The next two years will potentially see the release of four new Rockstar games, and not one bears the name Grand Theft Auto. The first is Red Dead Redemption: a chance for the mediums sharpest satirist of American culture to revisit the quintessential American genre.
We sit down with Rockstar co-founder Dan Houser to discuss the chaos of the frontier, and life outside of Liberty City.
To hear the press tell it, this is generation has been a flash point in the evolution of video games.
The industry forges ahead on all fronts, and each year brings fresh experiences that seem to be the spoils of that progress.
It’s an exciting time to be a gamer, and logic dictates that the job of the critic should also feel more rewarding and diverse.
To some degree that must be true, but the fact is that we are gatekeepers – barriers between the consumers and the industry.
We’re planning for gold, forever engaged in the search for diamonds in the rough.
Shielding you from the full flown of the industry’s products is a key part of the job, and that reinforces the sense of dynamism that currently surrounds the medium.
The truth is more banal. The gems shine more brightly, and there may seem to be more of them, but that’s because there’s more everything. Games are now being created and released in larger quantities than at any time in history, and innovation is an ideal that hte cast majority fails to achieve – indeed, most don’t even try. Copycat design is a rife now as it has ever been, and in that climate suspicion becomes a natural reflex.
We still remember seeing Quake dismissed as a Doom-clone, and WoW derided for cribbing from EverQuest. The way Heavy rain has been marginalised as ‘one long cut scene’ is symptomatic of the same problem – we deliberately couch ourselves in familiarity, even when confronted with the sort of original idea’s we’re supposed to venerate. It may be intended as a form of shorthand rather than a deliberate insult, but the effect is very much the same.
It came as no surprise, then, to see Red Dead Redemption immediately described as “Grand Theft Auto with horses” by a large swathe of the gaming press.
It’s the sort of snappy, concise phrase that takes practically no effort to invent, and achieves the paradoxical goals of telling you nothing about the game, while making what it does offer seem trivial. This sort of reductive soundbite is anathema to the pretentious, serious-minded game critic. We expected Dan Houser, Rockstar’s co-founder and one of Red Dead’s main writers, to be on the same page.
Somehow, on the reflection, he’s far more sanguine.
“A lot of the key, long-standing members of the Grand Theft Auto team have worked heavily on Red Dead Redemption, he replies, “including Leslie Benzies, GTA’s producer, and Aaron Garbut, the series’ art director, while Christian Cantamessa, the lead designer, moved to Rockstar San Diego at the start of the project after working on San Andreas.
So that extent, I guess it’s not a bad way of describing it.
It’s an open-world game using the expertise of the best team on Earth at making such games. Each GTA has been a massive labour of love, and so it is with this game. We may know how to make a Grand Theft Auto game, but that does not make it easy – it’s really hard work, and [continues to be] challenging every time. But Red Dead Redemption is also very much it’s own game.
The point is that Red Dead Redemption is a Rockstar game, and so it shares the knowledge and ambition it takes to create something as detailed and compelling as Grand Theft Auto IV.
However, the assumption that San Diego hast just swapped the gangsters for cowboys and cars for horses, giving the masses something to play until GTA V rolls around, ignores the phenomenal amount of time, effort and resources invested in giving the game its own personality.
The fact that the lead designer started work after the release of San Andreas is telling: Redemption has been in development for more than five years, and was ambition of Houser’s before its predecessor, Red Dead Revolver was even released.
“We acquired a half-made project from Capcom that they were developing and about to abandoned at Angel Studios shortly before we bought the studio and turned it into Rockstar San Diego,” he recalls. “We then finished, tuned and styled the game to our tastes as best we could, but the core game design was not something we could have to much influence over. The core idea of the game – to make a fast-paced shooting game with the sensibilities of a fighting game – was very interesting and was done really well.. but we love open-world games, and in finishing Red Dead Revolver, we also fell in love with the Wild West.
The main with we wanted to keep and expand upon was the core sensibilities of the gun play.
The rest, we wanted to start over and make a game that was vast and epic in scope.”
This hints at the contradiction at heart of Red Dead Redemption. The Western may be the quintessential cinematic genre – its archetypes and icons instantly familiar to millions of people across all cultures and genres – but as gamers we’ve rarely experienced the West as anything more than a tongue-in-cheek shooting gallery.
This medium has never captured the sense of freedom and threat to evoked by that endless landscape, or traveled to the dark of heart of what establishing law and order in the chaos of the Frontier truly meant.
Cinema has offered several revisions of the myth of the West. Games have Sunset Riders and Mad Dog McCree.
“Our guess is that most of the reasons are technological,” Houser observes, “You simply could not make a game like Red Dead Redemption until this point – vast open areas of rolling wilderness, a complex , living ecosystem, a massive array of characters, side-quests all flowing together. You couldn’t make natural environments look convincing.. so gamers set in rural environment would tend to look a little silly, or be limited to small, narrow levels that look okay, but didn’t feel organic.
Equally, you couldn’t make horses, stagecoaches or rope – all the vital aspects of a western experience – look or behave remotely sensibly.
Nor could you show any kind of emotion on character’s faces. All of these factors combine to make most Western games very limited in scope, or very flawed, and push game makers into making the characters and styling of the game either camp or absurd, as there is nothing worse than having as semi-serious story supported by a ludicrously limited or ugly game.
I don’t think people got things wrong… it’s just that people were trying to do something that was fundamentally impossible.
This project has been long, gruelling and enormously challenging for us, despite our massive experience at making open-world games, the big team we have on the project, our strong technology base in RAGE, and experience of making Red Dead Revolver…there is simply no way someone could have made a game like this twelve months ago, let alone on the previous generations of hardware.
