meIt is three in the afternoon, and I am pushing the lifeless body of a sedated crocodile onto a swampy shoreline. My character’s stamina is about to run out, and then I’ll drown, and by the time it reappears, my scaly friend will be awake, ready to criticize me for showing some compassion for his finite existence.
No, dear reader, I am not having a fever dream. Instead i’m playing Red Dead onlineThe latest update to ‘The Naturalist’. After several months of silence, Rockstar Games has finally responded to the community’s call for more content with a Frontier Pursuit. This time they’ve decided to integrate multiplayer hunting mechanics into a new role, as have the Trader, Bounty Hunter, Collector, and Moonshiner jobs that players have been researching for the past year.
Roles are optional classes that Red Dead online Players can level up to specialize in the game’s virtual business society. The last role of the game allows you to become a naturalist. Instead of killing the game for sport, you can choose to be an ecological warrior, a protector of the natural world that seeks to learn and nurture the wildlife of the Old West. This brings me back to the lifeless shell of an American alligator that I am pushing through the Lemoyne swamp.
I’ve filled it with sedative rounds of the Varmint rifle, perhaps the most significant mechanical introduction to the Naturalist update. These rounds allow players to put animals to sleep, so they can get samples of them before they wake up. You can also revive them if your conscience isn’t clean, using another expensive new item, but I’m not sure why it would, for the sake of efficiency.
Level up the role of naturalist enough and you can also have mercy to kill wounded animals … but the only wounded animals I meet are the ones I shoot by mistake. So if you’re wrong and you stomp on a Coyote, they can at least go in peace I guess.
The problem here is that when you shoot animals with anything, I’ve found that they don’t like it. So even if he was shooting blanks, the alligator he was looking for for “investigation” has escaped amid the depth of the swamp, before succumbing to tranquility.
For all Red Dead onlineRealistically, you can’t take a sample from an animal if it’s swimming, so you must push it inward to finish the test. By the time we got there, I wonder if it would have been better to hit the poor man in the face with the two barrels of the Elephant Rifle, the cannon-type weapon for eco-terrorists that is the enemy’s best hunter. Naturalistic spirit of naturalistic actualization.
It would definitely be less time consuming and probably more enjoyable for this unlucky alligator. This ongoing debate that I am sharing with you is the crux of the narrative ambitions of the Naturalist update. Before you can start sedating the animal kingdom in the name of science, you’ll be introduced to Harriet Davenport and Gus MacMillan.
Davenport is a devoted friend of all animals and the herald of the Naturalist role, recruiting him to trade his samples for experience, new tonics, role-related skills, and brownie moral points. She is Red Dead onlineIt’s Professor Oak, and he’s giving you a Pokédex and trusting you not to indulge your most carnal instincts.
Gus MacMillan is an enterprising person with a combed mustache who couldn’t care less about this empathetic effort. He wants me to skip the sample and kill all the animals so he can reward him with cash. You won’t feel like an asset to society, but you’ll get a fun hat made from a hollowed-out badger shell. Sometimes that is all you need!
MacMillan’s offer begins to look very appealing after spending hours shooting an absurd number of sedative rounds on disinterested, often angry animals, completing the same animation over and over before chasing the sleepy subject and bringing home the scientific bacon.
I can see what Rockstar is doing here: it certainly takes more effort to be a good person. Hell, if you kill too many animals, Harriet will stop working with you. But when the gameplay behind “being nice” isn’t as fun or rewarding in practice, being a naturalist feels like a big contradiction, especially in a ruthless open-world game where the best gangs thrive through sabotage and murder. Cold-blooded.
Preparing your equipment and venturing into the desert to collect perfect skins is one of the most meditative games in Red Dead Redemption 2, but the Naturalist update makes it a repetitive boredom that takes much of the excitement away.
The Naturalist update is certainly more content, but it seems Rockstar is falling at a rate that allows sedition in its community. The 2019 Frontier Pursuits update that first brought Roles to the game felt like an exciting review from Red Dead onlineIt’s a boring base, but now I hope there is some general plan that goes beyond these role updates.
Certainly they introduce useful options for specialization and offer players more agency, but what’s the point of specialization if everyone can be good at everything? On a nicer note, just like the mini-campaign that accompanied Moonshine, this update’s legendary animal expeditions are excellent and really stand out – these smoothly scripted adventures deliver exciting game bullets that press all the right buttons.
Fundamentally, the Naturalist update does not address the terrifying vacancy in Red Dead onlineThe existential core: a crater that eventually needs to be filled with something meaningful for players to return. The main answer I’ve seen from players so far is “is this it?” – Engaged players will likely end this role’s content in the coming weeks, and the waiting game will begin again, with an even more fervent fan base specializing in each role, hoping for something more.
The reason why people keep playing GTA Online‘Heists is because there is a level of responsibility behind the game. If you make a mistake, you lose the money you earned with so much effort that you placed as a bet. When you are assigned a role as a driver or hacker, you feel like you are impacting the world and contributing to the multiplayer narrative in significant ways. You have to communicate to prosper, and if you’re wrong, so be it! That creates adrenaline and, as a consequence, great gameplay.
All roles in Red Dead online I still feel very introverted. That would be nice if they led to something bigger, but this process of adding more and more jobs to do is not very helpful for a community that is asking to come together and put their newfound skills into practice in a more focused way.
These cowpokes have chosen their specializations, and now they need a way to combine their skills to feel worthwhile. But unfortunately, Red Dead online he remains a cat of all trades, and a master of none.
