User Experience, Gamification, and Why Red Dead Redemption II is a Bad Video Game
/In recent years, the games industry has seen a big push for this thing called “UX” - short for “User Experience”. The idea is essentially that, when we create games, there often isn’t a voice explicitly advocating for the end user. Of course that’s who we make the games for in the first place, but especially as development teams grow larger and developers’ roles become more specialised, it can be very easy for developers to get lost in their own little corner of the game and lose track of the big picture. That’s where User Experience design comes in. A UX designer’s job is to look at the game from the player’s perspective, and reduce the friction between the user and the game’s systems as much as possible.
So in theory, the UX designer’s job is to solve the problem of “It wasn’t anybody’s job to think about this from the player’s point of view, and now we accidentally have an unintuitive game that’s hard to understand, and a chore to play”.
But what happens when that’s the point?
One of the fundamentals of game design is the concept of abstraction, or “gamification”. Essentially the idea is that, some parts of real life tasks kind of suck. Maybe they are boring, or repetitive, or just far more complex or time consuming than most people care for. So in games, we tend to abstract these issues away. When we enter a shop, we just select what we want from a list of items. When we reload our weapon, we just press a button. When we need to travel great distances, we fast travel. The goal is to simplify the process until it’s fun and painless.
But there is also value in realism, though we have to carefully pick and choose where we insert it. Look at the racing game genre and you will see a wide range of titles, from those that are more “arcadey”, to those that are more realistic. Some people don’t actually care how a car really works, they just want to go fast. Other people get a lot of enjoyment out of the increased technical difficulty involved in managing more accurate real-world mechanics. It can be perceived as being more engaging, and being more satisfying when you get it right.
But where does Red Dead Redemption II come into this conversation? Well, my journey with the game went something like this:
I started off playing the game with the intention of analysing it’s UI/UX, as I often do. I pretty quickly realised that (spoiler), it’s just not very good. It’s menus are super plain and present information in very uninteresting, poorly streamlined ways. It’s HUD is very reserved and does little to help the player understand the game’s current state as they play. The controls are a jumbled up nightmare of context-specific actions, unnecessary button combinations, and just really antiquated design all around.
So my next thought was, how then could it be done better? If I was designing the control scheme and the menus of this game, how would I do it? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was kind of a fruitless question.
See, this is a game that has chosen at every possible turn to emphasize realism, and avoid gamification. So while there may be some pretty severe shortcomings in the game’s UX design, it is nonetheless, exactly the game that they wanted to make. These were all conscious decisions that were purposefully made. Sure, I could change the entire control scheme, but then that would in turn require changes to the way some of the game’s most central systems work. Maybe then I could walk back their very clear aversion to having any UI appearing anywhere but the distant corners of the screen. Maybe I even redo the in-game menus from scratch.
And yet even after all that, we would still be left with a game with confusing contextual rules and fail states, and an obnoxiously plodding pace permeating every fibre of it’s being. That means we’d also have to change things like, how the player moves (on foot and on horse), how they interact with the environment, revamp the entire Wanted system… and the list goes on.
So I guess the question then becomes, at what point does Red Dead Redemption II stop being Red Dead Redemption II? Rockstar chose to go so far down this road of realism, and they chose to sacrifice so much to get there, because this is the game that they wanted to make. Bringing the UX of this game to an acceptable state would mean making sweeping changes to basically every single system in the game. The bredth of changes that would be required just goes to show how important the work of a UX designer really is, because it really would be an entirely different game.
That’s not to say that improvements couldn’t be made over what’s already there, but it’s very obvious that it would mean compromising on one of the game’s main pillars (realism), to accommodate something that is clearly not a pillar (UX). I feel legitimately sorry for whoever had to design this game’s UI, because I can only imagine that those conversations were very one sided.
So sure, RDR2 is an incredibly immersive, gritty game. It’s vast, it’s varied, It’s got a great cast, an engaging story, and it’s fantasy is compelling. But I think we have to ask ourselves: if the changes required to bring it’s UX up to an acceptable level are so thorough that it would fundamentally turn it into a different game, then maybe the game wasn’t very good to begin with. A coworker described Red Dead Redemption II as “the absolute pinnacle of what 10-year old game design was capable of”, and that about sums up my feelings about the game.