This was a replay, the first time I played I loved the story.
This time I spend around 100 hours in chapter 2 exploring the world, which was amazing, before moving on with the story.
The things I found annoying-
- Weird NPC comments - like remarks by gang on how soon Arthur returned to camp or the blood on him, when he has a deer on his shoulder, when Arthur is the only one feeding them. Or NPC saying why is Arthur following him, while walking down stairs.
- Arthur saying he’ll look for gang member request item even when he already has it.
- Law system, inconsistent economy.
- No repercussions of Arthur’s behavior with gang or Arthur’s contribution to camp funds.
This broke immersion for me on several occasions even when I wanted to believe otherwise as I was loving the world and wanted to be deeply immersed regardless.
But these were minor issues and were overshadowed by the beautiful world.
I finally lost it with all the spoon-feeding and the hand-holding during missions, and when daddy rockstar did not like it when I did not play EXACTLY how they wanted me to, standing in the wrong spot - mission failed, try a different strategy - mission failed, jumped directly outside Danbury’s window - guess what - mission failed because Danbury just had a divine vision and destroyed the documents in a second. Fuck this shit.
However much I loved the open world this time and the story in the first play-through. RDR2 is definitely overrated and extremely annoying.
End of rant. This is obviously just an opinion, and enjoying game is the only thing that matters, so if you do, lucky you.
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It’s funny because a lot of the things that bug you are immersion features that gamers of 20 years ago would be blown away by, regardless of how badly they were implemented. Goes to show how spoiled we are for immersive games these days. But interestingly, it sounds like RDR2 was less immersive for you because of those additional immersion features, because it always had little hitches that completely shattered your immersion. I guess realism has an uncanny valley in games - a game with more simulated elements also needs a higher degree of polish on those elements, as the errors become more obvious the closer you get to reality.
The game isn’t immersive to me because watching one button perform a 20 second interaction just isn’t engaging. Which to me is the forefront of the difference between “immersion” and “engagement”.
That on top of all the little frustrations that OP mentioned. Hitching your horse is a huge pain and takes you out of the moment every time, for example.
Tbh, the entirety of RDR2 feels like that to me. It’s been critically acclaimed as the most immersive game ever, but it just is so far from actually being that for me because of all of these little things that actively take away from it.
Overall, it’s fine. It’s not really a great game IMO, but a prolonged interactive story. The gameplay aspects are sporadic and mostly require you to mash the A button to keep your horse on the trail, else you don’t move along it. With the advertising and gamers both claiming it to be an immersive game, things like these really detract. I went in expecting a cinematic experience and came out of it with the saddest GTA jank and repetitive grinding for time sensitive unlocks.
Add in the senseless unskippable animal skinning and it just results in a good 70% of the game being unenjoyable for me. I played through the story, which was mostly pretty good, and the rest of the game was waiting to get to a destination to do one thing or see one event, then waiting til I got to the next destination. The gunplay is alright, the spontaneous events are funny, sometimes a little shallow but mostly are good. but man… I was disappointed with the game, as a game.
Of course, this is all my personal preference too. I just don’t find watching multiple extended cutscenes and multiple sub-scenes every few interactions. I don’t blame it all on these sorts of things, but I have a really hard time agreeing that it deserves the acclaim it’s gotten when these are pretty significant shortcomings for a game, specifically advertised to be immersive.
Sometimes you want to ride around on a horse and take on the sights, and it sure does to a good job at that. There’s some good tools and gunplay which are pretty fun to play with and… Well, that’s about where the fun ends.
Sounds like NakeyJakey’s take from 5y ago. Hoping they take some lessons for GTA6.
To be fair, it’s not easy to make a big open world that feels immersive and competes with linear games in terms of fidelity (art, rendering, sound, music, etc), even if you know exactly where the player will go and what they’ll do. Trying to then account for every possible permutation of game state and player action is an exponential explosion of work. Without some kind of AI figuring out a believable way for the game to respond in any given situation, your only practical option is to make some assumptions, pick a small set of “golden paths” and polish those.
R* devs work their asses off to an ethically questionable degree as it is, I don’t think it’s fair to imply they’re not making the best possible experience at that scale with the technology available.
“I put 100 hours in to chapter 2 after I beat this game. It’s terrible.”
🙄
It’s easy to simplify, and ignore nuance, huh! so here’s a simplified answer- “yes”
I finally lost it with all the spoon-feeding and the hand-holding during missions, and when daddy rockstar did not like it when I did not play EXACTLY how they wanted me to, standing in the wrong spot - mission failed, try a different strategy - mission failed, jumped directly outside Danbury’s window - guess what - mission failed because Danbury just had a divine vision and destroyed the documents in a second. Fuck this shit.
I’m not necessarily with you on the other points. I guess I’m used to NPCs only spewing generic, canned lines. But this sucks so much. Huge issue imo.
DarkViperAUs alt account lol
I have left about 70 hours of time in this game for playing the story one time and most of the side quests. It would be even more if they fixed the frickin vram memory leak causing the game to crash after one or two fast travels, but it’s unplayable for me this way. Search for “rdr2 FFFFFFF” if you’re looking for another reason not to buy this game.
Oh that’s what that is. I just assumed it was Linux things happening. lol
The issue was fixed for me in that update they did earlier this year. Also the horse stable glitch was fixed after many many years.
So, what you are saying is that the horse stable is stable now.
Huh, gotta try it again some time then.
I did replay the game recently and it was still the least of my issues, just a glaring example of one that is symptomatic of a wider issue in the games design
A fair assessment. But it’s still better than a lot of games released since then. I’m not going to kick it out of my bed for eating crackers.
