BENGALURU: Red Dead Redemption 2 is painstakingly detailed — converting even the simplest of everyday tasks into a minor event, from allowing you to buy food for survival, interacting with people around you in the game, to an honour system that works better than in the real world! If I was a benevolent hero who paid off my bounties, donated money, and saved innocent people in the RDR world, I’d get discounts (up to half-off on goods if I’m an exceptional humanitarian) in in-game stores, and special access to outfits. That’s a good deal. I would like that system in real-life.
Also, who wouldn’t want to experience this amazing new near-perfect real world with friends? Red Dead Online Beta is just releasing for the lucky first few players of the game (including me!) and we’re all very excited about the future happiness.
The online game is supposed to allow us to free-roam the five states, explore with our friends while watching out for ambushes, and bond with our horse. It also has competitive gameplay with a “Showdown” mode — which means experiencing all the lawless adventures of the Wild West in the late 19th century.
Moving on to another beloved game going online, but this is a sadder tale — almost dystopian like the universe of Fallout itself. Fallout 76 is the online RPG version of the game that released last month. It was meant to be an enlightening survival experience with a fast-track programme on inventory management (that’s how realistic games are these days, you can’t carry infinite equipment and collectible goods on you anymore — and you must make a lot of choices), but the stock storage experience took too much of gameplay time.
The game had limited actual human interaction, and more conversation with Artificial Intelligence. This diluted the sympathetic aspect of surviving in waste land and strips the intention of the story mode away; almost like breaking a sculpture down to a rock with the open-world experience, rather than enriching it. Which goes to say that we can’t get online right every time. So how about doing it the other way around? Imagine an offline story-mode for your favourite online game — like PUBG!