WARNING: This post contains massive Red Dead Redemption spoilers!

There are days when I’m really glad I’m not a game designer, and today is one of them, because today I’m thinking about story-telling. Consider a novel or a movie, and more specifically, consider pacing. Most writers take you on a journey full of ups and downs, full of contrasts. The best way to convey an emotion is to preface it with some contrasting emotion. So when everything seems grim and suddenly something wonderful happens, you really feel that sense of joy. And vice versa.

Not in every case, of course. Some stories are just relentlessly joyful, or relentlessly grim. But usually we get variety.

But in games, that’s so hard! Gamers expect an intense experience from start to finish. At best they’ll forgive some slowness in the beginning of a game before things really get rolling, but once the plot is in motion we expect more, More, MORE, MORE!!!! Everything has to ramp up until some ultimate battle at the end.

Red Dead Redemption tries to tell a richer story. [Here come the spoilers.] When you finish the plot and kill the dude you’ve been hunting throughout the game, you’ll expect the credits to roll. Hell, there’s even a great “end of the game” song that plays as you ride off to your homestead to re-unite with your wife and kid. It feels great!

Then you get there…and the game doesn’t end. Now you’ve got more missions doing mundane things like herding cattle or teaching your son to hunt. This goes on for a while and compared to earlier in the game, the pace is sedate. I might even go so far as to call it boring.

And then, the last loose end gets tied up. The US Army comes gunning for John Marston. It’s a scene very very reminiscent of the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He’s stalled his attackers long enough for wife and son to get away, and now he’s holed up in the barn. He realizes there’s only one way this is going to end. Only one way for his wife and child to be free. He has to die. He bursts out of the barn and there’s.. I dunno, 50 enemies, and he’s gunned down.

For me it was a real “oh….shit” kind of moment. I kept wondering how he was going to make it through. (After all, I has side quests to finish!) But he doesn’t. Instead, we fast forward a few years and step into the boots of Jack, his son, now turned gunslinger and going after the man who killed his father.

Anyway, so that’s the plot of Red Dead Redemption. Marston’s death wouldn’t have the same impact if you hadn’t just spent 30 minutes doing these mundane quests where you’re just taking care of your family and your farm. Marston is content at last, and just wants to be left alone. We get that. But the government agent who’d been pulling his strings all this time just can’t have Marston hanging around, knowing what he knows.

The problem is, gamers don’t like those mundane quests! We’re rushing to finish the game; we’ve got 4 more on our “to play” pile that we want to get to. We’re pumped up on adrenaline from taking out the last boss…and now you want us to herd cattle?! Are you crazy?

So how does a game designer give the player that breathing space he needs to settle down, so that the next plot point has the impact the designer is going for, without making the game play boring? And wow, how much testing did they do in RDR so that the maximum number of people get lulled into that sense of complacency before the last battle. Put too many mundane quests in and people will just quit. Put too few in and the sudden switch back to death and combat won’t have the same impact.

I have a friend at work who thought RDR had the ‘dumbest, worst ending’ of any game he’d played. I also know he was really rushing to finish the game, and I think that had some impact?

To me, Red Dead Redemption’s story was amazing. I was thinking about it for weeks after finishing. Generally I finish a game and move on, but RDR has stuck with me the same way a good movie or book would. I’d love to see more games with this kind of storytelling, but I can see how hard it is to make a game like this, and how good the rest of the game has to be in order for gamers to stick with you through the slow bits.

Much easier to design a game based around killing stronger and stronger enemies until finally you kill the strongest enemy, then cut to the credits.

Red Dead Redemption shows us that games can be so much more than a shooting gallery, if we’re only willing to let them be.

I didn’t sleep well last night. I had disturbing, unhappy dreams. I suspected I would, so maybe I sub-consciously caused them to happen.

But I’m still blaming Red Dead Redemption. Something happened in the game last night that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand out. There were only a few second of fore-shadowing that something was Wrong. Not enough for me to prepare myself. And then, there it was.

And I was totally creeped out. After I quit playing the imagery and the event stuck with me; I couldn’t shake it.

This relates a bit to my last role-play post. I think 95% of people will bounce right over this event without a second thought, but I was so “in the world” that I bought into it hook, line and sinker.

Back in the day I played quite a bit of GTA IV, in spite of the fact that I don’t generally like playing bad guys. I tried to keep Niko on the straight and narrow but there were some scripted actions that were very unsavory to me. But I played because of the format.

This past week I’ve been playing Red Dead Redemption. I’m loving it. Being a gunslinger in the Old West isn’t nearly as unpalatable to me as being a hit man in a realistic modern setting. And I’ve got a certain amount of nostalgia for Westerns anyway. Rockstar was brilliant in picking the setting… the tail end of the untamed west period, where we see influences of the much more modern eastern states. Some early cars and so forth.

Anyway, what keeps me playing RDR is, again, the format. I play it like an MMO (but then I play everything like an MMO if I can manage to). Sometimes I quest, sometimes I chase challenges (gather 5 coyote hides, shoot 5 birds), sometimes I just ride the range to see what me and my trusty steed come upon.

In a lot of ways, Red Dead Redemption is the best RPG I’ve played in a long time, in the most literal sense of the acronym. No, there aren’t levels or character stats (though there is gear, to some extent) but I just sink into the role of John Marsten and lose myself.

But as much as I like Westerns, I’m a fantasy guy at heart. I know everyone else is sick to death of fantasy, but I’m not.

And that’s why I want Rockstar’s next game to use this open world format for an Arthurian Grail Quest game. Imagine you play a knight. You might be a white knight or a black knight. You’re ultimately searching for the Grail, but along the way you could have all kinds of adventures. You could help out peasants who’re being mistreated by a cruel lord… or side with the lord to help him keep those pesky peasants in line. Hunting and fishing, of course.. a knight has to live off the land at times. Magical beasts, just to keep things fun. Random encounters with wizards, damsels, other knights, creatures… and this is Rockstar, so there’ll be some very dark things happening, too.

I could just get lost in a world like that… but I’m sure that’s much to geeky for Rockstar to take on. I hope someone ‘borrows’ this open world format and runs with it, though.