In the most classical Cowboys
and Indians-kind of ways, the American frontier
has been used as the canvas for literature and film since each has had
breadth to embrace the era and its infinitely contested lands. But the
dust-mottled landscape of violence, thieves, and legends that remain
ever so familiar in other media has been implemented surprisingly
little in the gaming medium. So when Red
Dead Redemption, Rockstar’s
spur-saddled, 2010 magnum opus hit, it immediately impressed both the
gaming press and consumers alike, garnering unanimous high praise and
quickly becoming as viable in sales as Rockstar’s flagship Grand
Theft
Auto series. RDR took the
industry by storm with a well written,
expertly paced, and massively open world. With such a high bar set by the
first installment, how can a sequel possibly meet fans’ expectations, let alone
exceed them? Like the first game so cleverly ingested much of what has
been utilized before, much can be gleaned from investigating the
genre’s storied past in celluloid, on page, and in real life.

John
Ford and Caricatures of
the Old West

Despite the harrowing finale of
Red Dead Redemption and the violent path John Marston carved through
the game, it’s RDR‘s more caricature qualities that leave the greatest
lasting impression. True, it’s the same stylistic trappings that have
permeated Rockstar’s titles since Grand
Theft Auto III turned its dark
mafia
underworld into a high-contrast pop-art expedition, but despite the game’s
attempt to capture the brutality of an untamed land, it’s John Ford‘s
saccharine vision of the old west that most resembles RDR‘s overall
tone. While the game’s landscape was untrodden ground for the digital
space, it nonetheless emulated some of the era’s most iconic genre
tropes, and nothing embodies this more than John Ford‘s epics of the
’40s and ’50s. In The Searchers,
John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a
brusque ex-Confederate with a past to hide who, for ambiguous reasons,
falls into rescuing his abducted nieces. But despite Edwards truly
being of the moral conflicts The Searchers’
narrative attempts to
provoke, the fabric of the film is overshadowed by the Technicolor
fluorescence in which Ford’s West is visually painted, transforming
gritty legend into more of a fantasy.

No matter how gritty RDR
attempts to make the world, its errant whimsy provides weight more as
mere imitation than being singularly unique. Characters like Nigel West
Dickens and Irish display an animated quality that would feel at home
in those Technicolor epics that set the groundwork for the grittier
“true” Westerns of the late ’60s and ’70s. In this
way, Red Dead Redemption is a contradictory experience. It’s obvious
that the mission “Assault on Fort Mercer” and its
inclusion of a vicious, manually
operated Gatling gun mimics the
famous last moments of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.
But the intended
nauseation of the gruesomely violent cross-cut finale was lost within Red Dead Redemption‘s contentment with
presenting a broader picture, which really is
that of genre and little more. The details of each moment are lost in
the shuffle to move the story along, negating the greater impact that
each could make. In this regard RDR emulates Ford’s works most because
it’s primarily concerned with scope. But the minutiae of the later
Westerns in film, those that turned classic genre into something more,
remained largely untouched, and this is where Red Dead 2 could really
shine. In emulating later works, RDR 2 could push what may remain
exclusively genre within the digital space and
become something truly innovative. In breaking new ground, Red Dead 2
should work to establish palpable tone to encapsulate its tale.

Of the countless films set in
the dust and grime of the Old West, none establishes a soul-dampening
tone better than the Nick Cave penned Australian epic, The Proposition.
Charlie Burns, a gunslinger and outlaw played by Guy Pearce, is
blackmailed by local provincial officers into killing his older brother
in return for saving his younger brother who has been locked up and
faces impending execution (sound familiar?). Here lies an interesting
kind of intersection — the unknown past of Edwards in The Searchers
and the blackmailing of Burns in The Proposition.
Both prove integral
pieces of Redemption’s story, and in a broader sense, how commonly
similar themes in Westerns have been borrowed and shared. But each film
utilizes these elements so differently that the overall experiences are
polar opposites — one toes predictability while the other challenges
ideas of morality and gives greater sense of emotion and impact.
Video games typically retain the safer route of integrating easily
processed genre archetypes, but films like The
Proposition give vantage of
how integrating the familiar can still lead
to broader, more meaningful end products.

The haunting tone found in The
Proposition is apparent and
openly explorable in RDR. Moving forward
with a sequel, Rockstar needs only to embrace the often surprising and
sometimes disturbing intricacies of the open world that it has
worked so diligently to create in order to strike new ground.

The
Open World and RDR‘s
Conflicting Game Structure

One of the most impressive of
Redemption’s various merits is just how expansive the game’s open world really is. It’s easy to get lost amidst the exposed rock and hard clay of the
rugged terrain, stumbling upon wolf attacks, wayward sheriffs, and
rogue ambushes by bandit parties. Between missions, the daunting power
of the lands one travels can be felt, but therein lies the rub. Most
often these serendipitous interactions are left in passing on the
continued push to reach destinations, waypoints, and to forward the
story through the completion of tasks delegated by the game’s limited
secondary cast. It’s in this way that Redemption’s greatest strength,
the open world and how aptly it captures the haunting tone that
permeates The
Proposition’s bleak Outback,
also presents its worst
contradiction of constraint and limitations. In one fell swoop, the
wildness of a land that should feel dangerous and overwhelming is
nullified as the player is reined in by the worst kind of hand-holding.

What Rockstar worked most to
successfully establish was coincidentally that which they most feared.
Like the modern age of tepid boundaries and bureaucratic convenience
that Marston tried to escape, Rockstar fenced in a property that could
have been untamable and unwieldy. What’s worse is that the trappings
they built the game’s story and gameplay into were the same trappings
developed within every major Rockstar release since GTA III established
its Liberty City in point-to-point, connect the dots simplicity. Take
away the tumbleweed and wagons, the exterior skin
of desert, abandoned town, and setting sun, and what you’re left with
might as well be the urban sprawl of any other GTA title. In looking to
Redemption’s sequel, Rockstar needs to challenge the makeup of their
title and the structure of the unraveling plot. They should seek to
create a digital world that exists as a living schism between the old
and the new, the untamed and the sheltered. While the beauty of Red
Dead Redemption‘s environments and the wild unpredictability of
animals, strangers, and errant storms all feel uniquely inspired, it’s
still a game that exists within the shell of another.

Red Dead Redemption 2 should
leave the player stranded, desperate and under-equipped. In undoing the
guided narrative that Rockstar has built into an empire over the past
decade, Redemption’s sequel could elevate itself past this constraint.
It may be hard to imagine playing through an experience like Red Dead
without a map, without the constant guidance of characters met and used
to open up the next area, but in developing a sequel, that is exactly
what Rockstar should do. While this means revolting against every
natural tendency within the interactive medium established over the
past three decades, there is no better landscape to do so than the
dissonance of the Old West — the infinite land of discovery,
isolation, dangers and self-made wealth. Imagine if Rockstar stripped
the player of that oh so convenient map altogether. No Icons in the
lower left hand corner to guide the player. No setting waypoints. Just
the real task of actually finding one’s way. Suddenly claiming
bounties, scavenging for wild plants, and hunting would take on a whole new
meaning. Everything that acts within RDR‘s world as fodder, second
fiddle to maintaining the course for the main story arc, would be
transformed into visceral, immersive experiences in the sequel. One
would truly be forced to learn the land, and the weight of its violent
nature would resonate far more deeply.