I’ve often felt that cold Minnesota winters are primarily responsible for me having devoted so much of my life to video games. When the temperature drops to -30°F or there’s waist-deep snow on the ground (which is tragically more common than it should be), staying inside and snuggling up with a blanket ,and having a controller in hand feels like the only option to pass the time throughout the worst of what the season has to offer. This past winter unintentionally became a marathon of open world games for me. Throughout the winter, I knocked last year’s Red Dead Redemption 2 and Marvel’s Spider-Man off of my neverending backlog and began replaying 2017’s Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Playing these three games in quick succession to one another had a profound impact on me. All three games shared the commonality of offering open worlds begging to be explored by the player, however the ways in which these games treated their open worlds differed greatly.

After navigating Manhattan with Spider-Man’s incredibly satisfying traversal mechanics and traveling across the many titans of Alrest with Xenoblade 2’s insistence on rewarding the player’s curiosity with experience points upon discovering new locations and landmarks, I reflected on my experience with Red Dead Redemption 2’s open world - you know, the main selling point of the most successful game last year - and ultimately felt underwhelmed. Navigating through the worlds created by Insomniac and Monolith Soft left me in a constant state of wanderlust, needing to discover more to see what both games had to offer me.

However, such an experience didn’t exist for me in Red Dead Redemption 2.

Why was this? How could a game from a studio praised for consistently making strong open world games make me feel underwhelmed by its world? Does an open world necessarily need to constantly deliver rewards and incentives to warrant being explored? What makes an open world rewarding and worth players’ times to explore? And perhaps most crucially for Red Dead Redemption 2, at what point does immersion begin to hinder gameplay quality? Let’s examine these three games and unpack what exactly makes the design of an open world game work and why Red Dead Redemption 2 failed to leave me thinking of and/or coming back to its open world in the weeks and months after completing its story.

So let’s back up and discuss Rockstar’s game and the immediate impact that it had. As anyone familiar with the industry will know, Red Dead Redemption 2 swept many Game of the Year discussions in late 2018 and immediately set records as one of the most commercially successful games of all time. Inevitably, the game has been the center of many conversations, specifically over its story, its characters, and perhaps most crucially, its world and supply of content.

Having spent over eight years in development, the wealth of attention to detail that was lovingly put into Red Dead’s open world is difficult to ignore. Rockstar’s vision of the wild west in an age of an impending industrialized society is one that feels very well realized. The game’s various events and NPCs sprinkled throughout it creates a convincing and immersive world that feels lived in. You may run into convicts escaping their imprisonment while traversing the world, only to eventually run into them again elsewhere on the map later on in a side quest to help them lay low from the law.

With Red Dead Redemption 2, Rockstar has undoubtedly succeeded in making an open world that makes the game’s setting come alive to the player. While convincing the player of the world’s setting is a necessary accomplishment for any game - open world or otherwise -, the volume to which Rockstar was able to amplify the believability of its world is beyond admirable. Red Dead’s world is one that ostensibly feels lived in.

“Lived in”: a term that’s often thrown around when talking about open world games, but is nevertheless in need of a definition for this examination. A “lived in” world features characters, creatures, objects, and depictions of culture and society. What separates a “lived in” world from a “non-lived in” world is the extent to which said characters, creatures, etc. interact with the world and environment that they inhibit. Red Dead’s world is unanimously referred to as feeling “lived in” due to extent to which the environment impacts you.

As days pass, Arthur’s facial hair will grow and his clothes will increasingly get dirty. NPCs and towns react differently to your presence depending on your “Honor” - an in-game mechanic that indicates your nobility, determining how the public perceives you. Killing and skinning animals in some games (Assassin’s Creed III, for example) is often as simple as killing a creature, walking up to it, pressing the “skin” button, and suddenly having a hide in your inventory. Red Dead goes a step beyond in forcing you to stow the skinned material on your horse, which, depending on the weight of the skinned materials, may slow your horse down.

