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Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

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Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#31

Post by UweSchmidt »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #15
narrator wrote: post #11

Kind of a boring dystopia we have here. People enjoying the great outdoors from their climate controlled bedrooms. Good thing they only kept the cute animals in the game and not the mosquitos or black flies.

Back in my day, we had to enjoy the great outdoors uphill both ways!

We did. People used to spend more time outside, more time walking. Older novels seem to mention animals and plants modern people wouldn't recognize.

And of course there just existed more nature. We are destroying our environment and are losing many species. It's getting harder and harder to just enjoy a carefree joke about it...

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#33

Post by diggernet »

techopoly wrote: post #5
hownottowrite wrote: post #3

The RDR2 environment is an amazing horseback camping simulator. Fishing, hunting, beautiful vistas... bliss

Side question, do you think there's a market for this sort of game? Outdoor simulator I suppose?

There used to be.

Wilderness (1985)

https://www.mobygames.com/game/wilderness-a-survival-adventu...

From the sound of it, RDR2 would be a great starting point to build a modern implementation of Wilderness.

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#34

Post by blhack »

narrator wrote: post #11

Kind of a boring dystopia we have here. People enjoying the great outdoors from their climate controlled bedrooms. Good thing they only kept the cute animals in the game and not the mosquitos or black flies.

The appeal of these games are that there are no consequences. You can ride your horse as fast as you want, and if you crash into something, you don't actually get hurt.

Also you can ride a horse without the requisite care, cost, time responsibility etc. You can be whoever you want, and when you get bored of that personality, you can just ditch it.

I personally don't really enjoy this game, but it's easy to see why people do.

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#35

Post by donavanm »

pnathan wrote: post #10

This kind of tiny piece by piece interaction with the world is something I desired in the late 90s, dreaming as a teen, but my rudimentary O(n) skills showed me was beyond the computers of the time. It's gorgeous & I love the potential that brims here. What if something was this complex and well built, but the storyline was removed - the player simply builds their own story, ala DF Adventurer mode.

Check out some of the critiques for games like No Mans Sky. The short of it is that procedural “story” doesnt really work. You still need writers for engaging content, and that doesnt scale. If you remove written story you get something closer to a tower defense/tactics/arena shooter/grinding genre, which is “fine” but substantially different than most open worlds people envision.

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#36

Post by twic »

thisismyusernam wrote: post #18
hownottowrite wrote: post #3

The RDR2 environment is an amazing horseback camping simulator. Fishing, hunting, beautiful vistas... bliss

I first got a PlayStation (1) when I was about 9 years old, and we got Road Rash 3D with it. Looking back the graphics were pretty shocking (though cutting edge at the time). But my main memory is how liberating it felt to leave the race route and just ride around aimlessly for hours and hours, exploring the countryside and the towns and cities you'd discover. I got a lot more out of that than trying to keep up with…

Half of the pleasure of Sir You Are Being Hunted is that it's a very good English countryside simulator, with occasional murderous robots.

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#37

Post by smadge »

ilamont wrote: post #2

I think this is pretty neat, not just that so many species are featured but some of the other natural behaviors (e.g. fox and turkey vultures feeding on just-shot mallard carcass) are replicated. Showed the article to my teen son, a big RDR2 fan, who was less impressed, calling it "sad" that someone would play a birder in that world. YMMV.

Playing as a birder was definitely an option by design. There are in game achievements for spotting through your binoculars and “studying” each species of animal. It is not even out of character of Arthur Morgan, who often draws landscapes and wildlife in his notebook.

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#38

Post by mstade »

alexlrobertson wrote: post #22
thisismyusernam wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I first got a PlayStation (1) when I was about 9 years old, and we got Road Rash 3D with it. Looking back the graphics were pretty shocking (though cutting edge at the time). But my main memory is how liberating it felt to leave the race route and just ride around aimlessly for hours and hours, exploring the countryside and the towns and cities you'd discover. I got a lot more out of that than trying to keep up with…

This is similar to what I remember from playing Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. I wasn't very good at the actual game, but there was a post-credit sequence I would skip to where you could just walk, drive, and fly around quiet, rural, and sparsely islands. The simulation is pretty unremarkable by todays standards but being able to explore a huge open world at my own pace was incredible at the time. One encount…

For you and the GP I would recommend picking up Horizon Zero Dawn. The environments are gorgeous and vast, with lots of "story" in the placing of props and such. The actual story of that game was prettt darn good too, but if all you want to do is roam around a beautiful landscape – and occasionally come upon murderous robots, but they can typically be avoided rather easily – it will certainly hit the spot.

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#39

Post by hownottowrite »

techopoly wrote: post #5
hownottowrite wrote: post #3

The RDR2 environment is an amazing horseback camping simulator. Fishing, hunting, beautiful vistas... bliss

Side question, do you think there's a market for this sort of game? Outdoor simulator I suppose?

Absolutely. Just do a search on YouTube for bushcraft videos. There’s a market.

Re: Birding Like It’s 1899: Inside a Blockbuster American West Video Game

#40

Post by jcl »

Buttons840 wrote: post #26
jcl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me a bit of Jeff Vogel's blog post about the first Red Dead Redemption: "What was more surprising, though in retrospect it should not have been, was how instantly attached my eight year old daughter became to the game the moment she caught an unlucky glimpse of me playing it. Of course, it makes perfect sense. This is a game where you own a horse, ride your horse, take your horse out into the brush, find wild…

Rockstar should consider breaking their games down into sub games. They could build a G rated game about caring for wild horses and sell it for kids; they'd only have to remove content. In the full RDR2 game my daughter might have fun caring for horses, but she might also witness a random murder, pick up new words I'd rather her not repeat, witness a rape, who knows. I haven't actually played RDR2 but all of those th…

Exactly! The taxi, ambulance, and firetruck missions were some of my favorite parts of the GTA games, and featured relatively nonviolent, legal activities. They could easily be standalone games... One could argue the taxi missions already are, if you count Crazy Taxi.
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