Dodo Blog

A series of posts on the use of interactive animation in games …

Next: Red Dead Redemption

Last post I talked about proximity as a gameplay device.

Red Dead is another game that does some interesting things with this… I was somewhere in Mexico doing odd jobs for The Resistance, when ‘man of the people’ Reyes asks me to ride shotgun on a stagecoach. Now, you can choose to sit down next to him, OR if you happen to think he’s kind of a hypocrite, you can ride alongside on your own horse instead, to which Reyes responds:

“I guess my company is not good enough for you anymore, hm?”

You could argue the only gameplay consequence is missing some exposition… but it’s a great step towards making social cues matter in how your interactions with NPCs pan out.

You can also greet people as you walk or ride by. If you press the interact button when close to another character your avatar, Marston, tips his hat and says “hello”, or replies if the other has already spoken.

The game is full of little touches like this. NPCs call out and gesture to you when they want to ask you something and wave excitedly when you come back. If they’d implemented “He went THAT way!”-gestures as well, the mini-map would’ve been rendered all but obsolete.

[I found playing with the mini-map off a lot more enjoyable as it made the game less about riding from mission to mission and more about really exploring]

Of course, you can’t talk about Red Dead Redemption without mentioning the horses. While you could argue they are like the cars from GTA, there’s a believability and life to them that goes beyond that…

Like Agro from Shadow of the Colossus, they are characters you come to care about and this is in no small part thanks to the fluid animation and all the little details in their behavior, from the head-shaking when you push them too hard, to the intricate interaction with the terrain.

If you whistle anywhere in the world your horse comes to find you. It’s possible to keep the same horse throughout the game so you can get quite attached to the creature, to the point where some players felt compelled to mourn the loss of their horse when a stray bullet, or cougar took it…

To me this is the whole point of game animation: creating interactive characters you can believe in…