Systems like this are commonplace in Red Dead Redemption 2. The attention to detail makes the world feel alive to the player. However, a world “feeling alive” is only one aspect to an open world’s design. If a world feels natural and immersive, it is ultimately for naught if there is no incentive to explore and learn more about the world. So how does Rockstar incentivize learning about the game’s world? Through storytelling, which is where the game’s open world design begins to show its issues.

In his video review on Red Dead Redemption 2, Writing on Games’ Hamish Black compares the story of Red Dead to that of a TV show - a comparison that feels remarkably apt. Indeed, Red Dead offers an unquestionably gripping narrative about the Van der Linde gang of outlaws as they desperately try to cling on to a lifestyle of the past as the rest of the world embraces the future. Every mission has a mini-narrative that does a remarkable job at showcasing the personalities of each member of Van der Linde gang in addition to showing the gradual movement of these characters. As a narrative experience, Red Dead offers intrigue - enough to the point that the story served as my primary inspiration to keep playing the game to the end.

However, it is also during these story missions that Red Dead shows one of its greatest weaknesses. From the opening chapter all the way to the game’s lengthy epilogue, there are countless “walk and talk” sequences, in which all the player needs to do is follow a character they’re riding with on horseback as they walk towards a waypoint to proceed the current mission they’re on. The player can either decide to manually ride their horse alongside their character, or go into the game’s Cinematic Mode and simply hold a button to automatically ride as the mission’s scripting demands. Quite often, this leads to minutes of “watching” the game. The player only needs to hold a button as they watch characters speak to one another as they arrive to their destination to proceed with whatever they’re doing. While character dialogue is aplenty during these sequences, it doesn’t change the fact that the player is just holding down one button for minutes at a time.

When viewing these sequences as narrative-driven experiences, they’re enjoyable but are comparatively lacking to other games that are more devoted to being narrative-driven, such as Life is Strange, a game that offers more player agency in smaller choices such as dialogue options and different endings. While Red Dead occasionally offers branching paths in dialogue and even actions in missions, they’re few, far between, and don’t leave incredibly significant consequences. Even during the “walk and talk” sections where characters talk while riding, it isn’t uncommon for the dialogue in these sections to either end well before arriving at a destination (resulting in awkward sections of riding with nothing of note going on) or dialogue getting cut off due to arriving at a location before a conversation between characters has reached a natural end. Although Red Dead tries to emulate being a western TV show in video game form, it still manages to occasionally stumble in its storytelling with these issues, in addition to some sluggish pacing in its opening and closing hours..

What’s most unfortunate about this is that when Red Dead is being a good TV show, it’s being a good TV show. If Rockstar had focused on making a completely narrative-driven experience that was designed around its story, Red Dead’s story could have been tighter and more focused. But Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t want to be just a narrative-focused game. This is a modern Rockstar game, so by obligation, Red Dead Redemption 2 also feels the need to be a massively open gameplay-driven adventure game driven by player agency. This causes a split in Red Dead Redemption 2 - one half is a story-driven TV show and the other is an open world playground for countless gameplay experiences. Each half unfortunately weighs down the other, resulting in both experiences not meeting their potential.

The story missions have so many sequences where nothing interesting is going on, gameplay-wise - which will cause gameplay-focused players to feel underwhelmed and even bored. Other times, if players want to quickly progress through the game’s story missions, they’ll often have to traverse across large portions of the map to proceed the story, frustrating story-focused players. Fans of either the gameplay or story of Red Dead Redemption 2 will inevitably become irritated by the duality of the game’s obligations. Through trying to be both a story-driven game and a gameplay-driven game, Red Dead has a decidedly difficult time trying to balance being both games at the same time.

Let’s talk about traversal, though. As stated earlier, fans of the story will often find themselves having to traverse long distances across the map to access missions located throughout the game’s sizable map. However, this isn’t uncommon in open world games - far from it. Open world games will naturally take players across their worlds to complete different kinds of objectives. Collecting a certain number of materials that are only available in a certain portion of the map is a fairly common schema for open world RPG quests. To make these kinds of quests bearable for players are two key components: traversal and convenience.

