I’ve been back to playing Red Dead Redemption online lately. A friend prompted me to join them in free roam to work on some challenges and achievements. It’s been months since I played this last and its always been a good time, so I decided to drop everything and check it out.
It would be so easy if I could just dump my enthusiasm for a topic on you, it’s much harder to translate from thought/feeling to words. The interesting perspective here is that I already played RDR, a lot, when it first came out. With the DLC releases through the summer and fall I did revisit the game a number of times for the adventures and achievements. What really gets me pumped though about RDR is the fact that I’ve spent so much more of my time playing other hard core FPS games and the like. I’ve spent over 650 hours playing Bad Company 2. This is nowhere near the fabled 10,000 hours required to reach expert level in life (according to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”) but at this point I believe I can say I know the nuances of the game and have a definite hold on the design aspects, mechanics and features of the game. Taking this point of view and applying on top of the normal user experience with RDR, I actually start to pick out things in game that impress me with each return.
Each person has their own perception of a game and how they play it for best experience. Compared to playing Halo Reach and Bad Company 2, which are excellent shooters, there are some amazingly awesome features and animations I noticed in RDR. Jump into free roam and soak in the ambiance of the sandbox world Rockstar has created. Hear the buzz of flies around your ears, feel that hot sun overhead on a cloudless sky just beating down on you. Now imagine as you ride along the open terrain, the sun starts going down and darkness creeps in from the ground up. In the distance you can hear gunfire so you look in that direction. Within eyesight the first thing I notice is a tiny smoke wisp. I'm seeing the smoke trails from the pistols being shot. The awesome curl and swash of each one as it dissipates into the air.. Now I’ve identified the source, but as I venture closer to see what is going on. Here I see one NPC firing at some wild coyotes. One is shot in the back and I watch as it stumbles, flops down and twitches as it lays there. Eventually it bleeds out, but I know anyone could have just finished him off more quickly. These may seems small and petty, but it is the tiny things like this that "wow" gamers who really appreciate their games. With the hours people put into games, it’s these tiny features that can really stand out.
Halo Reach came out in the fall of 2010. I played that game until I maxed out the achievements and moved on. It wasn’t until one night in February when I came home from a work travel trip and need to relax, that I was invited by friends to play Firefight with them. Having played strictly bad company and mostly in Vietnam, coming back to Halo Reach was new form of shock and awe to me. The most significant feature that struck me was around the enemy AI. In Firefight I was noticing what seemed like squad tactics against the human players. We would focus on a set group only to realize another set had come up behind us or beside us. The elites had amazing animations I had not noticed before such as round house kicks, flying jump kicks and other brutal bashing moves when the come into close quarters combat with you. I also had my first experience being duped by an AI enemy faking me out with a hologram. That in itself shocked me. Bungie really put in some AI intelligence for the NPCs to react to us on the map in such ways as to draw us out or distract us while another crowd moves in. Genius Bungie, I love it.
As you know, Bad Company 2 is my game. It’s what I play 95% of my time. DICE did amazing work in the animations and features of their game. This blog is just to say that when you get into something so deep, and then pull back for a short change of pace, you come to these new games or activities with a different perspective and you can really learn to notice and appreciate the parts of games you love and know to look for in the future.
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