5. The Setting
Okay, like many points in this list I'm going to begin by talking about GTA V. Don't let the title of this piece fool you - this isn't an article on how Grand Theft Auto sucks and we should all throw our copies into a landfill. It's rather an exploration of why I don't believe it's quite as good as the spectacular Red Dead Redemption. Let us begin. As I said in the introduction, the world of GTA V is beautifully-realised. San Andreas is a place crawling with people from all different walks of life, cultures and origins, and it does an obscenely realistic job of creating a Southern Californian state that would believably house them all. From the ghetto to the suburbs, to the Vinewood Hills and all the way out to the sticks of Blaine County, each place is as varied, detailed, and bitingly satirical as the next. Still, Red Dead Redemption is set over two United States counties, and a Mexican state that is separated from its northern brothers by the San Luis river. Brace yourselves, chaps, because this is the frontier, and be it in cinema, literature, or anything else for that matter, I don't believe I've ever seen it better represented than it is in New Austin, West Elizabeth, and Nuevo Paraiso. See, the thing that sets these places apart from San Andreas is that in GTA V, Rockstar have done a stellar job at designing a world that has been built by humans for humans. This is no mean feat, but in Red Dead they've built a world that is still wild. It's not been bricked by man, but carved by the elements over thousands of years. It's natural and untamed and - though there are a few places where people have managed to stake out a place for themselves - Marston and the other characters in the game aren't just at the mercy of each other, but of Mother Nature herself. It's hard to draw a building. It's hard to make the bricks look real or the windows shine or the doors open just right. But these are things we know we can do, because they've been done a thousand times before. Show me a skyscraper and if it's even half good I'll be all: "Right on, a skyscraper." But show me a mountain prowled by wildcats, or a desert flecked with nought but cacti and death, or a forest so dense that it's almost impenetrable, and I'm harder to convince. If there's something slightly off about it, the illusion is ruined. If the animals are stilted or the tracks too convenient or the shrubs feel like copy-and-paste jobs, then the whole thing just falls to bits. In Red Dead Redemption, this never happens. Not once.