If a game is easy and fun to traverse through, then the distance between mission objectives becomes a non-issue. Playing through Marvel’s Spider-Man earlier this year served to be one of the greatest lessons one can have about how traversal can improve the overall flow of an open world game’s design. Even if there were objectives that players wanted to complete that were far away from players, getting to them through the game’s excellently crafted web-slinging traversal mechanics becomes a fun experience in and of itself. If traversing a game’s open world is fun, then the distances players need to go will be endured no matter how far that distance may be. The experience of getting from Point A to Point B becomes an enjoyable gameplay experience in and of itself.

But obviously, not every game is going to have super fluid traversal mechanics like Spider-Man. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, a game with well over a hundred side quests, many of which involving jumping from one country to another, would be unbearable if not for the inclusion of Skip Travel (or fast travel, as the mechanic has been unofficially labeled as by the overall gaming community). The inclusion of such a mechanic allows for players to simply get to where they need to be as fast as possible so as keep the pace of player’s actions moving forward. Through having a convenient option such as fast travel available to players, open world games become comfortably navigable and keep the player’s pace from stopping abruptly.

Red Dead Redemption 2 ultimately fails to offer satisfactory traversal and convenience for its players. As traversal in Red Dead is primarily done on horseback, the mechanics of riding a horse are paramount to making traversing the world enjoyable. With that said, riding on horseback feels…okay. It certainly doesn’t feel as janky as other games with horseback traversal, but the inclusion of the Cinematic Mode that only requires one button to be held down in order to automatically ride towards a set waypoint isn’t something that I feel improves the experience of traversal. Riding horses manually still involves frequently tapping the X / A button to keep going at a consistent pace, which, on horseback, isn’t necessarily something I take issue with. What I do find troublesome is that Rockstar has decided, once again, to have characters run by also consistently tapping a button - a mechanic that feels remarkably dated. While you can go into the game’s settings and set this to have another button toggle running instead, that doesn’t fix that traversal, overall, feels slower than it needs to be.

Granted, this game’s going for realism and if that means having having people and horses move at realistic paces, then I’m fine with that so long as navigating where I need to go is convenient for me. And while, Red Dead does have a fast travel system, it’s this devotion to realism that holds it back from being enjoyable. Red Dead Redemption 2 has a few available stagecoaches set throughout the map that the player can use as a means of fast travelling to different towns on the map. However, what keeps this from being primarily useful is that the stagecoaches are only accessible at a small handful of locations throughout the map. This means that, even if you fast travel to a location that’s somewhat near where your intended destination is, you will still have to devote a fair amount of traveling from where the fast travel point is to where you want to go. Additionally, the load times for fast travelling are quite long, so even if you fast travel, you’ll still be on a 30-45 second cutscene before you regain control.

This turned fast travel into a mechanic that I barely touched throughout the game due to its sheer inconvenience. The game’s devotion to realism is admirable to an extent, but this realistic depiction of stagecoaches as fast travel doesn’t help make navigating the world feel any faster. The game’s lack of convenience or particularly fun traversal mechanics makes navigating and exploring Red Dead Redemption 2’s huge world feel more like a chore than a reward. Additionally, when having to navigate through many sections of Red Dead’s world, many places will lack anything of particular note, making most locations not capture my attention nor my imagination. Very rarely did I come across an area that struck me and made me want to return to it.

The lack of the option to quickly travel to separate parts of the map in addition to traversal in general being on the slow side makes me question if the game’s large map was ultimately necessary. Imagining the same game, but with a scaled down map to only contain what’s necessary for the story may have made for a more focused experience that had less empty areas that felt like “filler open world locations”. As is, the game’s devotion to realism and immersion comes at the price of consistent gameplay quality.

