DISPATCHES JANUARY
Beyond redemption
I was waiting with bated breath for the Edge review of Red Dead Redemption 2, especially as it came out after I had already bought the game. I knew it would score well, I’m sure most of my fellow readers thought the same. But as I played it, I had a nagging voice in my head that said, ‘This isn’t an Edge 10’. And then your review came out, and it was, and I was puzzled.
I always saw the ‘10’ as something revolutionary. Something that truly made you play in a new way. This was HD, 4k, hyper-real Red Dead, but it was still Red Dead. Another downbeat story doesn’t change that. It was why I was utterly unsurprised when Breath Of The Wild got one. And I think both are good counterpoints to discuss games through.
One felt that fidelity was the key to make a living, breathing world, and the other merely made a world someone would want to spend time in. While I appreciate you can’t throw out a rule book, after working on a game for eight years, you’d expect something revolutionary. However, I’m still setting way markers, I’m still following a prescribed path. I’m still having to do busy work disguised as gaming. I’m still following an NPC while they expound narrative at me. None of this feels like a 10.
Yet for all that, when I am with my horse, in the middle of nowhere, far away from the hullaballoo of the main game, I get it. Fishing, hunting, or merely existing in the world is a pleasure. However it took me a good ten to 15 hours to reach this state of mind. My cackhandedness getting me into trouble with the law, whether it was shooting innocent bystanders or punching my horse accidentally. Some of these resulted in ridiculous stories I told my friends, other times it just ruined a mission I’d completed and just broke the whole illusion.
“As I played Red Dead, I had a nagging voice in my head that said, ‘This isn’t an Edge 10’”
I appreciate game reviews, and opinions, are like arseholes in that we all have them. However Edge’s is the one I trust the most. I had hoped they would be at the vanguard of protecting those who develop the games (and the weeks before its release the crunch news was across all channels) but like almost all outlets it chose to turn a blind eye because the product was close to spectacular. Maybe it is a case of no one wanting to know how the sausage is made, but I feel if we reward developers for this behaviour, we are part of the problem. I appreciate many contracts are related to Metacritic scores, and as such, lowering scores would actually harm those who need them for the bonuses they worked so hard for.
I think the above demonstrates what a quandary we are in. We want to and should celebrate games which elevate the art, and Red Dead definitely did that, but we need to manage our own expectations and excesses, while also thinking of the human cost to our consumption. Anand Modha We realise Red Dead isn’t for everyone, but it certainly was for us. As for crunch, it simply can’t factor in to a score, unless all future review code is accompanied by staff timesheets and Glassdoor reports. Anyway, did you really just say you trust Edge’s arsehole more than anyone else’s? We suppose we’ll take praise wherever we can.
Tome of healing
After reading the sad news that two of your longstanding stablemates have had to close their doors, I just wanted to drop a line to say how much I value what you guys and gals are doing at Edge. I’ve been on the mend from a sod of an illness in the past year or so, and a key part of recovery has been that oh-so faddish thing, ‘self care’. I’ve largely
interpreted this as an excuse to buy a Switch and tool around Hyrule rediscovering a hobby that had slipped out of my life for a long time with all the stresses and strains of acting like a grown-up. It’s been marvellous to just play again, but tuning back into gaming called for a trusty guide. I hadn’t picked up a copy of the mag since at least 2004 – but blimey, it’s even better than I remember. Funny, reflective, and a proper sense that you care about how these things are made and where they are headed. Mooching about on the sofa flicking through
Edge for a few hours is a true joy. They will have to prize that direct debit out of my cold dead hands – here’s to another 25 years. Matt Foster Bless you for this, Matt, and not least for the timing of its arrival so close to print deadline. It’s great to know that work that’s affecting our health is helping someone else’s. Once this issue’s gone, we are definitely getting this cough looked at.
