I hate it, but it's such a common trope I come to expect it in almost every game.
THe analog to this is "You've got all of these great guns, but we're going to remove them from you for X amount of time...." The number of games that use this trope is so high. I think every Rockstar game since GTAIII has done it.
This post contains some vague mission spoilers for early in Red Dead Redemption 2. I'm not going to wrap this in spoiler tags because it's just one mission out of like, 100, in the middle of the game.
Red Dead Redemption 2 does it okay. There's a mission in or around Chapter 3, called "Blessed are the Peacemakers," where the gang is going to make peace with a feuding gang, but of course it's a trap and you get taken, beaten to an inch of your life, and captured. Where Rockstar breaks the trope is that you first "wakeup" after the ambush and you start to crawl away, seemingly to make you think that this is the point in the mission where you crawl to safety and grab your guns, go back and murder the blokes chasing you, but instead, the blokes notice you escaping, beat the hell out of you again and you black out again. You're taken to a secondary, safer location, where you escape again.
The reason for capturing you and holding you, rather than killing you, makes sense in the narrative of the game. You're to be used as leverage both over your existing gang and potentially in turning you over to the Pinkertons for a reward/clemency so that the Pinkertons can take down your gang. You're worth nothing dead, either to your gang or the pinkertons. Also the reason you're captured may tie into the climax of the story at the end of the game, "It was a setup," of course, but the person who brokers the setup could have tried to set you up in this way intentionally because they see you as an obstruction within the gang.
Also the reason your guns are relatively nearby makes some sense. Guns are worth a lot to the rival gang, they wouldn't destroy them or get rid of them, guns like that are hard to come by.
The mission is also a good way to get you oriented with one of your primary antagonists, a rival gang leader in the old west. I've often criticized games that don't let you near the antagonist, or you rarely see the antagonist, and yet you're supposed to want to kill or stop this guy you -- the player -- have never met or interacted with...? THis mission really gives you the first long encounter with your primary antagonist from early in the game since the first couple missions, and establishes your shared back story. I'm still a little critical of how RDR2 presents your antagonists, but it's better than GTAIV, V, and RDR, and this mission helps that.
A nice touch in this mission is how it ends. You don't get revenge on everybody in the mission, for the most part, you probably narrowly escape, fleeing in chaos because you're weak and hurt. Your horse was also taken (again, it makes sense to save the horse for the rival gang -- it's a nice horse), and while you -- Arthur -- are disoriented and lost, you have no map, your screen is warped and weird as you're near death, and it's hard to focus, your horse is the one that really saves you, flees from enemies, and wanders its way back to camp to drop you with your allies a long way away. As most may know by now, Red Read 2 really establishes a relationship between you and your horse throughout the game; Your horse can be perma-killed by enemies, and there's a strong in-game and narrative bonus to having one horse for a long time in the game. This is one of the first missions that really enforces that from a narrative point of view, Arthur says, "c'mon boy..... get me home..." and blacks out, and the game cuts into a cinematic of your horse meandering back towards camp with music to save you. It's one of the early moments that the game takes control away from you and shows a cinematic with an instrumental over it, among some of the best touching and memorable moments in the game.
What it also does well is that this mission is early in CHapter 3 just after you've arrived at this new camp in a new state that you haven't really explored before that if you've been playing through the game normally (e.g., not going and discovering everything first). You, the player, are as disoriented as Arthur was, and you don't know where you were. The graphical effects skewing the screen making it hard to tell where you are and how to get out are a nice touch. Even after replaying the game and knowing most of the map really well, when I replayed it I Was still a little lost until I found some familiar points a good ways away.
Here's the mission walkthrough:
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Mission 100% Gold Medal Walkthrough \ Guide in 4KRed Dead Redemption 2 Gold Medal Missions Walkthrough Playlist:https://www.youtube.c...
www.youtube.com
This trope is predictable in Rockstar games. It's been put into every major Rockstar game I can think of since GTAIII.