The biggest selling point for any open world game for me, though, is not in its traversal mechanics or convenience, but if exploring the game’s world is “worth it”. Perhaps it’s a by-product of my love for the Xenoblade Chronicles franchise, but being actively rewarded with experience points, more fast travel locations, and accessing new monsters and collectibles through exploring different regions of an open area is what keeps me coming back to those open worlds. Even when I’m away from the game, simply thinking about taking certain paths and wondering about what gameplay possibilities different paths will offer make me want to jump back in to those games’ worlds. In each Xenoblade title, being rewarded for exploration begets more exploration. The more I explore the world, the more I become familiar with the game’s landscapes, resulting in me acquiring the tools I need to complete other components of the game (whether it’s experience points to level up and overcome or stronger enemies, or collecting items that may be part of a future side quest).

What Xenoblade does so well is making its open world an inherent part of its gameplay loop. The open world doesn’t feel obligatory - it creates a unique, memorable setting in addition to allowing its many gameplay systems to be designed around discovering and familiarizing oneself with the game’s large setting. Having experienced this open world gameplay loop in all three Xenoblade titles and other games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is what made me become a believer in the open world genre. These games constantly incentivize and reward turning the primordial, otherworldly setting into a familiar navigable landscape for the player.

This is something that Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t accomplish. Its open world, while indeed a recipient of amazing attention to detail, doesn’t make exploring the world feel like a game in and of itself. Rather, most of the sections of the game’s world feel as if they’re there for the sake of being there - not because of ultimately serving a gameplay purpose, but only existing as a means of being part of a large open world because, well, that’s what Rockstar’s games are supposed to be, aren’t they? Red Dead often feels like a game that just happens to take place in a large setting, instead of being a game that takes advantage of it being in a large setting.

In general, the quality of a game’s design is primarily defined by how meaningful and useful its parts are. A smaller 2D platformer that takes full advantage of platforming mechanics and only includes platforms and pathways where necessary is going to be perceived as having better game design than a 3D platformer with a lot of empty space with nothing to do in it.

By that definition, Red Dead Redemption 2’s game design feels held back by its obligation to be an open world game. It offers a lot of promise with its story, but Rockstar’s insistence on maintaining their reputation of making open world games holds it back from excelling in any particular facet. The game feels remarkably large open for the sake of being large, and not because it contributes to any kind of gameplay loop that rewards the player’s curiosity for uncovering the secrets and gameplay opportunities to be found in this open world.

Now, Red Dead doesn’t necessarily need to consistently reward the player for exploring the world, but it does need to at least provide a point to it all - something that makes me care about this game’s world. I need something that makes me want to continue playing through the game even if I’m not completing a mission or doing something relevant to the game’s progression. Red Dead fails to give me that reason. The game fails to offer any kind of incentive or curiosity that makes me want to investigate its world, which eventually ended up in me ignoring and skipping past a lot of areas of the game’s map. It is for that reason that Red Dead Redemption 2 calls the necessity of being an open world into question.

Would Red Dead Redemption 2 have been a better game if it wasn’t trying so hard to be an open world game that offered so many options to players? Would it have benefited from being a story-driven adventure with only a fraction of its gameplay content? Was the detail-filled world worth most of its contents not feel worthy of being discovered?

It’s difficult to give definitive answers to these questions. In a time where open world games are becoming more and more common, I feel that now is as an important a time as ever to bring into question when an open world enhances a game, and when it drags the entire game down. If this genre is to have a healthy future moving forward, it needs to be known when an open world game has mechanics that makes use of its open world and when it lacks mechanics that can cause much of its world to go ignored and uninhabited by players. Red Dead Redemption 2 deserves more eyes on it, not because of how it’s an achievement in open world game design, but rather, to show that open world games deserve game design that makes these worlds a better, more fun place to inhibit. Open worlds deserve to exist to unify a game’s world and its gameplay loop, but to do so, it is necessary for these open worlds need to feel inherently important. Red Dead Redemption 2 fails to provide game design that accommodates for that necessity.

Thank you so much for reading! I felt overwhelmingly harsh when writing this, so now I’m curious to hear other perspectives! What are your thoughts on Red Dead Redemption 2 and its implementation of its open world? As always, join the conversation and let me know what you think! // Featured Image: CNET