Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Red Dead Redemption 2 are both big open-world games, and they both came out in October of 2018. Both involve a hero on a horse riding around and murdering lots of people. The similarities end there.
AC Odyssey is very much of its time. It’s an embodiment of the open-world game design ethos popularised over the last decade by its developer, Ubisoft, and it’s loaded with ideas that have been embraced by so many other open-world games that they now feel ubiquitous.
In contrast, Red Dead Redemption 2 feels like it popped out of a pre-2010 time capsule or, perhaps more accurately, like it warped in from an entirely different timeline.
Since around 2012, more and more open-world games have adopted Ubisoft’s information-heavy, player-friendly style of open-world game design. In 2018, “Ubisofty” is a useful shorthand for describing a new open-world game.
If you tell someone “Oh, you know, it’s basically a Ubisoft game,” you’re saying there is a big map full of colour-coded icons, lots of clearly marked collectables, repeatable and systematized side activities, and lots of progress bars to fill.
In that context, Odyssey is a warm blanket of familiar video game tropes and concepts, while Rockstar’s game is strange and discomfiting.
Over the weekend, I decided to finally get back to my Odyssey playthrough. I’d spent the preceding week and a half marathoning Red Dead 2 in order to review it, and felt ready for a change of pace.
I was unprepared for how thoroughly I had adjusted to Red Dead’s peculiar flow and rhythms, however, and found the transition back to Odyssey—a game that I love, I should say—more jarring than I’d anticipated.
I loaded up Odyssey and immediately noticed a small but instructive difference: like a lot of modern games, Odyssey includes gameplay tips on its loading screen.
I hadn’t even loaded my save, and the game was already trying to help me out, explain itself to me, and maybe to push me to try new things. Red Dead 2’s wordless, evocative loading screens offer no such guidance.
My game finished loading and, holy shit:
After dozens of hours with Red Dead 2’s stripped-down interface and general opacity, everything about Odyssey felt aggressively helpful.
“Press start to open Quest log and track a new Quest,” a pop-up in the upper-left of the screen urged me. In the lower-right, a large indicator told me I was on “KYTHERA ISLAND,” which was under Athenian Leadership with an Undiscovered Leader.
The leader’s name had a purple progress bar beneath it, which indicated that the current governing faction was Weakened. On my compass were several question marks, a couple of viewpoints, and behind me, several exclamation marks indicating available quests. In the upper-right corner of the screen, the number “38” reminded me of my character’s level.
I played for a few minutes and the differences continued to pile up. Kassandra, my Odyssey protagonist, moved like a superhuman gymnast compared with Arthur Morgan, the plodding star of Red Dead 2. Kassandra’s horse, Phobos, controlled more like a Star Wars speeder bike than the idiosyncratic, free-thinking animals I’d been coaxing around in Rockstar’s game.
I leapt up a wall and climbed to the highest point on a nearby fort, then dove to the ground, fifty feet below, and rolled into cover. (In Red Dead, I would have died after falling half that distance.) I pressed a button and was given a sweeping aerial view of the fort courtesy of my eagle companion Ikaros.
I tagged every enemy in the base. I could now see them all through walls.
There is nothing in Red Dead Redemption 2 to compare with any of that. Everything in Rockstar’s game is slower, more deliberate, less empowering.
It’s a quality that I talked about at length in my review: Red Dead 2’s snail-slow pace, convoluted control scheme, limited travel options, sludgy interactions, and hard-to-parse user interface all combine for an experience that is far more languid and cumbersome than most people have come to expect from open-world games.
Red Dead 2 rejects so many modern open-world game design mainstays that it almost feels like it comes from another dimension.
Since Friday, I’ve been watching my colleagues, friends, and other Internet folks trying to get their heads around it, and have seen plenty of people understandably struggling to adjust. Red Dead Redemption 2 is not a welcoming game, and it has a tendency to resist and even buck the player like a mustang in the wild.
There’s a yawning chasm between what I think of as “Ubisoft open-world design” and the style of open-world design Rockstar has embraced with Red Dead 2. In the Ubisoft model, everything is laid out at the player’s feet.
