Red Dead Redemption

[RobertR1]

Turning the shooting to "expert" makes it a lot better. Easier to control the cross hair and get more headshots.

As for the game, it's beautiful to look at and just as wonderful to play through. Wasted all night in free roaming in a party so I have no clue what the SP hold but from what I played last night, they certainly got the "feel" right. I basically didn't follow the game at all so I went in blind and came out happy.

 

[Billy Idol]

Huh 100 Mio...this is a joke right!?

Makers Rockstar Games are thought to have spent up to $100million on the long-awaited project.

Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbi...s-players-relive-Wild-West.html#ixzz0oJjc0wTc

 

[warcrow]

Did you install the game on HDD?

Yessir!

 

[Billy Idol]

Yessir!

Thanks for the answer! I heard that it rans much better with HDD install, that is why I wondered!

Can you maybe give a hint about the mission variety? Did you "had a chance" to experience the checkpoints system? How is the main story?

Thanks for your impressions!!

 

[Tap In]

metacritic review of the reviews.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Hey Scott,

a question regarding the shooting mechanism. I did not play GTA4 to the point where I had to shoot so I don't know how it feels.

Is it for instance comparable to the shooting in Uncharted?

Aiming feels a lot better than GTA4. You have much better control of the sensitivity, even though some users would probably want to be able to turn it up even higher. I think I'm near max, which is not nearly as sensitive as other shooters. I'm at a sweet spot, near max, which might be 2/3 of what other shooters may offer.

As for the other shooting intangibles, like sound and impact, this is top notch. Shooting a guy off his horse, and watching him very realistically fall to the ground, where his own horse tramples him, is pretty much video game magic. They did a really nice job in making all of the ragdoll and tumbling look realistic, rather than a human meat sack without any bones in their body, like many games do. You can shoot a guys feet out from under him while he's running, shoot off his hat, shoot a gun out of his hand etc, and all of the reactions look very convincing. I'd say real, but I've never actually shot at anyone before. Cover mechanics are simple. It would be nice to have some more cover-to-cover type features, but what's there works. If you're in cover underneath a window, and hit LT to aim, your guy will smash the window with his elbow before popping up, which is a nice touch. Oh, and the guns don't produce bright muzzle flashes, or shoot out huge flames like in an action movie. You just get a nice powerful pop and some nicely done muzzle smoke, like you'd see in a western movie.

The one weapon oddity I noticed in multi-player, and not sure about single-player, is the throwing knives. Fun to use, easy to aim, and the knives stick out of the bodies and the enemies react according to where they are hit. But for some reason if you throw a knife at a wall, you don't see it sticking out of the wall. Thought that was kind of a crappy omission. It would be cool in multi-player to hear a knife whiz by, and turn around to see it sticking out of the wall beside you.

If you want to see a really cool combination of physics and animation, find a steep hill, take a short sprint, jump and watch your guy roll to the bottom. I think I had a 20 second roll where I stopped when I hit a tree. The guy does a bit of a tuck, when he can, and goes tumbling in a comical manner.

 

[nightshade]

Initially I had a lot of problem with Horse riding...while moving in a pack.
I either used to get left behind or go ahead of everyone...I had no idea that I could just keep the button pressed & my horse would maintain his speed according to the speed of my friend's horse.

Blame the tutorial for that (which lasts for a very small duration on screen), it never mentions about you being able to go at the same speed as your friends by just having the button pressed...all it mentions is that "once you gain enough speed keep the button pressed to maintain the speed"

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

So what's the balance of players? It seems to me that only warcrow is playing the single player campaign.

Did the rest of you just jump right into multiplayer? Does it feel like the multiplayer will have legs? Do you get to keep your multiplayer "accomplishments" in future multiplayer games or when you go into single player?

I'm desperately trying to hold off buying this until tomorrow. I've got Friday off, so that seems like a better deal than buying it today and being up all night playing it when I've got stuff to finish off at work on Thursday!

 

[Malo]

I was checking out the bar in Armadillo last night and started hearing a bunch of yelling and screaming. Spinning around to see what was going on, I ran out front to find one of the patrons with a prostitute on the patio knifing her in the gut over and over. I stood there shocked until he got up and ran off and I came to my senses. I proceeded to gun him down with my revolver.

I didn't get honor or lose honor I assume because I didn't save her and he was a criminal.

 

[Scott_Arm]

You have a persistent player that you use online. If you look at your journal you have challenges to complete in free roam and pvp. There are weapon and stat challenges that are mostly to be completed in pvp, on top of the pvp challenges.

