John Marston is a damn fine shit-shoveller. That’s not a euphemism or some old-timey western saying for you to unpick – it’s a key activity that players undertake late in Red Dead Redemption 2, which I’ve finally completed after four long years. After the ever-escalating drama of rolling around with Dutch’s gang for dozens of hours, shootouts against every faction from the Pinkertons to the US army, and the eventual yet inevitable demise of stolid protagonist Arthur Morgan, we get zapped into the body of the first game’s hero, John Marston, for the epilogue.
There’s a case to be made that the whole epilogue is a bit of a pacing-breaker and that ending things with Morgan breathing his last in the face of the rising sun would’ve been more poetic, but I for one appreciate how the epilogue gently transitions the game towards the story and topography of its predecessor (and chronological sequel). The simplicity of some of those late missions, where you’re doing all kinds of pastoral grunt work as Marston, also exposes some fundamental flaws that have plagued Rockstar’s games since time immemorial.
See, shit-shovelling is good honest work (just ask Marston’s long-suffering wife Abigail). It’s honest not just because it keeps Marston on the straight and narrow, but it also lays bare the stark reality of the game’s mission design. In the wholesome stench of that stable, I realised that this is precisely the reason that I kept bouncing off the game, and why it took me so long to complete.
Marston’s poop-picking non-adventure is the Rockstar mission design par crapcellence. First, a shovel is marked on your radar thingy, which the game – not an in-game character but the game itself – orders you to go over and pick up. Then, the yellow blip representing the shovel is replaced by several new blips signifying each steaming pile of horse manure in the stable. And so you get shovelling, cumbersomely dragging yourself between the various brown piles/yellow blips until they’re all gone. You can’t just chuck the shovel on the ground though, oh no! The game orders you to return the shovel to its original place, and only then are you done with the mission.
The issue here isn’t in the tedium of picking poo; there’s a lot of ‘tedium by design’ in Red Dead 2, forcing you to shelve your typical gamerly instincts to do things here, now, quick and instead be in the moment – whether you’re trudging around camp, riding across the prairies, or doing farmwork. But working against this noble ambition is Rockstar’s eternal problem; the studio just can’t seem to escape this prescriptive mission style where it’s directing your every move, to the point where it doesn’t trust you to spot your own turds on the ground and makes you return a shovel to its place.
This tiniest of missions really is just a microcosm of every Rockstar mission – micromanaged and guided to such a degree that with a little luck you could pretty much complete most of the game just by looking at the blips on that radar in the corner (hmmm, blacking out the game screen and playing RDR 2 with just the radar – now there’s an idea for the most boring Twitch stream in the world…).
Take one of the climactic missions in Arthur’s campaign as an example.
It’s late in the game, late at night, and judging by the sounds of Arthur Morgan’s pained spluttering, late in the life of our doomed protagonist. Alongside Charles, one of the few reliable folk in Dutch’s disarrayed band, I’m infiltrating a US army fort in a bid to break free the son of the local Native chief.
Once I’ve followed the big blip to get to the fort (that I’m precisely guided to via 19th century satnav), I arrive at the front entrance. There are a couple of guards on the door, which in any self-respecting modern game would give you a choice: do you sneak past, or do you gun your way straight in? Not so in a Rockstar game, which orders you to sneak around the fort until you arrive at the exact ‘secret way in’ (which isn’t all that secret given that you’re directed straight to it) that the game wants you to take.
What follows is a sequence of stealth kills where, upon getting the order from Charles, you kill one guard while he kills the other – each enemy of course marked by that all-powerful blip on your radar. If you get spotted, then everything fades to black-and-white and you have to start over. It’s the kind of dated, restrictive game design I’d expect to see in an Assassin’s Creed tailing mission from 2010 (or, for that matter, a GTA 3 mission from 2001).
What makes this overbearing mission even more frustrating is the fact that it all predictably descends into a shootout anyway (which you can easily see coming given that by this point you’d have already done the whole sneak-sneak-shootout rigmarole countless times throughout the game). With a shootout inevitable, here’s no diegetic reason for you to be stealthy – it’s just an old bad habit of Rockstar’s to over-direct your experience of a mission (which in turn conflicts with the freedom it offers you outside of missions). It would be one thing if this were a tutorial teaching you a bit about the stealth mechanics, then a bit about the gunplay mechanics, but for this kind of prohibitive mission to exist so late in the game is a crime against design.
The irony of Marston’s poop-picking is that while it’s meant to be a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek wind-down from the high drama of Arthur Morgan’s finale, it really is much the same mission structure as every other mission, except you can justify it by the fact that at that moment you are just a farmhand following orders. Without all the gunfire, combat music and red blips on your radar trying to kill you, it’s easier to see the Rockstar mission design for what is: outdated, restrictive and, well, just a bit crap.
