Red Dead Redemption

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IGN: Five Reasons to Love Red Dead Redemption


oh my this just moved up to my most wanted list..... GTA in the Old west. but new and improved :smile:


The Wide Open West
Though Rockstar gets the credit for spawning the open-world craze, at this point I've seen all the metropolises I can handle. It is, in all honesty, starting to feel a little "been there, done that." But a wide open West is quite a different beast. For the most part, videogame Westerns have been shackled to linear level design that focused on stylish gunplay, but lacked the atmospheric elements of the Wild West. If Rockstar nails the landscape and social aspects of its three Western locales (the frontier, Old Mexico and the Northern territories), then exploration is going to be something very unique and exciting as compared to other open-world games.

In a way, the West was like the world of Fallout. It's a place of isolation. But unlike Bethesda's dystopian world, the West is moving from a savage place towards one of civility (or at least refined savagery). Red Dead's story takes place at the turn of the century, as the West is confronted with the birth of modern industry. The setting is only going to help create the proper sense of desperation that swept across the outlaws of the Old West in its final years. In some ways, the themes may be very similar to those of GTA IV. Hopefully Rockstar can pull it off.

I'd Like a Side of Spaghetti with My Western
I've seen my fair share of Westerns, but no subset of the genre appealed to me more than Spaghetti Westerns. It's a perfect fit for a game, because the exaggerated style of these films allows for hats to be shot off an enemy's head and the gun blown out of their hand. The stories in these movies doesn't suffer. Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" trilogy is a perfect example of three classic Western tales filled with betrayal, surprises, villainy and anti-heroism. I'd be prett shocked to learn that these films (and others like them) didn't have a major influence of the Grand Theft Auto series as a whole, let alone Red Dead Redemption. And yes, with the Deadeye Mode (aka bullet time) you can target just about anything on an enemy.

Natural Motion Horses
Red Dead Redemption may be set in the West, but its technology shares a lot with GTA IV. As with the latest GTA title, Redemption uses Rockstar's RAGE engine and Natural Motion's amazing Euphoria technology. What's that all mean? No pre-canned animations. And the ability for the body to react to bullets and other unexpected collisions. One of my biggest problems with past videogame Westerns were the horses. They never looked quite right and riding them always seemed unnatural. But with Euphoria, the horses will move a react to changes in the terrain and collisions. Riders will be thrown by sudden stops and characters should tumble off horses more organically than the pre-determined animations of the past. Let's just hope legs can get caught in stirrups and wounded enemies will be dragged behind their rides.

Duels
There's not much I can say about one on one gunfights, since Rockstar hasn't shown that off to anybody. So I can't exactly say I love what they are doing (maybe I will, but who the heck knows how a duel will work). Still, I am excited about the very prospect of duels when you consider that the previously mentioned technology and the Spaghetti Western aspects should make for some really cool moments. The real trick will be if Rockstar can nail the high level of tension the precedes just about every duel in movie history.

Notoriety
Red Dead Redemption doesn't feature a traditional morality system like Fallout. To my knowledge, you won't have the option to be the good (Gary Cooper), the bad (Deadwood's Swearengen) or the morally ambiguous (Eastwood's Blondie). The story is going to drive you where you need to go without the kind of branching paths seen in some other games. That's fine by me. What is interesting is how the wanted level works.

You can be evil if you want. Go shoot up a whole damned town if it makes you happy. But the worse you are, the more heavily the law will come down on you. Wanted posters will appear in town, posses will be formed. And unlike GTA IV, where getting free of the search radius resets your wanted level, in Red Dead Redemption, people have longer memories. Shot up a bunch of churchgoers? Head back to that same town soon after and people are going to remember your face. Bad things are going to happen.

While it's going to take a very long play test to see how well the notoriety system works, what I know about it so far sounds very promising. And for the record, everyone wants to be the Man with No Name. So if Red Dead Redemption keeps your character's morality in the grey, more power to Rockstar.
also first look with impressions here


May 7, 2009 - They may share two of three words in their titles and be labeled as Western-themed games, but it doesn't seem like the upcoming Red Dead Redemption is going to be much like its predecessor, Red Dead Revolver. While the first game (which wasn't actually a Rockstar original but rather a project imported from Capcom and completed internally) was more of a stage-based affair with some mild platforming thrown in, it appears Rockstar is going all out with Redemption. The sequel is going to be set in an open world, which Rockstar claims is one of the largest it has created.