After eight hours with the single-player mode, we left feeling that Rockstar is perilously close to creating, a definitive take on the Western with its first full attempt. Graphics and processing power certainly don’t guarantee a satisfying game, but Houser is right: the genre demands a combination of visual splendour and physical space that couldn’t have been achieved until now, and Red Dead Redemption could be taken as conclusive evidence of that.
The landscape is strikingly beautiful, it’s character altering with the changing colours, and the sun arcs across the sky and throws long shadows across the desert floor.
It is open on all sides, a stark contrast to the concrete jungle of GTA, and a constant invitation to just get on your horse and ride for the horizon. No agenda, no marker to head for. In a Western, the journey should be as important as the dissertation and Red Dead Redemption captures that perfectly.
Indeed, this could be the most believable world Rockstar has ever created. Liberty City demands that you suspend your disbelief to some degree: there are hundreds of shops and thousands of people, but they are a part of the ambiance of the city, and far more effective when you accept that you can’t go in every door or start a conversation with every passes-by. Red Dead redemption’s environment might appear simple by comparison, but it’s more authentically reactive and alive than any of the studios’ previous work.
“With Grand Theft Auto, the urban settings gave the player a huge amount of things to interact with simply by being there – people, vehicles, and so on, and around him all of the time, ” Says Houser. “When we began to get sections of this game’s map up and working we were suddenly presented with realities of the wilderness – there was nothing to do, so Christian and his team began to develop systems to fill that void. We had to put content in the world for the player to experience, and so we developed interesting ways of doing that which would still feel organic and new to players.
This combination of procedurally generated events and a complex ecological system is at the heart of what makes Red Dead Redemption so different from other open-world action games, not least those from Rockstar’s own stable.
Only story missions are represented by icons on the map: The rest of the game’s numerous distractions and side-quests are found by indulging in the spirit of adventure created by the landscape and striking out for the horizon.
We drifted from the trail to investigate a building on the prairie, only to discover it was a gang hideout with a posse of sheriff’s deputies planning a siege nearby. On a norther occasion, we spotted a white church in the haze of the far distance, and found an elderly women in a wedding dress outside.
This hidden encounter led to a bittersweet search for her missing husband, during which we resolved a dispute between an amorous musician and his demanding wife.
Virtually every journey we made was punctuated by one of these chance encounters, or a ru-nin with some marauding bandits, or an impromptu sharp-shooting contest with a wandering desperado.
The way Red Dead Redemption’s world unexpectedly reveals itself to the player evokes a similar sense of scale and discovery to Fallout 3, and honours the spirit of the Western in a way that Grand Theft Auto’s more regimented structure never could.
“As game makers, our goal, at some level, is simple – to fulfil fantasies – and the concept of the old West comes loaded with so many images, so many moments, so many great character types and such a strong sense of legend attached to it, that it was brilliant to play around with them and try to assemble them into a fun and coherent game.” explains Houser. “From a technical perspective, it was a complete nightmare. For the game to be everything we hoped it could be, we had to include a huge range of classic Western moments – stand-off, duels, stagecoach fights, gunfights on trains, hold-ups, bounty hunting, and so on. This is the strength of the game, but doing this in a seamless way in a massive open world was a huge challenge,”
Certainly the story missions we played were a mix of contextualised riffs on a classic action templates, and some moments of inspiration that we hope to see repeated in the full game.
On a fundamental level, a frantic race on a single-berth wooden carts is no different to tearing around the street cars.
But the way the rickety traps barrel and splinter recalls Ben Hur rather than Bullit, and exemplified the way Rockstar could use its setting to bring new life to open-world staples.
More impressive was a mission where Marston had to retrieve a Gatling gun from a mine guarded by bandits. It began with a satisfying gun-fight through a winding tunnel, but finished on a an altogether more surprising note, with Martston surfing a mine cart as it rolled down a series of steep hills, using Dead Eye mode to take out waiting enemies as he moved. Grand Theft Auto IV and it’s episodes proved that Rockstar’s knack for mission design hasn’t diminished, and while Redemption will need more than just a handful of impressive quests to meet that standard, what we saw gave us nor reason to doubt that it will.
For any long-standing fan of Rockstar’s games, though, Red Dead Redemption will have significance beyond the changes to its underlying game play. In terms of storytelling, only Bioware, Naughty Dog and a handful of others treat scripting and cut scenes with such reverence and skill. Indeed, in that respect GTA IV was career-best work, but where Rockstar’s previous games were firmly grounded in the here and now – culturally savvy and proud of it – Redemption presents a very different type of challenge.
That’s obviously a different challange from making a gangster living in 2009 New York / Liberty City sound believable and interesting.
On GTA IV, I was fortunate in that I could hide my many deficiencies behind the talents of my co writers, especially Rupert Humphries and Lazlow Jones, who head up mission dialogue and in game media respectively.
I’ve been able to do the same thing on this game with Mike Unsworth, who has done. I believe, a brilliant job. We have always been clear on the our role as game writers – to support gameplay as best we can to keep the game moving and make the experience as interesting as it can be. In short, to add to the experience as best we can and, when we can’t add anything, to get out of the way”
The next two years could be the most exciting Rockstar’s already impressive history, and precisely because, despite having four major projects in full development or scheduled for release, not one of them is part of the Grand Theft Auto family.
L.A Noire, Max Payne 3 and Agent all stand as evidence that the studio isn’t one to rest on its laurels, growing fat and happy on the profits earned by its mega-franchise. Each new concept is distinct and the diversity of these games will be a stiff test of breadth of Rockstar’s skills.
First up though, is Red Dead Redemption, and we’re confident that this period of potentially startling creativity is off to a flying start.
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