Planet Sillicon

Not feeling so completionist

By blog on Jun. 13, 2010.

I’m not really feeling so completionist now that John is dead in Red Dead Redemption, so the Ambient Challenges are falling by the wayside.

Basically, there’s four types of missions that you can go about and do all by yourself. You’ve got the Treasure Hunter Challenges, where you get a map with a landmark on it and it will direct you to the location of some treasure. Some are hard to figure out, but the more you actually roam around the world the better chance you’ll have to find them all. I’ve got all ten of these, as they were very fun to get and I sort of got on a roll with them for a while.

Then you’ve got the Sharpshooter Challenges, where you have to shoot specific tough targets. This is a fairly straight forward one, and I’m sitting at Rank 8 currently, where I have to shoot the hats off of two people and disarm them as well, which means shooting the gun out of their hands. This is a bit tougher than the animal challenges, but very manageable.

I’m only up to Rank 5 with the Master Hunter Challenges, as killing two cougars with a hunting knife is a tall order, really. Cougars are a scary thing in the RDR world. You’ll hear their familiar call and the next thing you know they’re attacking you, your horse is dead, and if you don’t move like lightning you’ll be next. Deadly creatures. The later ranks seem easier than this one, though killing a grizzly bear with a hunting knife is scarier than a cougar, I must say.

The Survivalist Challenges are just collecting plants from about the place. These are really quite boring and irritating, and as such I’m only up to Rank 6. Riding around and finding the right plant, dismounting, collecting, mounting, and then riding around some more isn’t really my idea of fun. If there was something you could actually do with the plants, apart from the odd quest or just selling them, then that would be something, but other than that they just feel largely out of character.

So, now that I’ve finished the story line, and I have to run around as the incredibly irritatingly voiced Jack, I don’t want to go and complete all the Ambient Challenges. The game-world is a lot less fun now that John’s dead.