This video is sponsored by GXC, who I’ll take a brief moment to thank. GXC is a
platform for gamers and game creators, where developers can easily upload and showcase
their projects and where gamers can play them. In GXC you’ll be able to find any type of indie
games, from small titles by aspiring developers to bigger ones made with
more resources and experience—all able to be played instantly, natively in your browser!
There are hundreds of different games available for free on GXC and the list keeps growing every
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thirteen minutes—probably incredibly easy to beat, so why not do so yourself! With leaderboards,
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and now on with the show! ---
There is a moment I experienced upon revisiting Red Dead Redemption 2 that should have annoyed
me to the point of turning off the game… and yet, it only compelled me to play more,
to invest myself in its open world in a way I hadn’t even done my first playthrough way back
when. Nestled in the early game (although still several hours in for me, I’d forgotten the sheer
size of Red Dead 2’s story) is one of a couple of tutorials for the game’s hunting system—an
adventure undertaken alongside aging outlaw Hosea Matthews, and a mission that teaches
you not only the mechanics of hunting, but readies you for the slower, more focused mindset, the time
investment you’re likely to have to put in here. Over the two in-game days in which the mission
takes place, Hosea guides you through the process of acquiring a horse, getting meat,
setting up camp, cooking meals and preparing bait for larger game—each stage punctuated
by the requisite lengthy horse rides and the game’s divisive (but in my eyes still deeply
effective) attention to detail in its animations and willingness to let moments linger. And this is
all in service of pursuing the Legendary Bear—one of many mighty animals you can choose to go up
against; their hides worth considerably more than the various fauna you come across on your travels.
In this instance, once the scripted fright of the tutorial is over and Hosea heads back to camp, I
decide to stick around and see if I can’t nab this dastardly bear right here and now. I slowly prowl
the area for a good ten, fifteen minutes or so, looking for any sign of the predator until finally
I get my chance—rather inelegantly taking down my prey and collecting the prize; ready to make the
sizeable journey back to camp with trophy in tow. And then my horse trips up on a bridge and dies. I
pick up the bear pelt in full knowledge that, in the absence of a wild horse appearing,
I am now having to walk all the way back to camp; I stumble into an inexplicably hostile
area and am promptly killed—I try running back in to get the pelt, I get ganked again
and finally… the hide is gone. My reward for all of that time and effort, seemingly up in smoke.
Here, I hadn’t just failed a side mission, cut down and respawning at a checkpoint ready to try
again—this felt like an event I had straight up lost—there’s a difference there. You know, in the
game’s eyes I had completed the tutorial, in any RPG it would come up saying Quest Completed and
I’d get showered in experience points and loot. But Red Dead didn’t care, it didn’t foreground
that loss—there wasn’t even the kind of ceremony you get in, say, The Witcher, where you go to a
different area too soon and suddenly the previous quests are locked off and the game lets you know
that. Instead, this just kind of hung there. It felt inevitable; an uncomfortable reality of
existing in this world that one just has to accept after a while—one of many examples I would come
across where the story of the mission would extend way beyond the mere objectives of that quest.
And of course there is a way to retrieve lost legendary pelts, but the game merely flashes
a small, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it message at the top of the screen—it requires you to go
even further out of your way to claim your reward that, at the end of the day, hardly seems worth
the vast effort you’ve likely expended to get it. And as I say, it’s far from the only example of
this kind of thing happening. I’d get ambushed by the O’Driscolls in one of the game’s more
emergent scenarios, and notice the wagon they were lugging behind them—my video game brain suddenly
associating that and the loot it might be carrying with my prize for surviving the encounter.
What I couldn’t have counted on was a passer-by registering the final O’Driscoll being taken out
as, well, what it is—murder—and suddenly a mad chase ensues where I take out this one person
by shooting out his… tyres so to speak, which another civilian (rightly) saw as an act of
animal cruelty—resulting in a whole other chase to try and take them out in a different way;
one that doesn’t arouse yet more suspicion from the authorities. And, of course,
silencing all those people returning to the scene of that original ambush many moons later,
I find my wagon, my prize, long gone. It’s not that the contents of said wagon
would have been game-changingly brilliant or anything, there might not have been any contents
to speak of whatsoever—but it still didn’t stop that pang setting in, one that had started to
become all too familiar across my many hours of playtime, that I’d lost out on something.
It’s interesting because, for all the game has its many issues with its main mission design,
the examples I’ve outlined speak to an overall subversion in terms of how we typically
view mission structure, in a way that actually ends up bolstering the game’s world and themes,
even if it means that I sometimes lose out on cash or a few healing items or whatever.
