1721

Found a cheap copy for the PC, and have been trying that, as well. I like how much closer it gets me to the game world; the third-person perspective just seems so much tighter. Maybe that’s just a function of sitting two feet away from the monitor, as opposed to six.

1722

The trick with dealing with the sameness is finding new approaches. Can I collect all the crates, plant explosives on everything, and 100% a town without ever firing a shot? Can I blow up everything from the top of a car? Can I collect a crate by hovering low in a helicopter and then dropping out and hanging from my tether?

The game’s not failing you. You’re failing yourself by doing the same thing twice. :)

1723

Many people like software toys. I like playing within a storyline framework. Doing stuff just to do stuff grows old pretty fast.

1724

I see what you’re saying, Denny, but I’m just not that drawn to messing around with stuff to see what happens. At least in a purely mechanical sense. I’m more about immersion. Y’know, does this place feel real enough to me that I care about what I’m doing? It’s why I loved Rowan’s Battle of Britain and never could quite make out the attraction of Sturmovik.

1725

This is actually pretty interesting Brian. You and I are alike in that I loved Rowan’s BOB and always felt the IL-2 series was sterile and had zero immersion factor. We’ve always been more alike in our game design preferences, I think (which is why I ordered Saints Row 2 to try out, based on you liking it.)

But so far in RDR I haven’t found the immersion factor you have, albeit I have only really spent a few hours on it (not made it to Mexico yet.) Specifically because, while the world is nicely set up, every single encounter so far feels 100% pre-scripted. Nothing ever happens that the designers didn’t set up, in detail. Meet a stranger who asks for a ride, I know exactly what he’s going to do, the animation that will be used, etc. See a wagon broke down on the side of the road and a woman asking for help, there’s no variation in what’s going to occur. Nothing I can do can really make a big change in events or actions. A guy asks me to help him save his wife: I either get there in time and shoot the rope in time or I don’t. The two results are completely scripted.

So it feels like a sandbox game, yet every single activity feels incredibly scripted. I’m enjoying it, but frankly, so far, kinda disappointed in how pre-planned everything is.

Cut to JC2. While there is a sameness, I feel like I have a LOT of freedom. I have been spending time in the bigger cities lately, and I have been coming up with some really creative ways to disrupt the peace. Last night I played for an hour, was in the process of finding and destroying the items such as the statues and propaganda trailers, and found myself in a battle with a group of military keeps (with mounted guns) in the middle of the street. I was looking for a place to grapple out when two guerrilla jeeps with guns came flying up and the guys jumped out to fire and help me out. We ended up taking out all of the military guys, I jumped in one jeep and took the gun, and the guerrilla drove around town with me taking my shots at any military vehicles we came across. I then noticed as I looked up a colonel was nearby. Told my driver thanks, climbed up to the higher buildings, and got close enough to use my sniper rifle to take out the colonel and most of his comrades (lots of good loot there.) I then grabbed a chopper off a building nearby, and decided to fly over to the airport to run a mission for the Roaches.

While the action may have been mainly blowing things up and causing chaos, at no point did I feel I had to do anything in any way. There was just a spontaneity in the game that I am not yet finding in RDR. Even in the missions, there appear to be a LOT of ways to complete the missions, and the game can handle any approach I may take.

Don’t get me wrong, I like RDR. And it and JC2 are both VERY different games. But I am surprised, given your normal preferences, that you aren’t also getting kind of turned off by how scripted every encounter in RDR feels.

1726

I suppose I’m able to abstract the scripted nature of RDR’s encounters internally to an extent. I don’t take each animation or each interaction literally as presented but as typical of a type of encounter so it doesn’t bother me as much as it probably should. RDR would benefit from more variation within each encounter (there might be more than just one way each type of encounter can play out with more variables involved) and more subtypes of encounters overall. But for me the magic happens when one of those typical encounters intersects with wildlife behavior or passersby or, in too rare instances, other random encounters entirely. That’s when the game really takes on an emergent narrative life of its own.

But immersion is more than just the street-level interplay of random elements. It’s also the look and feel which RDR does remarkably well. All the mechanics feel unique and appropriate to the setting. The graphic and audio designs are just so powerful I feel like I’ve walked into a painting or spaghetti western film. I suppose RDR does that so well it makes it easier for me to cruise past the flaws and actively want to suspend disbelief.

The other big element of immersion for me is purpose. Why am I doing the things the game wants me to do? What’s the big picture? Here I’d say both RDR and JC2 fall pretty short. They’re both under-girded by a linear narrative storyline. The advantage RDR has, for me, is that if I ignore that I can still see myself in that role doing the things the game rewards me for doing. And as noted, the visceral and evocative feel of the gameplay works very well for me. With JC2, well, I’ve done (almost) all this before. It was fun in Mercenaries. But the failure of the setting and the premise to interest me cuts down on my caring to keep on doing this stuff or experiment with the mechanics.

Where you see an interesting potential to create some inventive mayhem I just see more stuff to blow up. I’m not particularly motivated or rewarded for experimenting with different ways to do things. It’s more efficient to find a good system and stick to it. Maybe that’s because I’m less interested in Bruce Willis antics and more fond of Clint Eastwood’s. It could be that subjective. Not likely, though, because I’m particularly a big fan of Westerns at all. Perhaps it’s just the historical and unusual, for videogames, presentation I appreciate most. JC2 is just more mercenaries blowing up parts of the third world to me.