The game feels like a digital tool, or maybe an operating system. It’s full of menus and progress bars. Every activity fits into a larger, clearly delineated context: enemy outposts, sync points, caves, tombs, cities, leader homes, convoys, and so on. You always know precisely what you’re doing and where you stand.
In comparison, Red Dead 2 is a black box. Most activities fit under one of a few broad categories—you can meet strangers, or clear gang hideouts, or track down one of five mysterious shacks, for example—but those activities are presented much more organically, as part of the game world.
Almost every icon on the map simply designates a location: a post office, for example, or a butcher’s shop. Lots of items in the “total completion” menu are hidden with question marks until you find them on your own, after which the game will only hint at what they are.
One entry is labelled “Dreamcatchers,” and enticingly instructs players to find all 20 dreamcatchers, note their locations, and “see what you think.” Arthur can level up his trio of core stats, but those levels are buried in a nest of menus and don’t have a huge effect on gameplay.
The two games also have wildly different pacing. Odyssey wants to get you to activities quickly and easily, the better to help you work your way through reams of forts, quests, targets, and missions. Red Dead 2 feels like a long, contemplative walk in the woods.
In Odyssey, you can fast-travel to your ship or to any viewpoint just by opening the map. In Red Dead 2, you can only fast-travel after buying a camp upgrade, and you can only do it from your camp. Even that is presented as a cinematic montage of Arthur travelling by horseback.
Red Dead Redemption 2 shares a lot of things in common with 2010’s Red Dead Redemption, as well as with Rockstar’s other massively popular games. So why, in 2018, does the sequel feel so peculiar?
In part, it’s because of the unusual diligence with which Rockstar has pursued the goal of grounded verisimilitude, even by the company’s own standards. But it’s also due to how pervasive the Ubisoft model has become in the eight years since the first Red Dead.
Ubisoft’s approach germinated and developed over the course of the first few Assassin’s Creed games, and arguably reached full fruition in 2012’s Far Cry 3.
That game had it all: upgradable skill trees, viewpoints that unfogged the map, crafting tied to animal hunting, experience points that let you make your character more powerful, instant fast-travel to unlocked points on the map, and so on.
In the six years since then, Ubisoft’s many game studios have continued to iterate with subsequent Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, and Watch Dogs games, though the overall formula has remained the same. During that same period of time, a bunch of open world games from other major studios began to borrow Ubisoft’s ideas, helping establish them as game design norms.
Games influenced by the Ubisoft model include Mafia III, Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider-Man, Mad Max, Dying Light, Batman: Arkham Knight, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Shadow of War, and even role-playing games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3. (There’s been some cross-pollination as well: The Witcher 3’s branching dialogue system and sidequest design turn up in Horizon and Odyssey, and Odyssey also shares a riff on Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system.)
Those games are each distinct in their own ways, but they share many of the same core systems and design ideas.
Moreover, each one broadly subscribes to the philosophy that activities should be easily sorted and organised, that players should be given as much information as possible, and that the game should be “readable” above all else.
If there’s a stealth element to the game, players can usually tag enemies through walls to keep track of them. If there’s combat, colour-coded numbers often fly off of damaged enemies to indicate the effectiveness of attacks, and floating health bars indicate how each enemy is doing.
Red Dead Redemption 2 does almost none of those things, which makes for a fascinating, distinctive experience. I find it appealing despite its evident flaws, and in a completely different way from something like AC Odyssey. As I put it in my review:
Unlike so many modern open-world games, Red Dead Redemption 2 does not want you to achieve dominance over it. It wants you to simply be in its world, and to feel like a part of it. It’s a crucial distinction, and a big part of what makes it all so immersive and engrossing.
The thrill of playing Red Dead 2, like with many other Rockstar games, comes not from how fun or empowering it feels on a moment to moment basis. It comes from the electric sense that you are poking and prodding at an indifferent, freely functioning world.
Over the weekend, I joked on Twitter that Red Dead 2 comes from an alternate timeline where the strange, divisive Far Cry 2 was the Ubisoft game everyone copied, rather than the empowering, crowd-pleasing Far Cry 3.
