Western Hack and RDR2

I got to play a bit more this weekend.  It was, after all, Father's Day weekend.  My wife joked that I'm addicted.  I admit that I'm in a bit of a bender on Red Dead Redemption 2 right now, but it'll fade again soon—probably when I go out of town for a week next weekend.  So, what exactly am I doing?

Often, I feel like I'm running around trying to do things and not being successful.  I still need two perfect armadillo pelts to finish all of the trapper garment sets, as well as a javelina pelt, two muskrat pelts, a bunch of squirrel and rat pelts for hats and other trapper stuff, as well as a bunch of bird feathers and whatnot for the last round of trapper hats.

Speaking of hats, I'm also looking to round out the stolen and found hats collection, as well as a handful of rewarded hats.



There's a lot of potential hats to chase down.  I don't know for sure how many I have, but I'm guessing less than half of the stolen hats, but most of the found hats (minus the Chinese hat and I might still need one or two of the scarecrow hats), most of the craftable hats.  And I've got challenges to do.  I'm trying to finish off the horseman challenge, and I'm on the last now, but it's the longest and most tedious to do.  I need to break ten breeds of horses in the wild to do so: the Wild American Paint, American Standardbred, Apaloosa, Hungarian Halfbred, Kentucky Saddler, Morgan, Mustang, Nokota and Tennessee Walker.  I plan on actually starting with the Mustang, because I want the Tiger Stripe Bay Mustang.  I actually just sold Rachel, because I'm a bit done with Thoroughbreds, she's kinda a boring one anyway, and I can always go get a free Thoroughbred at Valentine, I believe, because we have the Ultimate version of the game.  Assuming I would ever want another Thoroughbred again at this point, which I don't think that I would.  I have two Dutch Warmbloods—probably too many, but I don't want to get rid of either Buell or the Chocolate Roan, because Buell is super unique and if I get rid of him I'll never have him again.  (Maybe I need more than one save-game).  I also just went and got the white Arabian up by Lake Isabella again.  I had it as Arthur, but it died.  I would have lost it anyway changing from Arthur to John.  (Aside; if you want Buell, you'll have to save the last Hamish mission for John.)  Once I have the two Dutch Warmbloods that I like, the white Arabian and the Tiger Mustang, I won't be able to keep any more horses than that, so my breaking of wild horses will be just for the challenge, then I'll probably go sell them either at the horse fence or at the stable.  Of that set, the only one that I could possibly wish I could keep would be maybe the Appaloosa because it's such an iconic character of the American West, as well as a a unique-looking animal.

It's a little weird to be wandering around without any really super concrete goals.  This morning I got up a little early and played for almost an hour and a half, for instance.  I went and got a few points of interest added to my map after fast-traveling to Pronghorn Ranch up in West Grizzlies.  I had to deal with a weird glitch with my horse; finally reloading from the Autosave fixed it.  Then I caught the white Arabian, went to the stable to sell Rachel and put my Chocolate Roan in the stable, took some food to Emmitt Miller, and shot up Thieve's Landing, looting all of the bodies.  I've figured out that hats I'm looking for often despawn if you're not careful in this kind of scenario; what I need to do is go to one of the three Del Lobo hideouts and just shoot a few guys, steal a stealable hat, and then run away again before the hideout is completely emptied out.  I got the Pinned Flop Hat so far, but it's the Bolero hat (the sombrero) that I really want, and I'll take the Straw hat while I'm a it to get the full complement of stolen hats.  As the video above shows, there are at least forty stealable hats in the game.

Speaking of which, it's fun to have loads of options to choose from when customizing John's outfits.  I've got one that both of my boys just couldn't quit complementing last night; they really wanted to find the elements to make it themselves.  Some of it was crafted—I had the Gila monster hat (although I wonder if the Snake bulldogger wouldn't look even better?!) and the Legendary Cougar and Wolf Vest, for instance, but it was just over a black french dress shirt.  The other part that really made this outfit was the natural buckskin colored shotgun chaps (available at the Tumbleweed store) and the tan-colored Relentless boots, which have a kind of alligator-like texture to them as well.  I had some kind of black pants on underneath; work saddle pants, I think, but it doesn't matter too much as you can't see them very well because of the chaps.  This totally natural buckskin-colored and black outfit just looked really cool, and my one son, who had contemptuously eschewed hunting for the trapper spontaneously decided that maybe he'd want to do it now after all (of course, it helps that he finished the second epilogue, so he doesn't have anything other than challenges and collectibles to do anyway.)  This one really caught their fancy because it looked so iconically "cowboy"—I had made it specifically to run around in hot weather (in spite of the fact that the vest is moderately warm) and had been in New Austin with it, where it really looks at home.  Pair it with an open shirt, rolled up sleeves, and maybe some craftable leathery rifleman's gloves with a little fur lining, and they see me rollin'; they hatin'.

While it's just cosmetic, they did like the idea specifically of wearing the chaps in the desert section, because you're busting your way through prickly-pear cactus stands and whatnot so often.  I don't think they actually understood the point of chaps until then.  It maybe makes sense that by far more chaps options are available in Tumbleweed than everywhere else combined in the game.

I really wish a lot of the Online clothing options were available offline.  I'm just not really a huge fan of the Online game-play, honestly.  I'll probably eventually migrate over to it, but I'm disappointed that I can't just use the stuff that they keep adding for it to Offline (or Story, I suppose.)  I do notice that some of the online clothing options are buyable trapper crafted items that now come in multiple colors.  Some of them seem like stealable hats in the main game too.  But, of course, some of the items are truly unique; if they're in the game files, I wish we could get them somehow.  The ponchos in particular, are a big miss, and that double-breasted leather coat, the Durham coat, in particular is one that I wish I could get offline.  And they finally added a real, genuine sombrero too, which seemed like kinda an obvious thing that they didn't have in the normal story-mode game.

In any case, as fun as RDR2 is, it suffers from the same thing every computer game eventually suffers from; limitation.  You finish the story mode.  You don't like the online mode.  Whatever it is, it's not truly limitless.  Even big, open world sandboxes can only offer you so much, and with RDR2, I'm bumping up on the limitations of what single-player offers, and I'm wary of online.  As one of my sons says, the online missions aren't really very interesting either, because your characters can't even talk, for instance.

And this is why table-top roleplaying exists.  You can do anything in this environment, although granted it's not as passive of an activity.  You have to imagine what you can't actually see online (although even the very good graphics of RDR2 are nothing at all like real life), and you have to have a GM who knows what he's doing, but in that paradigm, you can suddenly turn all of your limitations off and do whatever you feel like.  As long as the other folks that you're playing with agree, anyway.  Of course, if even that last limitation bothers you, just write novels and sell them on Amazon, or something—I find that the collaborative nature of RPGs allows us collectively to come up with stuff that I individually would never have thought of, though.

Anyway, I'm thinking some more about the setting of WESTERN HACK and wondering how much (if any) development I'd really want to do, or if the high level stuff I've already discussed is sufficient to get it rolling.

I'll think about it some more and post later, when I get a chance.