CHENNAI: Belgium has enforced strict gambling laws (which covers lootcrates), which resulted in Nintendo banning two of its games this week. Lootcrates (common to all games today, and a money spinner in games like PUBG mobile) give random rewards in return for actual money. ‘FIFA points’, the in-game currency of the popular game is also banned in the country. I hope the first two sentences underwhelmed you enough to be excited about the more important news. While some of us are still stuck in chapter 1 of Red Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online gets a brand new update making it no longer a beta, fixing its many bugs, and introducing some top new features — raising the standards for winning videogames!
An actual Career Path: Up-coming updates are to bring in new realistic in-game roles where we could choose to live as a Collector (of treasures), a trader (by setting up business) or a bounty hunter (track down criminals). We can shuffle between roles, or advance in the one we choose to increase and unlock role attributes. A sound career path is a foolproof way to get us hooked to RDO forever. Smart, Rockstar!
“Honest” challenges: The game now has on-denand Competitive fishing (to catch the biggest fish), Bird Shooting and Herb picking. You can also visit poker tables in outposts and towns and play poker with friends (invite-only), and you guessed it — this is banned in Belgium.
Enhanced Hostility system: Apart from the updates on clothes and revolvers, the hostility system upgrade seems like an interesting step up. The game differentiates players on the basis of their in-game aggressive behaviour. Hostile players will be easily visible on their enemy’s radar, even from a distance. Similarly, defensive players are indicated by a “shield”, and take lesser damage from enemies.
Rockstar has built an entire playable, realistic, open-world universe set in the late 1800s — something quite different and way more extra compared to the mainstream big-name games you’ve seen before. Although revolutionary, this sets a track for the new trend in ‘gaming as a service’, which may lead each of us to pledge allegiance to a single videogame. Their constant and regular updates, paired with the breadth of their playable universe pulling us deeper into them, at the cost of gaming diversity?