It was an oversimplification, of course; Red Dead Redemption 2 is different from Far Cry 2 in innumerable ways. But Rockstar’s new game is the most defiantly unusual big-budget open-world game I’ve played since Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which was itself one of the most unusual I’d played since Far Cry 2.
Like Nintendo, Rockstar has proven uncommonly willing to throw out accepted game design conventions in service of a particular vision.
I generally enjoy Ubisoft-style open world games. I find them pleasing and easily digestible, and I like picking apart and appreciating the many small refinements that turn up in each new one.
I like Red Dead Redemption 2 as well, but for different, occasionally opposite reasons. Not every open-world game needs to follow the same playbook, and there’s something to be said for major game developers resisting trends and taking chances.
Despite how slow, frustrating, and just plain weird Red Dead Redemption 2 can be, I’m glad Rockstar’s designers were willing to so confidently do their own thing.
Comments
11 responses to “Red Dead Redemption 2 Defiantly Bucks Open-World Trends”
This is being very generous toward Horizon and Odyssey, IMO. Yes, they cribbed the form of it, but The Witcher 3’s actual sidequest design is still miles ahead of the pack.
To be honest, the Ubisoft Ur-Game approach has started to get really boring and repetitive. The problem is that they’re the product of multiple small studios scattered all over the place working on various pieces of a whole. But that’s how Ubi can turn around a game of the stupid size of Odyssey a year after Origins. The downside is that the gameplay bits are just copy/paste everywhere. There’s no soul to it, it’s all factory-assembled.
Ubisoft and Ubi-style open world games are the IKEA of open world. Sure, it looks nice, and assuming you can put the bits together with the careful instructions they give you, it will be functional and practical, if not maybe as durable as it could be. But it’s been made in a factory on an industrial scale out of MDF and cardboard and the pieces are precision cut.
Whereas a game like Red Dead is the product of a single studio spending probably the same amount of man-hours, but only inside their studio, so it’s taken three times as long. But they had a hand in every part of it. It’s the bespoke custom furniture. Beautifully put together, but maybe not that comfortable, probably with some impractical nobbly bits on it, and a lot more expensive, but there’s nothing out there quite like it and it’ll last for decades.
There’s a time and a place for both, IMO.
I’m not sure how comfortable I am with describing RDR2 as the artisinal, handcrafted alternative to a Ubisoft Open World Video Game Product, given that Rockstar is a huge studio owned by a huge publisher.
Otherwise I agree with you, though.
Honestly the only true downside I am finding to RDR2 is the lack of a good and reliable save game feature.
Whether it is Skyrim, AC Odyssey or Witcher 3. These games are all huge and they all allow me to be in control of how and when i save my game. I am not forced to go somewhere, I am not forced to finished a missions… I can save my game. Exactly where i am.
In Red Dead sure you can save any where (as long as you are not on a mission) but when you come back to the game you are not where you were, you may or may not have the same items you had on you. For all its advancements this is archaic system, left over from the previous games of theirs.
Furthermore if you get killed, sometimes it seems to over write your previous save, so say if i save before i do a big battle, Seemingly that save game is over written when I die. So I can never try out things, I have one go to get it right.
Guess what I am saying, is that i love the game but the lack of control in my save games seems to be a huge step back. And how a game saves in an open world is a huge part about what makes the epic journey less tiresome.
Man I can’t wait to get into this, never liked the Ubigame formula.
But I know if I put down Oddesey I’ll never pick it back up again.
No surprise, Rockstar has years more experience in the field of open world games, they really only compete against themselves while raising the benchmark with every title.
I’m starting to think ubisoft has paid you of.
You have made some false accusations about roksta games just calling you out
Your bias is obvious
And I bet you won’t post my previous post
I’ve been saying this for years. A lot of these “open-world” games are just sandboxes with plug and play mechanics.
Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption (and Witcher maybe) are the only actual games where some one worked to make an open world, and didn’t just use it as this months buzz word.
Stopped playing Ubi games a third of the way through FC3. The outposts being my main gripe, which were seemingly just a cut a paste job. Once I did one I felt like I had done them all. They added more to the game without really adding more to it.
