the less capable of stepping outside of himself (or herself) and portraying something different he is, the worse he is as an artist. What you speak of so disdainfully is the very essence of artistic creation.

yeah dude and jesus was a monster lol, what a terrible person. how could you look up to someone whose ideas ultimately led to the inquisition burning people at the stake, to persecution of the jewish faith, and to martin luther, who said the jews should all be killed? jesus is basically responsible for hitler! that makes him, like, the worst guy in the history of guys! and people STILL admire his crap about loving everyone! if only they realized what it leads to... but i guess everyone can't be as insightful as me lol...