unseeingeye
Cleric/Mage
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2021
- Messages
- 614
At this point I'd prefer to keep germane to the thread in a more focused capacity, though I acknowledge my part in exacerbating these trifling digressions. What I do wish to address is that the exceptional qualities this game has that isn't present in any others that I'm familiar with, beyond the sheer numbers and effort involved, are for me the artistic intangibles and attempting to describe them is what I was most keen on trying to share. I'd attempted to express some measure of that awesome qualia that arose in me a few pages back in my delineating the minutiae the compounding of which led to such euphoric sensory overload. Certain moments I've had while playing it approach childhood states of awe and wonder that I simply have not experienced in any other throughout my adult life, moments created amidst perpetual imminence purely by fortuitous serendipity through the converging of hundreds, perhaps thousands of dynamic variables aligning in harmony to elicit feelings that are otherwise only rarely evoked by paintings or inspired music. Moments that emerge within an interactive simulation so well designed to where the boundary between myself and the games world, the very interface between mind and model, almost entirely dissolved. I recognize that my enthusiasm for this sort of interaction with a game is unusual, and lament where communication is wholly ineffective.But really, the most important take away here is this: you think RDR2 is a masterpiece, because you liked it
And that's fine
Just don't go around writting essays that it possess an excepcional quality that can't be found in other games, because that isn't true...
Similar to actually going out and just existing for a time in nature, the amount of information being presented on screen at any given moment can be overwhelming should you step out of the action and allow your attention to dilate and just watch, and listen to what is going on in the environment. Many open-world games I've played before have had absorbing sonic landscapes and convincing ambient backdrops, but in no other have I been able to consistently identity and focus on one single, peculiar sound or sight amongst innumerable others, track it to its source and discover an actual insect, a frog, a bird, &c going about its business so believably. The flora and fauna are so diverse and so well articulated with the wildlife adhering to diurnal and nocturnal cycles and behaving in very complex ways. This gets trivialized as "horse balls and snow deformation mechanics" but it is truly an unprecedented realization of detail involved. I've encountered two dogs play-fighting, opposing rams or bucks colliding antlers to antlers, predators fighting over territorial or mating disputes, cats chasing birds or tiny rodents, hundreds of examples of this kind of thing. To me, these are exceptional qualities that cannot be found in other games, at least not to this degree.
The sheer number of animals and the potential animations for each one of them is truly remarkable, and the same goes for Arthur and other NPCs. One of the coolest things I've ever experienced in a game is to have Arthur survive a Grizzly bear attack. The animations of this are so convincing and intense, and there are actually multiples ways this can play out (obviously in real life you almost certainly would die if you tried to fight back). Missing the shot and desperately trying to reload as the bear knocks him to the ground sending the gun flying, as it starts clawing apart his chest and stomach and trying to bite his midsection or throat as Arthur wildly kicks and struggles before reaching his hunting knife and burying it in the side of the bears neck then wavering to shoot it in the head in the briefest of windows where the beast is momentarily stunned. The first time it happened I lowered the controller assuming I was just watching a dying animation, but then the controls showed up making me realize I could actually try and have him survive this encounter and when I managed to kill it and looked at a collapsed Arthur drenched in blood with claw marks all over struggling to breathe next to the heaping, bloodied mass of fur and fangs, I was seriously impressed. The suggestion that the game world is barren is once again simply not true; it may lack the kind of action packed events or opportunities to be heroic around every corner that some might prefer, but to say that there is nothing is incorrect. But I fear I'm beating a dead horse here so I'll leave it off there.