As you complete challenges, you get new exp to rank up, and as you rank up you get new challenges to complete. An example of a free roam challenge might be "Shoot 5 flying birds from a moving vehicle(carriage)", "Achieve a bounty rating of $5000", "Complete gang hideout ..." etc. The challenges are usually categorized and each challenge has a number of ranks to complete, like in Call of Duty. So for example, the bounty rating challenge starts at x number of dollars and each rank it increases. The challenges are hidden until you unlock them, so I don't know how many there are. Seems there are A LOT.

As you rank up you unlock new guns, new outfits, new mounts all of which you carry between free roam and competitive matches. Your single-player character is a separate entity.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

Cool, thanks Scott.

 

[Billy Idol]

As for the other shooting intangibles, like sound and impact, this is top notch. Shooting a guy off his horse, and watching him very realistically fall to the ground, where his own horse tramples him, is pretty much video game magic. They did a really nice job in making all of the ragdoll and tumbling look realistic, rather than a human meat sack without any bones in their body, like many games do. You can shoot a guys feet out from under him while he's running, shoot off his hat, shoot a gun out of his hand etc, and all of the reactions look very convincing. I'd say real, but I've never actually shot at anyone before. Cover mechanics are simple. It would be nice to have some more cover-to-cover type features, but what's there works. If you're in cover underneath a window, and hit LT to aim, your guy will smash the window with his elbow before popping up, which is a nice touch. Oh, and the guns don't produce bright muzzle flashes, or shoot out huge flames like in an action movie. You just get a nice powerful pop and some nicely done muzzle smoke, like you'd see in a western movie.

Hmm, this sounds great!! Thanks!

 

[dragonelite]

Aiming feels a lot better than GTA4. You have much better control of the sensitivity, even though some users would probably want to be able to turn it up even higher. I think I'm near max, which is not nearly as sensitive as other shooters. I'm at a sweet spot, near max, which might be 2/3 of what other shooters may offer.

As for the other shooting intangibles, like sound and impact, this is top notch. Shooting a guy off his horse, and watching him very realistically fall to the ground, where his own horse tramples him, is pretty much video game magic. They did a really nice job in making all of the ragdoll and tumbling look realistic, rather than a human meat sack without any bones in their body, like many games do. You can shoot a guys feet out from under him while he's running, shoot off his hat, shoot a gun out of his hand etc, and all of the reactions look very convincing. I'd say real, but I've never actually shot at anyone before. Cover mechanics are simple. It would be nice to have some more cover-to-cover type features, but what's there works. If you're in cover underneath a window, and hit LT to aim, your guy will smash the window with his elbow before popping up, which is a nice touch. Oh, and the guns don't produce bright muzzle flashes, or shoot out huge flames like in an action movie. You just get a nice powerful pop and some nicely done muzzle smoke, like you'd see in a western movie.

The one weapon oddity I noticed in multi-player, and not sure about single-player, is the throwing knives. Fun to use, easy to aim, and the knives stick out of the bodies and the enemies react according to where they are hit. But for some reason if you throw a knife at a wall, you don't see it sticking out of the wall. Thought that was kind of a crappy omission. It would be cool in multi-player to hear a knife whiz by, and turn around to see it sticking out of the wall beside you.

If you want to see a really cool combination of physics and animation, find a steep hill, take a short sprint, jump and watch your guy roll to the bottom. I think I had a 20 second roll where I stopped when I hit a tree. The guy does a bit of a tuck, when he can, and goes tumbling in a comical manner.

Cool hope more games will start using euphoria engine that covers the physics and animation in the Rage engine.

And glad to hear aiming and cover system is better then gta 4.

 

[slider]

Woohoo, shipped this morning. Should arrive soon alongside 3D Dot Heroes, Alan Wake, MNR and Pro Evo (only because none of my friends bought Fifa...).

Ahh, backlog... you keep growing.

 

[Malo]

As you complete challenges, you get new exp to rank up, and as you rank up you get new challenges to complete. An example of a free roam challenge might be "Shoot 5 flying birds from a moving vehicle(carriage)", "Achieve a bounty rating of $5000", "Complete gang hideout ..." etc. The challenges are usually categorized and each challenge has a number of ranks to complete, like in Call of Duty. So for example, the bounty rating challenge starts at x number of dollars and each rank it increases. The challenges are hidden until you unlock them, so I don't know how many there are. Seems there are A LOT.
.

