In an interview with Kinda Funny Games, Lazlow reminisced that if the team “needed specific accents or languages, we’d travel to those places.” For Red Dead Redemption 2, that meant jetting off to Santa Fe, New Mexico to record with Native American communities, or traveling to New Orleans to work with Creole individuals because “those accents you just can’t get right with New York, LA actors.”
Interesting to hear that they’ve left Rockstar. When did this happen? After mostly finishing the current game or earlier?
I think it was after RDR2
The new game is going to have dogshit writing. Dan Houser has been the head writer on every single game, he is the reason they’ve been focused on class or included content about america’s anti-marxism in latam or yugoslavia etc.
Without him I’m convinced the games will not really understand what the foundational cornerstone of them really is. The new writing will do “haha be a criminal, it’s great” without the “why are people criminals though?” question being included which is the class and material conditions element.
Totally agree. Its actually been interesting watching Dan Hauser and his team figure out how to tell really impactful stories in the medium of sandbox games. RDR2 is like the pinnacle of what they’d been working toward for almost 20 years. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone is going to step in and deliver at that level, let alone actually have themes about class etc.
Yeah they’re just not going to get it. There will be something missing, the overall audience will know something is missing but won’t be able to articulate it.
What will ultimately happen is that through successive games people in a boardroom will zero in on “what makes GTA good?” and “What is GTA’s identity?” and then exaggerate that to a degree that becomes flanderised. They will misunderstand the injection of reality that exists in it, the genuine attempt at a cultural product and the real attempt at a material basis to its contents. Most importantly they probably won’t be political enough, it’s an incredibly political game series that has always delivered something different even if it’s fucked up in places with its stereotypes that aged poorly.
I think we’ll see this in the new game immediately. But it won’t be until the game afterwards that it really kicks in.
The trialer for 6 makes this clear. It’s all just copying or referencing Florida man type shit.