Having played the absolute holy hell out of the single-player campaign of Red Dead Redemption, I recently decided I tried out the multiplayer. I was fairly reluctant of this, as I had previously thought it resembled GTA IV's too much; in which you'd be able to run around doing nothing or join matches which weren't fun. Fortunately, I was proven wrong and discovered that when I had tried out the free roam earlier, and found myself constantly jumping off cliffs and thinking 'is this it?' I had been in ignorance of the mountains of things to do, and how surprisingly enjoyable the competitive matches are. Not quite sure how I missed those minor details out.
I had expected, albeit with rather odd logic, that Red Dead's single player was so good and so detailed that there was no way it would be a game that can indeed hold its own on multiplayer alone. The maps are great, weapons are balanced and while the game types are fairly standard, they do require decent tactics and teamwork for the most part, and it's been a good ride so far. The problem I have come across time and again, however, is right beneath our noses and it is something that Rockstar can never stamp out with patches and updates. It's the players.
Using insantiy-inducing quantities of advertising for Red Dead has unfortunately given the game blockbuster status, and this has brought the wrong crowd: the Call of Duty crowd. Everywhere you go, it's 'Xx ViiZiiOnZzZ xX' this and 'Io Kr0NiiKzZz oI' that, and without fail one of them has to ruin my fun in some way or another. Doing a sharpshooter challenge in free roam which involved killing certain types of wild animals proved nigh impossible the other day, as I was consequently faced with some utter buffoon I found wandering in the forest (on his own, I would like to add) who would not stop killing me. Being the altruistic turn-the-other-cheek lovely man that I'm not, I didn't retaliate in the hope that he'd stop too. Unfortunately, he took my moving away from him not as a message of 'I'm not deathmatching with you' but as 'I am running away from you as I am scared of your huge skills, please don't kill me, you're great at this game and I am not'. I eventually got lost my temper at the fellow and I was so awfully cross that I sent him a message to the modernised jist of 'Crumbs, I wish you would have the common decency to differentiate between a free roaming exercise and a match of Queensbury Rules with firearms. You utter cad.' He didn't take too well to this and we ended up in a long message-off - in which I discovered that people from South London do in fact use the double 'i's and alternating capitals as standard form, in such messages I received as 'oK iiM GoNNa KiiL Yu' -and him following me around for the next half hour, shooting me in the back whenever he wasn't hopelessly emptying rounds into the floor. He didn't prove much of a fighter in the end, as when I at last took the bait, turned around and killed him six times in a row he left the session. Probably went back to terrorising old women at the park.
The problem is, this wasn't a unique occasion. I get angry post-match messages, kids screaming complaints on team chat, and these dreadful bloody gamertags all over the place. Soon enough, CoD kids will have not only spread onto every multiplayer game, but will begin to spread their influence into real life. People will be screaming 'NOOB TUBE' at tubes of Smarties, quickscoping with the binoculars you get at the Opera, and shouting 'ENEMY AC-130 IN THE AIR' whenever a plane goes overhead by, at the latest, 2015. They'll call it: The Apocalypse.
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