I like the improvements they made to Red Dead Redemption over Grand Theft Auto IV. The main beef for me in GTAIV was the checkpoint system. Say you accept a mission. You're told to go to a club and kill a mob boss. From there, you go to the club, kill the mob boss' goons, but he gets away, so you have to chase him down. Let's say you die at some point, or make a wrong turn, or fail in some other way, and you don't catch the guy. If you choose to do this mission again, you have to start over all the way from the beginning. Some of these missions are much longer and convoluted than that example, and it gets to be VERY frustrating. You literally cannot make any mistakes whatsoever.
In Red Dead Redemption, however, the longer missions get checkpoints WITHIN the missions themselves. So let's say you die in a mission that consists of three or four parts, like the example above. The game will ask you if you want to retry the mission and if you say yes, it'll put you at a checkpoint usually only a few moments before you died. It will never set you back several minutes, like GTA IV does. I'm hoping the next GTA has this same system.
John Marston was also a much more fleshed out character than any of the GTA protagonists, and the twenty-odd hours that I spent with him across the Wild West were some of the best hours I spent on a game ever. If GTA can bring some of the positive progress they made on RDR to GTA, it should be a stellar game.
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