Blue-sky printing
It saddens me to find out about the demise of GamesTM and GamesMaster. The latter I stopped reading years ago, as I had outgrown its content, as I had done with Nintendo Power, GamePro, and EGM. And so, I personally didn’t feel too bad never seeing them again. But GamesTM was another matter. Come to think of it, although I have followed dozens of game mags through the years, it was the first I was still reading while it went under. Granted, I’ve always enjoyed
Edge more, but GamesTM was always worth checking out as a second opinion. The retro section was particularly good. Actually, the whole thing was full of good stuff. I recall arguing with a college professor which magazine was better, and I remember applauding how GamesTM had both the content of a mature editorial, while also still oozing the enthusiasm for videogames that youngsters only have (we both agreed, though, that Edge had more depth to it).
Above all though, the thing I liked the most about your old competitor was the all-soelegant ‘Better than/Worse than’ graph. This not only immediately gave me an idea how good a game was, and what kind of game it was, it was also able to take funny jabs at bad ones.
Which brings me to the another point: I can’t help wondering if Edge could adopt Better than/ Worse than. Probably not, because it wouldn’t fit your serious attitude. But maybe you could come up with something similarly elegant. Perhaps mention two or three games a reviewed game reminds you of. Or an ‘also consider’ list.
Either way, please continue to arrive at my doorstep every four weeks: there’s nothing like print to fully engage with my other favourite medium. R0bert August de Meijer That sounds a bit too much like hard work, honestly, and in any case we rather like things as they are. How’s this: everything is better than Yaiba, but worse than Puzzle & Dragons.
Some justice
After seeing the Hype article in E325, and the subsequent review in E326, it seems that Red
Dead Redemption 2 is now everywhere I look. Even on holiday in Amsterdam it adorned huge banners on the side of buildings; the biggest marketing push I’ve seen for a game in a while. Further to this, my wife forwarded me an article about how YouTube had taken down videos of players beating an in-game suffragette to death in RDR2, and it provoked no little discussion.
Developers can create these incredibly immersive experiences, in which a player can do literally anything – in this case, beat a woman to death, or hogtie her to a horse and drag her along the ground. Other footage I’ve seen involves lassoing a man in the street and dragging him up a building, or dumping a tied-up man into a lake. I’ve never given any credence to the ‘videogames = violence’ debate, but I still wonder whether it’s really necessary to give players the option to do these things without any supporting narrative context.
Film and TV is so deliberate in its violence. Each scene is handpicked and usually carries a message or narrative hook that justifies the brutality. But in videogames – especially openworld titles – this isn’t always the case. Is it the developers’ responsibility to provide the most immersive experience possible, no matter the cost? Or is it their responsibility to create experiences that offer meaning, provoke thought, and educate players?
And, is it a negative reflection on the developers that they conceive of and deliberately include these things in games? Or does one place all blame on the player – after all, they don’t have to do those things; they simply have the option to do them.
I think a defining moment in videogames was with the hotly debated scene in Call Of
Duty: Modern Warfare 2, No Russian, which I think is ingrained in the minds of most gamers of a certain age. Here is the perfect balance of free will within a narrative context – the player is given the choice to role play as a terrorist or maintain the ideals of the character they currently control. Both options are, in my opinion, valid – the weight of the choice feels significant either way, and both choices offer a narrative heft. What the player chooses, ultimately, doesn’t matter, but I think in either scenario the player will feel something.
Experiences like this have helped games gain cultural recognition, and prove they can be significant in contributing to the discourse of many difficult issues. However, when a player can kill or torture anyone in a sandbox without any context, it feels like a step backwards. Chris Walker The reason Red Dead’s ‘annoying feminist’ videos were so shocking is that they draw their narrative context from the real world, rather than the one the game portrays. Rockstar sought to make a point about the politics of the game’s time period, which was then used to make a statement about today’s instead. Can we really blame Rockstar for giving awful people the chance to be awful? We’re not sure. Either way, enjoy your new PS Plus sub.