Yes, you heard me correctly. Red Dead Redemption is the first game I can think of that bothers to render out ants.
It was at the beginning of one of the raid missions, maybe the raid on Fort Mercer? I forget. Anyway, I was standing by an archway and noticed some movement by my feet. I looked down and noticed ants crawling around the ground and the base of the wall. It even looked like the had AI. Like, they were crawling quasi-intelligently around the environment.
Avert your eyes at this screenshot... the in-game newspapers are a chance for Rockstar to exercise those familiar GTA social parody muscles.
I've encountered some bugs of a different type, the kind of thing that the internet has already documented to exhaustion. Like floating corpses and flying deer. Last night when I walked past the Blackjack table in Blackwater, the players were all sitting two feet away from the table. Looks like there's some things Rockstar just can't fix.
There's a couple Trophies that hinge on you doing bad things. I've been playing it totally straight, but, for Trophies, I'm willing to branch out into evil and then just dump the save file. The one Trophy everybody has been whining about is Dastardly, where you have to tie up a woman and put her on the railroad tracks, and then watch her get clobbered. Wringing ones hands and monologuing about losing the farm are optional.
So I did that one, and I noticed that my Bounty level went up into four digits. Your Bounty level determines how likely the local deputies will be to come after you. As straight as I play, my Bounty has never been more than, like, $50. So reaching $1000 was a little scary.
However, there's a Trophy awarded for getting past $5000 and then paying off the Bounty yourself by way of an inventory item called the Pardon Letter. So I went for it, but only after coming up with a very safe plan... because I am not interested in working my way up to $4000 and then losing all progress and having to start over.
What I did was hole up inside the convent (which was right next door, since that's where I hogtied my victim for the Dastardly) and started shooting people. As anticipated, an eyewitness went running for the sheriff. Soon enough, a posse of deputies arrived and I started picking them off at a distance with the sniper rifle. The nice thing about the nunnery is that there is only one way in, so I could also keep an eye on the door and peg anybody who managed to get inside.
Then would net me about $500+ to the Bounty, so I repeated the routine enough times to get up to $5000. Bang, Trophy.
The only issue with the plan is that there was a considerable amount of downtime between these repeat offenses, either because it was nighttime or because the populace was slowing in respawning and giving me more victims. So I passed the time by stacking stagecoaches onto the train tracks. I rolled three of them into a row, as if I expected a Wild West Evel Knievel to launch himself over them. It sounds cool, but the train did not do that much damage.
Just kinda knocked them over. Killed one horse. Did nothing to my Bounty rating. Anyway, once I got the $5000 Bounty Trophy, I bailed out on my briefly-evil lifestyle. It's back to cautious politeness for my John Marston!
I am currently spending considerable time working on the Survivalist challenge, meaning I am scouring the countryside looking for specific plants to harvest. I have completed the Treasure Hunter challenge, which gets you a satchel upgrade (big deal.)
I have kind of given up on the other two "Legend of the West" challenges. On Master Hunter, I'm stuck at the kill-two-cougars-with-a-knife part. And on Sharpshooter, I'm expected to kill bears with a single shot. I don't even know which weapon to use, and those bears scare the piss out of me. (I did manage to get the Bearly Legal Trophy, which you get for killing and skinning eighteen bears.)
Simultaneous the Bearly Legal and Survivalist, I was also working on collecting the necessary elements for the Daedalus and Son mission. You need to give the guy a ton of red sage, beaver fur and bird feathers. Feathers, easy. Red sage, fine. But beavers are only found way up in the north of the map, right alongside all those damn bears. Several times, I would collect enough dead beavers to proceed, only to get jumped by four bears in a row and die. That sucked.
One time I had everything I needed, for both Survivalist and Daedalus, and I went back to camp to save. Just as I'm about to save, I hear gunshots outside my cabin so I peek outside and find a bunch of bandits tearing up the town. Then I get stupid brave and start shooting at them, only to die like an idiot and lose all my collected items.
By the way, I think some internet clown spoiled the storyline ending for me, WHICH IS GREAT.
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