See, typical missions in games, especially in other Rockstar titles,
generally instill in players the assurance that if you do the thing, complete the objective, that
the reward immediately follows. You know, “shoot those dudes over” there means immediate cash in
the wallet. How Red Dead 2 shifts this, then, is in the idea that the objective has no intrinsic,
in-game value—that is to say, great, you skinned a bear. If you actually want anything meaningful
for that effort beyond some meat to cook later, you’d better get that item across to a vendor,
and there sure as shit aren’t any nearby. Merely collecting the reward itself becomes
a multi-stage process, with its own potential for truly emergent narrative that simply won’t
play out the same for every player; where you end up hoping you won’t get jumped or robbed or
trip up or fall off an unexpected cliff in the middle of nowhere. Some players toil and get
the reward, while some players toil and don’t. And while some of this might seem like simply
frustrating, inconsistent game logic that leads to those moments where you can ostensibly lose
missions, the reason I found it so compelling was that the absurdist chaos it evoked—that feeling
that anything could go wrong at any minute—felt consistent with the nature of the world that
protagonist Arthur finds himself hurtling through; unpredictable, unfair and unknowably complex.
It's a world where things just… happen. A man comes to you asking for help with a snake
bite—you know, not exactly as organic an event as its sudden appearance would have you believe,
likely everyone will encounter this dude at some point—but it’s a tale in itself, one that was
being told pre-bite, and will continue post-bite, and outside of this and potentially one encounter
later on that’s just as fleeting, none of that detail gets filled in for you. You either do the
dude a favour, leave him, kill him, mess around with a lasso, putting Arthur’s rugged yet poetic
temprement to one side for just a minute in order to indulge in his more mischievous tendencies...
either way, this guy comes into your life, then he leaves—same as so many other side characters, each
with their own narratives and lives, comprising untold chaos and mundanity in equal measure,
just as yours does—even as the protagonist of this video game, you don’t inherently matter
more than the other people of this world. It’s this philosophy that drives the game’s
approach to your rewards for side missions, and moreso than the dense,
layered characterisation of your gang or the attention to detail in animations, this is
what lends the world its truly human quality, its paralyzing sense of scale that extends way beyond
simply how big the map is. It’s in the fact that you struggle as everyone else struggles,
and that sometimes those struggles are entirely ephemeral; losing that hard-earned pelt or missing
out on that reward ends up as merely one more stitch on the tapestry of one person’s life that
no one else might ever remember or witness. Fellow YouTuber pal Razbuten recently made a
video talking about the game being deliberately frustrating and in terms of the main narrative I
definitely agree with that point—sections like Guarma use the limiting of your freedoms as a
pacing device. But in these side missions, these random occurrences and threads that you end up
pulling on during your time in the open world, those moments where you can lose and all your
work amounts to nought, the unpredictability of those scenarios and the world governing
that unpredictability ends up completely avoiding tedium, at least for me. Rather,
far from frustration, those moments where I lose are actually exciting, compelling—the result of
experiences and stories that are mine alone. It’s this side mission and encounter design
that makes the world feel so much bigger than just you, reflecting the cold, indifferent brutality of
the era being depicted—if you, if Arthur can’t even be guaranteed the security of something as
simple as a reward for his work, something games have trained us to expect over time, you know,
it stands to reason that the ever-encroaching changing of the times that gang leader Dutch
gradually loses his mind in his desperate, flailing fight against,
is a fight that Arthur might feel increasingly sceptical about buying into after a certain point.
Similarly, and especially knowing the tragedy with which such a futile struggle ends up playing out,
I guess I’ve found a similar comfort in largely rejecting that fight now I’m revisiting the
game—I’m not really bothering with the critical path this time around—instead
spending hours and hours just being in the open world, embracing the unknowable chaos of it all,
even if it might result in a lot of effort that quickly and unexpectedly goes bad and
leaves me with nothing to show for it. In a style similar to the space of Breath
of the Wild, not only does such an approach make those small moments where you do succeed—where
you manage to, say, get a deer carcass back to camp, something that you might not even really
benefit from mechanically if you don’t bother eating the resultant stew or whatever—most
importantly it speaks to this idea that the larger reward, it would seem,
is just getting one more day of experiences—one more story, no matter how unfortunate said story
might be. It’s systems impressively bolstering narrative and themes in a way that I didn’t
necessarily pick up on my first go around. And at the end of it all, sure, sometimes you
want a game like Forza, for instance, that purely exists to make you feel good at all times—but
equally, as Red Dead 2 has now proven to me, sometimes in order to experience the true elation
of winning, there’s a lot to be said for a game that has the confidence to really let you lose.
Thank you again to GXC for sponsoring the video—check it out via my link in the
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Kimball, Jordan Middler and Charlie Yang. And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on
Games. Thank you all so much for watching, stay safe and I will see you all next time.