#19 - Red Dead Redemption 2: A Three-Year Retrospective

The beginning of Red Dead Redemption 2 has so much promise and care. It takes two hours because there are so many mechanics to teach you, and the game really does ease you in. There are so many things that I totally missed before, (like being able to move up in the lineup when you’re riding in a group) because they only show up once in the upper corner. Also, there’s a cut scene where you fix a wagon wheel, why can’t I do that later in the game at any point? Why can’t I go hunting with anyone I want to from the camp with a hunting wagon that I purchase from the ledger? Why is there not an inherent and clear benefit to spending time and doing chores around the camp?? I love doing chores in video games! (I can extoll why the Laundry Day pack in the Sims 4 is by far the best one for a solid five minutes, but this is not the time!)

The problems with the tension between the game wanting you to go out and explore vs. them wanting to show you this very lovely movie they’ve made is immediately apparent. And for more on that, please watch one of my favorite video essays of all time.

Anyway, Red Dead 2. I was gifted the incredibly generous gift of a ps4 for Christmas (and, let me take a second to say that while, yes, obviously a ps4 is always a generous gift, but I have never felt more seen/taken care of than when I opened it. Like down to my bones I didn’t know how meaningful it could be to receive something that made me feel like someone had noticed a part of me that I had been ignoring, and this sounds like a lot to say about a video game console, but it’s really the larger representation of the things that were taken away from me this year and the power of those who love me to make me feel more whole than I ever did before) and got to get my hands back on my (second) favorite video game of all time: Red Dead Redemption 2.

I remember the first time I ever played Red Dead 1. It was the first Rockstar game I ever loved, it was one of the first games I ever got good at (like, can compete & win online regularly good), and it was the first time I realized the expanse and uselessness of my horse knowledge. Red Dead 1 was a marvel of video game graphic achievement at the time. Do you know how hard it is to make a horse look good in a game? The Rockstar devs found out quick and spent like an entire year on a Dude Ranch.

And good for them! Do you know how many games I have played solely because a horse was present on the cover (rideability be dammed!) (Epona is a catfish!) (there is no more useless horse than the one in Dragon Quest!) (except maybe the ones in Skyrim!)? And then I waited, so patiently, for years for the sequel (neé technical prequel) to be released. And while my gripes about the story vs. free roam remain true, I would just like to give Rockstar credit for hiring a horse girl on their dev team.

Because it’s so clear that they did. There are so many mechanics added to this game that are specifically made for those of us who struggled through point-and-click barn games of the early 2000s. You know, the horse games that for some reason always felt they had to involve a lot of plot, and that plot was always a fun ~mystery~ that if solved could save the barn from the evil bank from foreclosing on the ranch! (Also, if anyone out there can tell me what the solution was to find the fifth golden horseshoe in The Saddle Club: Willowbrook Stables game was I’d be eternally grateful. There were/are no walkthroughs online and it haunts me to this day!) (Also it’s time to shout out one of the best horse games ever released, Mary-Kate & Ashley’s Winners Circle, a game that understood you just wanted to do the eventing courses on loop with no apparent plot and whose cartridge fused with my GameBoy color. Thank you, Mary-Kate, for being a horse girl with the power to create content!) The things Rockstar added were so simple, you could now feed your horse, pat your horse, and groom your horse. You could even remove its saddle! (A mechanic that was so clearly abandoned halfway through because you can remove it (and gain horsey friendship each time you do) but there’s nowhere to store it. Saddles are animated onto the hitching posts, but you cannot place your saddle there. And, there is no way in hell I would actually just dump a saddle on the ground. Not when my skill of polishing saddles was a major component of my (exploited) child labor around barns!)

You bond with your horse (to unlock…mostly useless features? Like, skid-stop is incredible, makes sense with the Western theme. Same with rearing. Hi ho silver away, we get it. But the final level you unlock is a leg yield? Like…why go dressage for just one thing?) and the emotional climax of the narrative revolves around bidding adieu to your steed. The horses around camp are all special, with every horse matched to people’s personalities, because dogs and horses should always reflect their owners.

«Andie McDowell in 4 Weddings voice » I am just a horse girl (a term I was so resistant to and in some ways remain resistant to because I think there is a marked difference between girls who were obsessed with horses/unicorns, and the girls who worked with and rode horses a.k.a. Barn Brats, which is how I choose to identify) standing in front of Rockstar, asking them to release a game with their engine mechanics and beautifully crafted horses (which span breed and appropriate corresponding coat colors and handling types) with no violence inherent to the plot.

