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It's probably been answered already, but are there any mods you guys recommend?
 
Activelo said:
It's probably been answered already, but are there any mods you guys recommend?
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AMJM Transport, Bandit Hideouts, Just Get the Loot Already, Just Use the Damn Crosswalk, and Remove Speed Limits. The first adds a few more repeatable jobs and bounties, the second bandit hideouts to shoot up, the next one speeds up the loot and gathering anims, the next to last prevents peds from suicidially leaping in front of your horse, and the last one gets rid of speed limits for your horse on all terrains, including Saint Denis' cobblestones.
 
Now the western both later Red Deads homage is The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah's only real commercial and critical masterpiece (though not my favourite). In that film, the characters are likeable in spite of themselves. We enjoy watching them on screen, but they are far from good people. The first line William Holden says as his gang enter the bank: "if they move, kill 'em." They, along with the good guy bounty hunters, end up slaughtering a temperance parade without remorse. There is none of the rugged romantics one sees in Bonnie and Clyde and Red Dead Redemption 2.

The Bunch have one moment of 'redemption' in showing their loyalty to one another, but only then that comes in light of all the betrayals they have made throughout the story. The problems they face is instigated by Holden's betrayal of Robert Ryan. They leave someone's grandson to die in the bank robbery. The Bunch's final action, where they slaughter as many dirty Mexicans as possible, is a show of loyalty but also a pithy acceptance that their time is up. It is a hollow catharsis, but it works because we are left pondering if brotherhood is all we have. And even then, do we really have it?

Peckinpah's films explore amorality and questions what loyalty is, something Red Dead 2 wanted to do but failed. Straw Dogs, a film with no message beyond stating there is no message, ends with Dustin Hoffman relishing moral confusion. Major Dundee has Charlton Heston as a glory seeking Captain Ahab, willing to murder for personal gain. His loyalty is to himself. Those films succeed because they are willing to push a nerve and make audiences uncomfortable.

Other great westerns explore ethics, from Ford's The Searchers and Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur, to Eastwood's Unforgiven, because they are on the frontiers; they are the edge of what we should do and what we are able to do to survive. There is real moral quandaries to be faced. The characters of Red Dead 2 never escape liberal pieties and so they never feel like they are actually on the edge of living. If they were, video game reviewers would complain, as bad film critics complained of Peckinpah, that there is 'fascist undertones'. But it leaves any thinking player confused. The game does not see hypocrisy except in Dutch. Arthur complains throughout the story that he is scum of the earth but his murders go unabated and his 'virtues' (his egalitarianism rivals Whitman) are never probed with "but you murder people. How can you respect women and yet kill loving husbands and fathers? What gives you the right to murder a bigot? If you really feel damned maybe you should turn yourself in. How is a shopkeeper worse than you? Because he lives in society? Because he votes? Do the people you rob really deserve it? Are the people you murder evil? Just admit your guilt is a mask to continue being evil." Arthur might be a more unlikeable character if they did question this but he would certainly be more interesting.

It is like with Last of Us 2. At the end of the world, Ellie would not be in a relationship with another woman "finding herself", she would be having as many children as possible. It goes beyond all reason that she does not, but in not doing it, it leaves players comfortable because they live in a comfortable society and people do not have to think of 'the common good'.

edit: to add, GTA IV did this all without issue.
 
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Okay, so according to R*, cinematic mode with HDR calibration means having your image quality washed out. Great. Changing it to Game Mode makes the colors appear vibrantly. Thank you.
 
One easy rebuke to any annoyance regarding the gang's multiracialism: Exploiting minorities' anger has always been a big feature of Dutch's character. Of course he recruits blacks and injuns, and he no doubt spun a yarn about Kings and faith and true enemies to smooth over any tensions it might have caused initially.

It makes a lot of sense for Dutch's character and he's charismatic enough that it's very plausible.
 
Bunny Tracks said:
The problem isn't that Arthur is a bad person. The problem is that the game goes out of its way to act like he's not that, even when he clearly is,
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This is why I didn't finish the game. The writing kept ricocheting between "Arthur kills one billion innocent people for basically no reason" and "Arthur avenges a wholesome 100 person of color because he's just a nice fella :)". I couldn't get into the story because it didn't feel like the tale of an old west outlaw, it felt like a bunch of assholes from San Francisco doing cowboy improv and sucking at it.
 
Megaton Punch said:
This is why I didn't finish the game. The writing kept ricocheting between "Arthur kills one billion innocent people for basically no reason" and "Arthur avenges a wholesome 100 person of color because he's just a nice fella :)". I couldn't get into the story because it didn't feel like the tale of an old west outlaw, it felt like a bunch of assholes from San Francisco doing cowboy improv and sucking at it.
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Again, it's not even him being nice to minorities because within the context of the story it makes sense, and because he doesn't even do it that much outside of a handful of times.

