My Excitement for Red Dead Redemption 2 is through the roof!

Yesterday my credit card company notified me of a charge that was made to my account and when I looked at the notification on my iPhone I got very excited. Amazon had just charged me for the Pre-Order for Red Dead Redemption 2, and I did not think I would be as happy as I was to be charged for something. I have slowly been getting more and more excited for the game as the release date approaches.

I have never been a “gamer.” While I do enjoy playing video games, as many do, I do so in a much more casual sense. I will not ever claim to be very good, far from it actually, but I do enjoy getting some time in on games when I can. Over the last 3-5 years I have not spent that much time playing games, and I have grown very bored with competitive online games because I am getting continuing to get worse for a couple reasons, I don’t have the time nor the desire to put the time in to be good. As with anything, practice makes perfect, and I do not have time to “practice.” I have many hobbies like cooking, as can be seen in my recent cooking posts, as well as a need to keep up with my house, and a desire to spend time with friends and family.

As the time has gone on I have grown to mainly play games in Single Player, and only really play online if I am playing with a friend. When I am playing with a friend, or a few friends, we will play squad based games like Battlefield, or team based PUBG (although I reluctantly play PUBG), and previously some Grand Theft Auto. Even though I am not as interested, and do not have the time that I used to, I still get excited for certain games – Battlefield, Red Dead, the latest NHL game, and sometimes others – but it has been quite a while since I have been this excited for a game to release.

My excitement for Red Dead’s release is due to the type of game that Red Dead is and who’s is making the game. I am looking forward to the setting being so different than the constant barrage of games set in a dystopian post-apocalyptic world inhabited by zombies or bullet-sponge aliens, or the not so distant total-war future world that so many first-person shooters share. I know that it is still a Rockstar game, and that there will be gun play, but if it is anything like Red Dead Redemption, the feeling will be different for me. The extensive and unmatched level of detail that Rockstar puts into their games combined with what is being advertised as a deep single player story has me very excited.

When Red Dead Redemption came out I was not familiar with the franchise, and I was skeptical when it was recommended to me because I was growing tired of the Shooter games, and I hadn’t truly played a Rockstar game. I had “played” Grand Theft Auto 3, and Vice City, but I had not actually played them and I was hesitant to spend what was – for me at the time – a lot of money on the game. But I did, and I was hooked.

The story to the game was incredible, the music in the game is incredible, the graphics still look incredible, and the online play was very fun. I recently popped the game into my Xbox One and was again enthralled with the game. I started playing the game and it brought back a ton of memories for me. It reminded me of time that I would play when I was in college and the countless hours I would play online with a group, a posse, of people from across the country that I only knew by Gamertag. These people I happened upon one day during a chance encounter in the game in an online free-roam session leading us to band together against some idiots that were going after people that were on their own and suddenly we banded together, jumped on a group chat and became intimidating foes to anyone we encountered. For months after, I would hop online each day and we would all join up, continuing to level up, gain new weapons, and of course, capture Gapthooth Ridge and take the Stagecoach for a long joyride and see how long we could survive roaming the vast map reigning terror without being blown up. This all continued for a while until people got tired of each other, and we all went our separate ways, but it was still some serious fun.

After returning from school and having moved on to other games and of course responsibilities, I put the game in one day when I had time and I was saddened to see that the online servers had gone to hell, and that all the progress I had in the game online was gone. Apparently the online servers had been hacked and any time I would jump online the peers names were there, but not the actual people. I was saddened, I put the game away for what I thought was the last time, hoping that one day there would be a follow up.

Now that we are close to the game’s launch I have been eagerly looking at the content and the pre-release hype information that is constantly coming out about Red Dead Redemption 2 and it all has my jaw on the floor, it has me wishing that I had an Xbox One X to pair with my 4K television to experience it fully, but also nervous because, as mentioned, I am not a “gamer.” I am nervous about complex progression systems and an inability to jump into the game as a casual player here and there. I still enjoy games that have this, but not being able to pick something up once in while without being completely humiliated makes it very difficult for me to enjoy. I am holding out hope that I will be capable enough to enjoy this game and not have too much of a learning curve to be able to play. We shall see how it goes very soon!