Yes there are a LOT. The guide has the full list, couple of pages worth.

Played this again last night. This really is a fantastic looking game, despite the PS3 issues. They have done an amazing job with this engine.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Ok, an update on multi-player and some control issues in general.

One thing I didn't really pick up on early, that was also a problem in GTA4 and should have been changed, is the lack of "hip fire" in certain situations. You always have to press LT to aim before you shoot. If you're in cover, you can blind fire, but you don't get a reticle to even approximate where you're shooting. I highly doubt it would ever be useful because the enemies on horses, or even on foot, will run or move to fast to hit them.

As for multi-player, I'm enjoying free roam. If you get too many people, all of the gang hideouts are too easy. They need some kind of difficulty option for the missions. Haven't played much public free roam yet. There are definitely a few things that could use improving. For one, the gang hideouts can be repeated, but if you get a huge posse you can rip through them so fast, you'll be finished all of them in a short period of time, unless you ride all the way to each one. If you fast travel, you'll have it done quickly. There's still all the other challenges to do, but the gang hideouts are the mission based ones. What's with the hunter challenges? I have no idea where they are, or how to find them. I'm hoping they unlock at a certain rank? Maybe more gang hideouts will unlock? An easy way to increase the life of free roam would have been to include the random encounters from the single-player. I think I'm at rank 13 or 14, and I know you can go at least as high as 50, but you couldn't get that high playing free roam, not without repeating content many times over. The free roam feels a little bit like GTA4 did when you finished all the missions. There just didn't seem to be a lot to do. In single-player, you constantly come across random events that make the world feel more "alive".

Now the big one was we tried some gang matches, and the experience was pretty awful. In theory, it's cool, but everything about it just felt wrong. For one, you don't carry any of the unlocks from your free roam. In the gang matches you are given a fixed kit based on the game, and better weapons are scattered throughout the map. So, part of the game is just map knowledge of where to get a good gun quickly. The spread between the usefulness of the weapons is too great. Being stuck with a slow double-action revolver is basically instant death against a person armed with a fast firing single-action revolver or a pistol. The reason for this is players seem to soak damage in gang matches. It was hard to tell if it was just lag, but the low bullet velocity and player movement seemed to be a recipe for me not to shoot anything. Guys would kind of step side to side, very quickly, and I couldn't hit them, almost like they were dodging my bullets. We were playing on the hardcore playlist for gang matches, but guys seemed to have deadly accuracy against me, and I'm thinking its the dead eye feature at play. Even if you're playing with full manual aim, dead eye allows you to paint targets and hit them perfectly. It charges based on kills, I think? I tend to not use it nearly enough, and didn't even think to use it in multi-player, but thinking back some guys were very obviously using it because their guns sounded like machine guns. Overall, the experience was poor for gang matches and it did not feel tight or polished like a game you'd want to play over and over, like the other multi-player heavy hitters. Rockstar is still getting their feet wet in that realm.

So will the multi-player have legs? Not unless they continually add new content to free roam, or make serious improvements to the pvp.

 

[NRP]

The donkey is not very fast, and it's a bit tempermental too. Steal a horse if you can.

Funniest thing ever was watching Robert chase a grizzly bear on foot trying to knife him.

 

[nightshade]

but you don't get a reticle to even approximate where you're shooting

That's why its called a blind fire ...having a reticule is kinda defeating the purpose (this is one thing which I didn't like in UC2, cause blind firing is so easy compared to other shooters)

Not having a reticule works fine in games like Gears of War where blind fire is a core part of being good at multiplayer (if you are not good at it, you simply can't play the game)....once you get an approximation of how the blindfire mechanism works you can easily use it very effectively.

 

[Scott_Arm]

That's why its called a blind fire ...having a reticule is kinda defeating the purpose (this is one thing which I didn't like in UC2, cause blind firing is so easy compared to other shooters)

Not having a reticule works fine in games like Gears of War where blind fire is a core part of being good at multiplayer (if you are not good at it, you simply can't play the game)....once you get an approximation of how the blindfire mechanism works you can easily use it very effectively.

You don't have an automatic weapon to walk your fire, and the enemies move much quicker than they do in Gears. It would be like blind firing with the shotgun in gears, but the shotgun fires a single small caliber bullet and you have no chance to kill the guy with one or even two shots. You don't exactly have a spread where you can catch the target if your aim is off. The blind fire just doesn't feel very good.

 

[NRP]

Yeah I don't think nightshade understands what you're saying, Scott.