I’d spent the preceding week and a half marathoning Red Dead 2 in order to review it, and felt ready for a change of pace. Over the weekend, I decided to finally get back to my Odyssey playthrough. In that context, Odyssey is a warm blanket of familiar video game tropes and concepts, while Rockstar’s game is strange and discomfiting. If you tell someone “Oh, you know, it’s basically a Ubisoft game,” you’re saying there is a big map full of colour-coded icons, lots of clearly marked collectables, repeatable and systematized side activities, and lots of progress bars to fill. In 2018, “Ubisofty” is a useful shorthand for describing a new open-world game. Since around 2012, more and more open-world games have adopted Ubisoft’s information-heavy, player-friendly style of open-world game design. In contrast, Red Dead Redemption 2 feels like it popped out of a pre-2010 time capsule or, perhaps more accurately, like it warped in from an entirely different timeline. It’s an embodiment of the open-world game design ethos popularised over the last decade by its developer, Ubisoft, and it’s loaded with ideas that have been embraced by so many other open-world games that they now feel ubiquitous.