Like they are just sitting on the best horse game ever created. Do they understand the untapped market potential of what they have? Misogyny in video game development is rampant (we don’t even have time to touch upon GamerGate) but more generally I think it’s fascinating just how much Triple-A game devs have routinely ignored an entire market and never get called out for it. And can we all just appreciate the audacity and humor if Rockstar ever released a horse girl game that takes itself very seriously? I have seen what they’ve done with varied and gorgeous barn designs! You muck a pasture as part of the Gunslingers’ side mission! They have entire menus with different mane & tail options to customize your horse even further!! It’s all right there.

Even if Rockstar just released a new style of Online gameplay that allowed me to run a farm, I would be completely satisfied. I have already created my own horse game within Red Dead (though I also was pleased to see that my headshot and accuracy skills have only increased in my six-month sabbatical from playing) so it’s fully possible and not that much of a stretch to ask for this. You lichrally do farm chores throughout the game, and you even load up a wagon with chicken eggs…but then you never drive the wagon into town to trade them for money. You can already chuck hay bales, so let me do it from a hayloft! Expand on the Horse Racing mini-games to include things like: barrel racing. We already have skid stops!! This feels like such an easy win! They spent the time to animate the horses’ balls getting smaller/larger depending on the climate, so they can absolutely figure out a better breaking/training system for the wild horses in-game that could actually net profit for players.

When I was in fourth grade we had to write letters to companies and ask them why they did a certain thing. One of my classmates wrote to Target asking why they didn’t have a store in Vermont, while I wrote to Nintendo asking why they only had GameBoy but no GameGirl. Nintendo responded to me saying there wasn’t enough interest. But I thought that was bullshit then and that thought has only been reinforced in the ensuing years. I wasn’t even demanding an entire line of GameGirls, I would have totally accepted the ultra-gendered 2002 response of just releasing a pink GameBoy that had the boy crossed out and a pink marker writing GIRL in really curly letters on it!

Anyway, I feel like it’s such a shame that video games became so gendered so quickly. There’s nothing about them that makes the division necessary. Who doesn’t like to gain a false sense of accomplishment through getting arbitrary trophies bestowed to them after a simulated task? You can have entire games where violence is not the driving factor of the story. In fact, I would argue that we’re now seeing video games ask themselves the question of if they are too violent. In Red Dead 2 you confess to the women around camp that you’ve been “killing people, and you don’t know why” during completely voluntary interactions. The Last Of Us 2 is basically a meta-commentary on the necessity of violence in the story they’re telling, and clumsily attempts to make the player feel complicit in their contribution to the violence they’ve witnessed/been forced to perform throughout the game. It’s almost like we forged a very narrow and lazy path of violence = conflict and no one ever bothered to find more creative ways to involve conflict in games. (And, to add to that argument, I would wager that video games are one of the storytelling mediums that actually requires almost no conflict. As long as there are problems to solve, there is a story. And those problems don’t even have to be direct results of characters’ in-game actions! Fixing up an abandoned community center can actually be something so personal!)

So, Rockstar, consider this my Nintendo Game Girl letter part 2: redux. You have it all, right there, waiting to be slightly reassembled for more coherent gameplay. Like I said, I’ll take it as an online patch, which would be the thing that requires a subscription-based service. Which is generally something I am adamantly against in video games because I think it’s actually bad and slightly discriminatory to lock some/most of your games improvements and features behind online paywalls! Access for everyone! You should absolutely be able to go to a GameStop, get a game, go home and play it with no internet needed and get the full gameplay experience. That doesn’t seem like a wild expectation to have, but tell that to anyone who attempted to play Cyberpunk before March of this year.

So, I’ll tell you what, Rockstar. Instead of Undead Nightmare 2, gimme DLC where I can play as Sadie and we’ll call it even, okay? You could even make the argument that Sadie would have been a much more compelling protagonist, since we, the audience, could have been guided through the game as the outsider who came into camp and joined the gang. It’s almost like it would make sense (and add to the inherent conflict) if you started out as a farmer's wife who was basically abducted, and then had to make interesting moral decisions based on your surroundings and figure out a new shape of your future! But that’s okay, it was hard enough for them to include a woman in the game who had any semblance of agency, so, golf claps for the crumbs of progress made there.