Rockstar San Diego is working on the game primarily, but also helping out are parts of Rockstar's GTA team, along with members from Rockstar's Leeds team. Thoughts about how an open world could be meshed with a Western-style game were being exchanged even as Rockstar acquired a few semi-completed levels of Red Dead Revolver, but the company had to wait until the appropriate technology came along to start up production. Redemption is being built on Rockstar San Diego's RAGE (Rockstar Advanced Game Engine), the same one used in titles like Grand Theft Auto IV and Table Tennis. For physics, Rockstar is using some of its own tech combined with Natural Motion's Euphoria, which makes for interesting post-impact character and object model reactions. cont'd...
 
Honestly, I don't trust IGN's take on a Rockstar game one whit. Red Dead Revolver was great, but it was also so much not a typical Rockstar game -- the Capcom roots really show.

Hopefully, this'll be good, but Red Dead Revolver shone because of gameplay systems, which isn't Rockstar's forte.
 
even MORE good info :D


As Marston moves out into the world, he'll travel around a vast wilderness set in the southern United States and Northern sections of Mexico around the turn of the 20th Century. "There's three linked bits of map. You start in what we're calling the Frontier area and these are all counties or states or regions…meant to be one of the last wild patches still being brought under the yolk of modern America. Telegraph poles are everywhere, people are starting to play around with big telephones in their offices, but on the other hand people have hardly ever seen any other form of modernization. The trains have been there for a while, but it's still pretty primitive, and still pretty lawless, and still has a Marshall rather than a police force…Then you get sent to Mexico to a province that is on the point of civil war. You get to see some of the characters there including the local, somewhat overly zealous political leaders and there'll be rebellious leaders and some other people hiding out south of the border from life in America. Then you eventually end up back in the Northeastern part of the map which is a contrast geographically with the other two which are different styles of more desert and scrub, and this is much more verdant with pine trees and hills and mountains in there and also a bigger town which is a lot more modern…so you end the map with a lot more of the modern world in your face."

The game world Rockstar is constructing is supposed to be massive, in a way that could be one of the largest worlds the company has yet created. Achieving this kind of scale was of critical importance for the type of game the company wanted Redemption to be. "The sense of scale, and the sense of riding across these big areas and exploring these weird corners of the map, that is part of the experience, just as much as having the shootouts and part of the story and adventure. The act of seeing these beautiful views and discovering them for yourself and feeling like it's enormous and I can go over there and see what's up that hill and see for miles in the distance, that is part of the beauty and fun of the game."
 
I hope the gun combat is much better than GTAs. I'd really like a good western, especially one with a huge sandbox world, but if the gun fights aren't fight it won't work. My worry is it'll just feel like a reskinned GTA. And it better have some good multiplayer modes so I can have an online posse to cause trouble.
 
so they are supposing that the map will be even bigger than GTA San Andreas, what the biggest map in a game ? Just Cause(though the map is this one is pretty repetitive) ?
 
Trains with horses carriages or some other time lapsed travel would be easy.

yep

To navigate the game world you can walk, ride a horse, hop into a horse-drawn stagecoach, or catch a ride on a train. On either the train or stagecoach you can choose to take a nap on the way to a selected destination to speed up the process, which sounds similar to how cabs worked in GTA IV. And if you're worried about being able to catch up to a train, you should know that some of these machines move especially slowly and should be able to be overtaken on horseback. Locating mission givers and other points of interest is made easier through a GTA-style mini-map that sits in a corner of the screen.

new screens.... looking very nice. full day night cycle and weather.
 
This game is a cool surprise, but I really hope it doesn't feel too much like GTA. I really like GTA4, but I think after the retail game, and the DLC, and more DLC to come, I'll be all GTA'd out if Red Dead Redemption also plays mostly the same.
 

Those interviews are pretty good. They've definitely captured my interest. Lookin' forward to this title, but I'm assuming it's a long way off.

I'd still like to see more detail about combat. When I think of westerns, one of the first things that comes to mind is sharpshooters and trick shots. Firing rifles at long ranges using those weird rifle sights, and shooting guns out of people's hands. It sounds like they want to go for realism, but some of those westerny tricks would be nice. Oh, and they should have single action pistols that you can fan.
 
I think they mentioned in one of the articles about being able to shoot the guns out of people's hands and shoot their hats off and stuff.

Sounds pretty cool, I'll probably pick it up even though I can't bring myself to finish GTA IV or even start the Lost & Damned.
 
Awesome. I'm hoping the gun play is better than in GTA4. GTA4 is all about the vehicles, but westerns are all about the gun fights.
 
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