The best thing about Red Dead Redemption 2 was how ridiculously slow-paced it was. With its massive map, byzantine fast travel system, and epic runtime, it took forever to finish, and every little thing I did while playing it also took forever. With Take-Two Interactive's projected earnings for next year pointing to a Grand Theft Auto 6-sized release, my only hope is that Rockstar's follow-up to RDR2 is even slower.
Like 10 million plus other gamers, I’ve spent the last few weeks deep in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I'm having a great time. Solving shrines, tracking down Dragon Tears, jerryrigging elaborate machines for simple tasks — it’s fun stuff. As much as I love Tears of the Kingdom, though, it's making me realize how ready I am for another open-world game in the Rockstar mold.
I'm ready for GTA 6 because Hyrule just isn’t a place that I feel like I live in. I know I can build and customize a house for Link — things I haven't done yet — but simply being able to have a house doesn't get at what Rockstar's games do so well. In Zelda, I have a terrific time running toward whatever catches my attention, with the knowledge that whatever I find there will be interesting and/or fun. Red Dead Redemption 2 offered something different: a routine.
There's an important, but subtle, difference between how the two games approach their immersion. RDR2 and TotK are two of the most friction-filled triple-A games made in the last 10 years, but that friction rubs in different ways. In Zelda, you can't climb a cold mountain without losing health unless you hunt down a warm set of clothes or cook up a spicy meal. In most Nintendo games, the differences between regions are mostly aesthetic with limited gameplay implications. In Super Mario 64, Mario will torch his tush if he lands in the molten magma, but he doesn't need to track down flame retardant overalls before venturing into Lethal Lava Land. Though the Zelda games before Breath of the Wild were different, they tended to approach the demands of different areas in a similar way. Breath of the Wild changed that by treating each area as a real-ish place that would have realistic demands.
But, even then, the new Link of the two most recent Zelda games isn't changed in any real way by his interactions with the world. What I love about Red Dead Redemption 2 is that Arthur Morgan is. He gets dirty and his hair and beard grow. He doesn't need to sleep, but all his friends go to bed at around the same time, so he might as well go to sleep, too. Heading into the Van der Linde camp at 2 a.m. is a very different experience than hitching your horse at midday. Link can take a nap if he needs to, but sleep isn’t a core part of the game in the way it was in Red Dead Redemption 2, and I miss feeling like I was part of a world that kept moving and invited me to adjust my playstyle to its rhythms.
My favorite activity in Red Dead Redemption 2 was my morning routine. I got up, made a pot of coffee, greeted my friends once my cup was ready, and looked for a quiet spot to enjoy the morning. I might look through Arthur's journal, or I might just stand there and look out at the world. But, either way, I had a morning routine that was pretty close to my own in real life. It's rare that games allow you to build a life for your character, and I hope that GTA 6, whenever it arrives, allows me to do the same.