Edit: Rowan’s Battle of Britain was so powerful not just because of the strategic engine, which many other flight sims have done, but because of the verbal interactions between pilots and the dramatic, familiar, historical setting. The street-level game was wonderfully unpredictable and dynamic because different flights could intersect at different times and under various conditions. The overarching motive for participation was the great big picture of the strategic game (even if you were just playing as a career pilot and not trying to manage everything).

The strong setting is what makes BoB more akin to RDR than JC2.

1727

Right.

So some of you probably remember my ‘Project Just Cause 2’ where I was trying to list out the location of every pickup and chaos item in the game. Well, I’m not quite there - still ~20 items to find, one missing water tower to locate, and a ‘missing’ SAM site to find, but the initial version is done. The guide should help you, at least, 100% every town and base in the game.

I’m looking for a spot to host this. I used GameFAQ’s once, but last time I did they required that the text file lines be all 80 charaters or less, which isn’t possible w/ the .csv info. So if anyone has a place to host it, let me know. Or, if you want, send me a PM and I can just send you the file directly. It’s a .txt file with some FAQ stuff up top, followed by a cut-and-paste .csv file to read into your favorite spreadsheet application (I used both Excel and ODS).

1728

make it a free, public but uneditable google doc

1729

How do you do that? I don’t even know what a google doc is.

1730

From the file of things that annoy me:

I’m flying around trying to identify all of the undiscovered locations in the game. I go into the map and turn everything off and then turn on undiscovered locations only. Great. Except when I got back in it after flying to the way point the map is littered again and I have to go through the map rigmarole again.

1731

google docs is a collaborative tool that is essentially like MS Office, online and free with controls for who can edit data

https://docs.google.com/

1732

Why not just set waypoints one at a time?

1733

Last night I wanted to do a couple of faction missions and unlock some more stuff. Except on the way to a mission I flew over a town and had to 100% it. Then the next one. Then an army base. Then I found a tank. Then I proceeded to grab tank after tank and blow shit up all over the little northwest sub-island I was on. Then it was 1:30 AM and I hadn’t done a single mission. This game is the ultimate Short Attention Span Theater experience. 20 hours in and I’m at like 15% of the game. I want to increase my efficiency (chaos/hour), except I am so hooked on onion-peeling and juggle kills that I just haven’t managed it yet.

1734

Yes. Every time I fire it up, this is what happens.

<3

1735

Yeah, I don’t think Brian’s complaints about the game are symptomatic of anything wrong with the game, it’s just that his personal tastes are for more structured games.

Me, I love this the way it is. It’s like Microsoft Flight Sim for blowing shit up.

1736

I wouldn’t say it’s a structured experience I like, quite the contrary, but I do like experiences with more flavor and personality or at least a setting I find interesting. I do agree that’s quite subjective.

1737

Brian, I suppose my problem with RDR is … well, to use the flight sim analogy, it’s kinda like I have a flight sim that is supposed to be an open world, dynamic campaign. So I may not know on a mission what exactly is going to occur, but when I see three fighters come at me from above, I know that as soon as I shoot one of them down one of the others will immediately try to run away and the other one will dive hard for the deck. And if I chase the one on the deck I know he’s going to try to break hard right, and if I hit him his left wing will always fall off. Or if I’m approaching a bridge to bomb, if I see an anti-aircraft gun start shooting at me from my left, I know that there will be another one hidden on the right because whenever there’s one on the left there’s always one hidden under a camo net on the right. When they happen may be random, but every time they happen they happen exactly alike.

I get that feeling with RDR. It teases me with an open world feel and a superb atmosphere (I love that, I get so tired of the fantasy type worlds) and teases me with what is supposed to be freedom. But every single significant encounter is so scripted that I don’t feel like I’m really doing more than picking “Push button A to get this script, or push button B to get this script.” For me, that complete predictability really hurts what feelings I have of openness and freedom.

I suppose it’s good that I’m not writing for any computer games mags anymore, because I’m sure I’d get the hate for my review of RDR. ;)

1738

I wrapped up the agency missions on Friday and yesterday I finished identifying all the undiscovered locations in the game. Right now JC2/Panau is a somewhat blank slate in the search for chaos. Woo.

I suspect at this point I’ll put the game down soon, but when I feel like flying or blowing shit up it will be there waiting for me. Assuming I put it down.

1739

I get that, Jeff. I suppose I think of the open-world of RDR as the hunting I do. Wandering around, looking for critters, and you never know if you’re going to get a bunny rabbit, a pack of wolves or a stealth cougar attack. Or all three in some combination. The encounters with humans are all predictable except to the extent they sometimes intersect the animal kingdom or random passersby. You can get some surprising behavior and situations. Not always. But often enough that it’s a possibility. In some regions I’m constantly checking my “six” to make sure I don’t have a grizzly lumbering up on me before I engage some other target.

Just last night I was out bounty hunting in Tall Pines. I decided to see if I could plink off some targets at range with my new sniper rifle. So I bring up L2 and squint through the scope, well below the targets, and into some bushes. Next thing I know I see a cougar’s face! It startled me so much I forgot to shoot! I swapped to my shotgun and put him down before he could get to me. But that set off the bandits hiding in the cabin and all hell broke loose. This would come to involve the bandits, wolves and one pissed off wild boar.

1740

Well, Brian, to be fair, I’m not even in Mexico yet in RDR. And don’t get me wrong - I like it a lot. I think I’m just more disappointed when a game looks like it could be my ideal open world game, and then it lets me down with scripted predestination.

But I’m playing it a lot anyway, and enjoying it, in spite of that. Splitting my gaming time right now between JC2 (on the PS3) and RDR (on the 360.) And the occasional continuing of my young pitcher’s career in MLB The Show: 10. ;)