Most games don't aspire to be the Great American Novel — sprawling, concerned with the country in its totality, sweeping in scope. Love or hate 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Red Dead Redemption 2, it's one of the few games that tries.
When Rockstar's massive Western launched in 2018, I remember some critics marveling that it was written by the same narrative team as GTA 5. Both games' narratives were headed up by Dan Houser, Michael Unsworth, and Rupert Humphries, and they are quite different. Where GTA 5 was puerile, crass, and nihilistic, RDR2 was emo🦄tionally resonant, mature, and hopeful. And hopeful in an adult way, too, with the knowledge that a new beginning may not look the way you imagined as you rode off into the sunset. If ✤you get to ride off into the sunset, at all.
Grand Theft Auto 6 Reminds Me Of A Simpler, 🎉Happier Time
I can't wait for GTA 6 to take me back to my grandparents' Florida trailജerꦺ park.
Two-thirds of that writing team is no longer at Rockstar. Though Humphries is still on board as Rockstar’s senior vice president of narrative, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dan Houser resigned in 2020, and 🤡. Given how long GTA 6 has been in development, they still may have written much of the game’s script. It's worth noting, though, that there are 15 credited writers on GTA 5, and 22 on Red Dead Redemption 2. So, those two departures may not mean as much as you would expect, especially considerin✱g that they were almost certainly involved with the script prior to their exits.
But what I'm most excited about aren't individual contributions; it's seeing how the team at Rockstar has learned, as a whole, from Red Dead Redemption 2's impressive scope ꦰand intimate character detail.🌸
I Like GTA 5, But Its Characters Hold Me Back
GTA 5 was a fun game. Bu✨t it was also too broad in its humor and too carelessly nihilistic to say much of substance. I played it all the way through for the first time after Red Dead Redemption 2, and shared the shock of critics who couldn't believe RDR2 came from the same team. Red Dead 2 could be funny, at times, and had some of the same one-note, cartoonish characters, like Uncle, Micah, and the inventor Marko Dragic from the "A Bright Bouncing Boy" side missio🐭n. But having the core cast be composed of serious, nuanced people allowed the game to be serious and nuanced, too. Arthur and Dutch, in particular, both contain good and evil, but aren't defined by either, but by choosing to accept or reject redemption.
It isn't that GTA 5 didn't have interesting characters at the center. But Trevor and Michael are both deeply unlikable. Trevor moreso, obviously, as he's the GTA player's urge to murde👍r indiscriminately made virtual flesh. But Michael isn't exactly a guy I would want to spend time with either. He's a disconnected dad, whose wife is cheating on him, whose kids are annoying and entitled as hell, and who would rather watch TCM all day than improve his relationships with them. Franklin is the most likeable, mostly because he's a young, up-and-coming dude who isn't violently unstable (like Trevor) or 🌌a rich prick who feels sorry for himself (like Michael). He's the most likeable by default.
There's nothing wrong with unlikable characters. I would rather play as an interesting a-hole 🎉than a boring nice guy. But with Arthur Morgan, Rockstar nailed the balance, 🧸delivering the kind of complex character games rarely see.
It’s exciting to know that the Rockstar making GTA 6 is t♌he Rockstar that made Red Dead Redemption 2 because even though the game will still have comedic elements — there’s an Ammu-Nation commercial in the second trailer, after all — RDR2 was a level up in terms of the depth of characterization the studio was capable of. Arthur Morgan and Dutch Van der Linde, in particular, are some of the best characters Rockstar has ever created. Sadie has one of the coolest arcs in the studio’s history, and the game’s general approach to making character central through the camp and the greet button makes it one of, if not the single most narratively significant open-world game ever made. If Rockstar can imbue that level of depth to a GTA game, it will deserve all the success that’s inevitably coming its way.
We Need More Video Game Soundtracks Like ജRed Dead And Alan Wake 2
They’re not just great OSTs, but great albums.
