THE frame rate whistle 30 times
As much to immediately address the point that surely interests you the most: on the technical level, Double Eleven delivers a more than respectable copy for the Switch. We will do you the courtesy of warming up the high-sounding speeches (positive or not) on the place of his hardware in the current console landscape; the fact is that this reissue – as sketchy as it is – ranks among the most successful of the system, after other much, much more mixed attempts. Too much praise would also be misplaced: it would have been appalling to see a patina in worse condition than its original version on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 which, let’s remember, were swimming in the hazy miasma of “HD-Ready” resolutions. (720p for the last, worse for the first) and a frame rate twitching with each sudden movement of the camera.
docked, Red Dead Redemption benefits from a true 1080p display, considerably more refined – but which nevertheless remains decked out with a pronounced aliasing on the grids, trellises, train tracks and other perpendicular patterns picked up in the rear camera. There’s nothing scientific about our analysis, but the quality of voice samples, especially on minor NPCs, seemed pretty poor to us for a while – but a quick comparison with our copy of the game on PS3 proves that the equivalence has been respected, without further work to improve the grain on this port. The same goes for clipping at an equivalent level – and which was nothing to be ashamed of at the time, mine nothing. Side frame rate, the ceiling is unsurprisingly still set at 30 frames per second. No drastic drops were spotted during our half-dozen hours of gameplay, suggesting a level of performance better than or equal to the 360 version – with no guarantee that multiple TNT explosions in a row won’t cause the game to wobble. counter, we prefer to point out, both in portable mode and on the dock. Finally, nothing to report on any excessive battery consumption on our OLED model, greatly used in the Paris metro: urban cowboys will be able to keep their Wild West in their pocket without having to look for the nearest socket.
That government boy
As for the content of this reissue, it is strictly identical to the Game of the Year version released in 2011, including anecdotal DLC packs such as Liars & Cheaters and the most substantial Undead Nightmare zombie expansion… With the exception of the multiplayer mode, which is still active today on the original platforms. If the PS4 version offers two different anti-aliasing technologies (the traditional FXAA and AMD’s considerably cleaner FSR2), the option disappears for the switch to Switch. However, it is still possible to disable motion blur (motion blur), something impossible on the 7th generation wafer. Now comes the thorny question of the recommended retail price, set at around €40 regardless of the bike chosen. For a title that has been available for more than a decade in all sales dumpsters in its 360 version – the latter also benefiting from full and improved 4K compatibility on Xbox One X and Series consoles – the bill is steep, all the more so when the added value against the first SKU is close to zero, but in no way deviates from Rockstar’s usual business practices. The real losers are rather to be found on the side of Xbox One players, stuck with a basic backward compatible version still capping at 720p…
After all these technical considerations in lunar jargon, is there still any interest in revisiting an open world à la Rockstar, with all that it implies from hackneyed and stiff game design ideas to cumbersome gameplay? still heavy? Yes, a thousand times yes. Whether we have already raked the desert of New Austin in the skin of Arthur Morgan or have traumatic memories of evenings spent in front of France 3 and the high-sounding John Waynes celebrated by Eddy Mitchell, Red Dead Redemption remains today one of the greatest artistic successes of the medium. The poignant emotion in the writing of the dialogues, carried by solid performers (Robb Wiethoff, always fair), has not aged a bit – just like the bounty hunting sessions under the Rio Bravo sun, or at the grizzly on the snowy lands of Tall Trees. No glory is to be sought in The savage horde fun from Rockstar San Diego, whose Red Dead borrows very, very largely the narrative framework, but also the appetite for explicit violence, to better describe the end of the Wild West in its noble sense, where the era of the solitary gunslingers now belongs to a bygone era, without any place in a territory “civilized” by the blood shed on the altar of Protestant, white and bourgeois customs.