It's that the game, and subsequently it's player base thinks this makes up for anything Arthur has done.

RDR1 doesn't have this problem. While John has standards, and is ultimately doing everything for his family, he knows he's a piece of shit, and no one in the game tries to argue otherwise.

At best, you could argue that the honor system kind of does that because unlike RDR2's, it actually affects how npcs react to you, and if you have high honor, npcs react very positively to you, but that's still not the story going out of its way to constantly insist you're a good person even though you're absolutely not.
 
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Bunny Tracks said:
It's that the game, and subsequently it's player base thinks this makes up for anything Arthur has done.
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I honestly don't think the game does. Even at max honor the letter you get from Mary says that Arthur is wrestling with a giant inside of him, and the giant is winning. His grave marker states "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness", which IMO implies he never actually attained it despite his efforts. He himself says to Dutch at the end that the only one of them who made it out safely was John, almost like he's talking more about the life the gang has lead than anything else. In his journal after saving the German family and moving the gang to Clemens Point he mentions that doing good comes naturally to Charles and that its something that continues to elude him. At best the game portrays him as a scumbag who realizes what being a scumbag has gotten him, and he knows he'll never, ever manage to break free of who he is.
 
Replaying RDR2 and within the very first mission Micah: Attempts to rape a woman and then burns down the building they could have stayed in. He later brings you to what is basically him massacring people in Strawberry with you covering for him and he's completely deranged. Why exactly are they keeping this guy around? Why is Dutch allowing a person who is a huge liability for the gang to stay in it? Am I missing something here?
 
Sicko Hunter said:
Replaying RDR2 and within the very first mission Micah: Attempts to rape a woman and then burns down the building they could have stayed in. He later brings you to what is basically him massacring people in Strawberry with you covering for him and he's completely deranged. Why exactly are they keeping this guy around? Why is Dutch allowing a person who is a huge liability for the gang to stay in it? Am I missing something here?
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Lore Reason: Because he sucks up to Dutch, and is a fantastic gunslinger.

Meta Reason: Because for some reason RDR2 just couldn't let Dutch and his plans be the reason the gang falls apart like is said in RDR1.

Also, there's an unconfirmed rumor that he wasn't supposed to be this bad originally, but because playtesters kept sympathizing with him over the other characters, Rockstar made him worse, and worse until this is what we got.
 
Megaton Punch said:
This is why I didn't finish the game. The writing kept ricocheting between "Arthur kills one billion innocent people for basically no reason" and "Arthur avenges a wholesome 100 person of color because he's just a nice fella :)". I couldn't get into the story because it didn't feel like the tale of an old west outlaw, it felt like a bunch of assholes from San Francisco doing cowboy improv and sucking at it.
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There is a thought terminating idea in leftist circles that consists of "how would character X react to minorities". You can't like or dislike anyone until you know it because you fear he's secretly hitler unless the writer told you so. This creates such retarded cases where Arthur's morality hinges on not saying the N-word more than his actual action in game.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
There is a thought terminating idea in leftist circles that consists of "how would character X react to minorities". You can't like or dislike anyone until you know it because you fear he's secretly hitler unless the writer told you so. This creates such retarded cases where Arthur's morality hinges on not saying the N-word more than his actual action in game.
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The modern bourgeois leftist is an extremely simple creature. As long as you're in favor of non-whites, abortion, feminism, and homosexuality, you could pretty much do anything and stay in their good graces. Go on a rape and murder spree. Burn down a school. Sneak into a hospital and unplug ventilators. As long as you stay within their extremely narrow concept of "good", they're not going to care. And that's exactly how Arthur is written. He's a piece of shit, but he agrees with Current Year leftism so none of it matters.
 
Bunny Tracks said:
Lore Reason: Because he sucks up to Dutch, and is a fantastic gunslinger.
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There's a dozen other great gunslingers in the gang who are also loyal who don't go on massacre sprees and attempt to rape women. It just doesn't make sense to me. I get loyality is huge with Dutch but Micah is clearly hated by the rest of the gang and causing trouble all the time.
 
Sicko Hunter said:
There's a dozen other great gunslingers in the gang who are also loyal who don't go on massacre sprees and attempt to rape women. It just doesn't make sense to me. I get loyality is huge with Dutch but Micah is clearly hated by the rest of the gang and causing trouble all the time.
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I think he's just very good at manipulating Dutch because both men are very similar at their core: murderous thrillseeking criminals to whom "fighting is in their nature" as Dutch put it at the end of RDR1. Micah realises this and doesn't fall for the philosophical/political yapping, he sees right through Dutch but he plays along and strokes his ego to get closer to him to eventually capitalise on it by selling him out to pinkertons.

Hosea and later Arthur both realised this but ultimately couldn't salvage the situation. The rest of the gang were too mistified by Dutch's bullshit to see what was really happening until the very end.
 
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