You can also turn off (all?) the HUD elements in AC: Odyssey if you want to go it alone.
But unless the game is built around this idea, turning off the hud won’t give you a better experience but an objectively worse one. A game needs to have no hud considered when landmarks are being laid out and the size and scope of the world is being planned or it will be a gimmicky feature with no practicality.
I find open world games daunting.( I only just started The Witcher 3. ) so i like them to be as readable as possible. I haven’t tried rdr or rdr2 yet. So I dont know if I will enjoy them. They sure seem interesting though.
You find em daunting and went with Witcher 3??
That’s like being afraid of heights and easing in to it with a nice relaxing Halo drop!!
I have played open world games before. Some of my favorites are horizon zero dawn, far cry 4.
I do find then daunting in that theres so much to do. I never complete them. Just finish the main story and the interesting side quests. Since june i stuck to linear games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider. Since i had been putting off the witcher 3 for so long I finally started it. It is a slow start. I dozed off during a dialog with some army general of emhyr after the first main quest.
AC: Odyssey starts you as a competent fighter and you end up being a hero of legend, spung from the loins of Zeus and born of Athena. You’re able to wrestle the Cretan Bull with you bare hands and make Medusa wimper at the mere sight of you.
In RDR2 you’re the just a guy …. and things can go good or (more likely) bad for you. But your still just a guy.
The styles of each game are very, very different. Being open world is where the similarities start …. and end.
I find the pacing of RDR2 to be very… Shenmue-esque. I know that might seem weird, but both games have this deliberate ‘take things as they come, don’t go looking for them’ approach to their design.
Obviously they do very different things, and hail from very different eras, but I think RDR2 might be the first game I’ve played since Shenmue that has that deliberately-paced feel.
I absolutely love both games for completely different reasons. I love the historical side of ACOd and the role-playing cowboy style of RDR2, plus my relatives used to live in a similar way, working station to station.
The thing I’ve found interesting is ACOd is using the same engine they used in ACOr, makes sense. RDR2 has borrowed a lot of systems and mechanics from GTA5, lol especially that bloody autosave and medal systems. I joke around saying RDR2 should have powered by GTA5 at the title screen
I think RDR2 is just very, very brave, for all the reasons listed above – the reward is that already, the locations and characters feel much more developed than just about anything else I can think of. The Last of Us comes close, but that was very linear. There’s an incredible sense of place and time, the map feels like a real place first, with gameplay considerations added a distant second – that rings true with previous R* interviews I’ve read too, where they’ve said they do tend to build the world far in advance of things like missions/characters/etc. They may add locations later (IE, we need a farmhouse for this mission, or a mine somewhere etc) but by and large the map is made in advance. This feels really evident in the various gang camps you live in, they feel messy and imperfect.
While I’m playing through first time very much ‘vanilla’ with all settings intact, I’m already looking forward to a second play-through in first person, with no hud elements at all and no map, to strip it back even further.
I’m playing Red Dead. I’m liking Red Dead. But I don’t get articles praising it as this genre redefining masterpiece. It’s 19th century GTA5. The graphics are the same, the minimap is the same, the the way sidequests and main quests are introduced is the same, even some of the animations seem the same. What some praise as a bold artistic choice I see too often as bad design. For example, I find the Deadeye system in Red Dead poorly explained and implemented. This is one of the main combat systems in the game, but it took me way too many hours to figure out how to use it properly.
It’s exactly the same as RDR1, so unless you never played that game, not sure where this comes from. It’s certainly not the worst explained thing in the game, and it’s certainly not poorly implemented. You hit R3 while aiming (which it tells you to do when it first comes up in game), time slows down, the screen goes red, and you click on heads. For the first 5th of the game it even hand holds you and automatically marks targets for you when you hover over them. The only thing holding it back is the fact you have to aim with their stupid thumbstick sensitivity/accuracy.
You heavily moderated comments ruin the discussion. Long time Kokatu reader, first time commenter… never visiting again. Here’s some advice: Don’t moderate comments just because you don’t agree or if they call you out.