I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride.
On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other hand, it revives the sense of wonder that I haven't felt since I learned to treat games as something to win rather than something to get lost in.
Also, the controls are quite bad - it suffers from the "Rockstar Claw" just like all their other releases. Overall, I want to enjoy this game, and I love the characters and the immersiveness of the world they've crafted, but the game containing the world is hard to play.
I really prefer single player games with a nice story and an action that's not too hectic that I can enjoy at my own pace.
I find this shocking because it's incredibly in line with discussions and articles that claim that a large portion of younger men had been deprived by society from getting a sense of belonging and accomplishment and is now using video games as a bandaid for that.
Games with stories and narratives feel like chores and are restrictive.
i played red dead redemption for hundreds of hours, both in single player and in the online multiplayer, which was a blast. i haven't even finished red dead redemption 2, and have found myself very bored with the story and side missions. it's the same formula rockstar has used for years, and the AI is as superficial as ever. it can be a real slog riding around between missions. even though the guns look great, they and the aiming system is not as fun as red dead redemption.
There have been times where I’ve done all the work I need to do to get some unbroken alone time, spent 40 minutes playing and gotten absolute nothing accomplished which really sucks given that it might be the only time I could play that week.
I get that it’s atmospheric but as a dad game it just sucks.
I’d like to be able to load the game and play through a couple of missions quickly without all the faffing about brushing my horse and crafting and hunting and what not.
Basically my life is full of enough chores that I don’t need games that simulate doing more chores.
Because they generally have this permadeath mechanic, every step in the game is meaningful to not losing, and the game developers are also kind of forced to make every part of the game fun and not too tedious or superfluous, as you'll generally replay them many times.
I currently quite enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which you will need a free afternoon to get into, but after that, you can even have meaningful episodes of 5 minutes. You're not gonna complete a run in 5 minutes, that's rather gonna take 8 hours (though the world record is at less than 30 minutes), but you can load up the game, play a few hundred turns and then save and quit easily in that time.
Whereas GTA4 was genuine satire (Republican space rangers anyone?) the sequel had poor characters and I honestly have never gone back to it since finishing the main storyline, the first time this was true in the series.
Anyway RDR2 Looks amazing. I bought an Xbox just to play it. Who knows how long it'll take to get to PC but I'll buy it again when it does.
GTA V’s PC port was also financially an enormous success, it cemented a place in Steams top seller list for years thanks to the success of GTA Online.
Couple this with the leaked RDR 2 PC developer job titles that have been discovered via oversharing Rockstar employees on LinkedIn, I think there is a good chance RDR2 follows the GTA V release model and a PC version hits 12-18 months after console release.
I bet a significant number of gamers ended up buying GTA V twice at full price thanks to the staggered release schedule last time (I and many friends certainly did), I’d not be surprised at all if this factors in their decisions.
Don't try and get on your horse if someone is standing near it because triangle is also "get into a fight with that person". You can back out of the fight, but not with the circle button (which is so often the "go back" button) - this time circle is the punch button!
Basically the core game loop is: move a bit, look in the bottom right to see if you can press some buttons to do a thing, do a thing or move a bit more.
I imagine the pacing, realism, and atmosphere is not for everyone, but if it is your cup of tea this is (so far) a masterpiece in single player gaming.
why?
Personally, I've never seen a game with this focus and this level of scope and quality.
The network was trained with https://nanonets.com, if anyone is interested. Interesting stuff, given the knowledge came from synthesized horses.
I did not train or segment any other entities other than Arthur and his horse. Labels were 'horse' and 'human'.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0...
There are two main criticisms to me.
(1) the dialogue is very cheesy and superficial too often when it would be better to just not have it at all. More segments of deep sparsity, even when other characters are around you (think Shadow of the Collossus) would make it even more desolate and impactful.
(2) The mechanics of the controls and indicated special instructions are sometimes clunky to the point that you fail missions or miss out on things accidentally just due to the control system. I know this will never be perfect, but it is frequently so bad in RDR2 that you are very aware of it and frustrated by it as you complete tasks.
Despite this, it’s easily one of the best games I’ve ever played on multiple dimensions.
It makes me very excited for Death Stranding as well, which I think will be something of a sci-fi / dystopian variation of what RDR2 is.
The scale of technical achievement is by far more impressive than anything that came before. Metal Gear Solid 5 might be the closest thing in terms of open world technology, but RDR2 is far superior to it.
The anti-game aspects create a very different dramatic experience than most games. Sometimes you just ride along with another character and do nothing but observe what happens. Other times your plans get derailed in an Inception sort of way and you end up halfway acrosd the map doing something you never intended, none of which has anything to do with the story. This happens in ways that are much more organic and natural than previous similar mechanisms in e.g. GTA games.
The story deals with a lot of themes that have more impact because of coming across them in an open world (stumbling into KKK meetings, seeing lynched bodies hanging in swamplands, tracking down a gang that tortures animals, finding evidence of families split by slave trade, and many more).
The main story is compelling and well crafted, but the fuller picture from the pastiche of stuff in the world makes it feel effective, and the scenes of blood-thirsty wild west action feel more like uncommon punctuation marks than important aspects of the plot.
