I heard that the red background has something to do with Halloween content for GTA Online rather than a new Red Dead game.
I still don't understand why they didn't port RDR to the PC or the new gen platforms. They're basically saying "no, we don't want a shitload of money for easy work".
I replayed RDR earlier this year. I have to say the killing hundreds of people aspect felt jarring against the more realistic narrative of the game. The assault on Fort Mercer that ends with you Gatling gunning your way through 50 men and horses felt like a lazy conceit to conventional video game shootiness. I might buy Undead Nightmare for Holloween though.
>>21967 >I still don't understand why they didn't port RDR to the PC or the new gen platforms. They're basically saying "no, we don't want a shitload of money for easy work".
It is reportedly not east work on account of the code behind the game reflecting the messy development process.
I like the fact it bridged the gap between Westerns and Zombie flicks. The latter, as others before me have pointed out, are the contemporary version of the other: a set-up where the dashing leads can mow down brain-dead unpeople, without being troubled by nuance and conscience. (I obviously condemn films inculcating that impression of Native Americans, but they do.)
RDR was by far my favourite game of the previous generation, there's yet to be anything that even nears it. I once checked my total play time in the option menu and was dismayed to find that it was over a week. I never checked again.
Looks like its following the GTA pattern of a long delay before coming to the PC. Fucking Rockstar knows that idiots are going to pay for the game twice.
Also it seems that it'll be a prequel based around the exploits of Marston and his gang. I'd be disappointed if that were the case and we weren't getting a new protagonist.
>>21976 > Looks like its following the GTA pattern of a long delay before coming to the PC. Fucking Rockstar knows that idiots are going to pay for the game twice.
As far as I'm concerned, that would be legitimate grounds for pirating it.
>>21994 Nobody in particular. If you google 'Red dead Redemption Code mess' you'll find it being repeated a lot over the years. I've heard Jeff Gerstmann mention it a few times on the Giant Bombcast. Could be true, could just be a rumour.
Pretty much all modern AAA titles have horrendous codebases. When you're just trying to get a product out of the door as cheaply and quickly as possible, maintainability goes out of the window. Games invariably pick up all sorts of really crufty bugfixes in the last-minute crunch to meet the launch date.
There's very little rigour in the development process, because rigour is slow and expensive. Nobody bothers documenting anything properly, because it's assumed that nobody will touch the code once the game ships. Nobody writes unit tests - a certain level of bugginess is accepted, with playtesting used to iron out the worst bugs.
If a studio doesn't have clear plans to port a game, they won't make any effort to make the codebase portable. There are simply too many other things that need to be done and too little time. Compounding the issue is the fact that game studios mainly hire inexperienced developers straight out of university, because they're naive enough to work punishingly long hours for below-market pay. The turnover of staff at game studios is alarmingly high, because most developers realise that they'd be earning twice as much money for half the hours at a B2B software company.
>>21995 I could maybe understand that for the previous generation's RDR, but they would have to write some seriously dodgy code for it not to be portable between the latest gen of x86 consoles and PCs. Most likely they're going for the similar tactic with GTA V, drawing it out over a long time and hoping for repeat purchases when the PC version comes out with all the Nvidia bells and whistles.
>>21996 The thing is though, porting games isn't something particularly new to the games industry, and writing portable code isn't particularly difficult - you'd think it would be a relatively cheap way of getting extra value out of the product. The latest Xbox runs Win10 on hardware not significantly different to what you'd find in a gaming PC, so porting between Xbox and PC should be virtually free (it's certainly in Microsoft's interest for it to be as cheap as possible).
>Pretty much all modern AAA titles have horrendous codebases. When you're just trying to get a product out of the door as cheaply and quickly as possible, maintainability goes out of the window.
This is less true than it used to be. Most modern development houses use pretty rigorous version control and modularity and such, because the projects are so vast and involve so many people in specialist areas ("water physics programmer", etc etc). You're guaranteed to have serious problems troubleshooting projects of this size if the source code is one big tarball that only one person really understands. This was often the case back in the PS/PS2 days, and pretty much universal earlier, but times change. Projects tend to follow "agile" development, Scrum etc (since they change drastically over the course of the project), and games have been increasingly incorporating online/multiplayer elements that will continue to be developed post-launch for some time now (RDR was no exception), all of which make a case for a modular, maintainable codebase. That's not to say that all modern game code is meticulously tidy, obviously, and for games that are platform-exclusive there'll be significant specialisation to the architecture. There were versions of RDR on 360 and PS3, though, so if Rockstar decided to put the resources into making a PC version I imagine it would at least be less hassle than most exclusive games of that generation, many of which have been ported to the PC/modern x86 consoles.
I wouldn't be too surprised to see a HD remake for modern platforms prior to RDR2.
