RDR2 has confused me

[PepZeb]

Hi all,

I am just coming up to 60 hours in Red Dead 2 and have finished the single player story, all side missions and a lot of the random encounters. I am about half way through hunting all legendary animals and have gone after all of the bounties. Coming up to about 87% completion.

This game has been absolutely incredible from its story, characters, graphics and its game world which is jaw dropping. I have been playing the game on a 65" oled at 4k with surround sound and there have been times when the realism has been immense and I have just spent hours wondering around the map taking it all in. I don't know another game that comes even remotely close to the world of RDR2 and the bar has certainly been raised with this game. Graphics and world building alone is a 10/10

The characters you meet in this game are so interesting and well written and the actual gang are brilliant. Dutch is one of the best villains and Arthur is probably one of my favourite and most likeable protagonists.

All of this said, I started playing the game in March 2019 and only finished the main missions about a week ago. There were times when the game really did bore me and I didn't have the interest to go from mission to mission or take part in the side activities even though I really thought the slower pace suited the game. The controls can be a bit awkward at times and a lot of the time it doesn't even feel like your playing the game. On quite a few occasions I found myself getting burnt-out by this game.

This is an incredible game world with fantastic characters, but is it a incredible game from a gameplay perspective..... I'm really not sure!

 

[Frag Maniac]

To me, it was both incredible and very disappointing. The worst part for me was most of the disappointment came toward the end, which was a big let down. Chapter 6 is both long and depressing. You suddenly find you can't do camp upgrades anymore, and there was no warning beforehand after a TON of hunting to complete them that finishing them would not be possible unless you did so in Chapter 5. Worse yet, most of the camp suddenly hate and blame you, when it's Dutch they should be mad at. I really hated Dutch as a character, he doesn't do a damn bit of the work, but takes all the credit, and the rest of the gang are just idiots for not seeing that. In fact, all Dutch ever did was use people to try to get himself rich, but came up with poorly conceived plans that lacked proper intel every time. Arthur is diagnosed with TB, and keeps having attacks, yet he somehow miraculously is their hero in the hardest battles toward the end of the game. It's also very disappointing and sad that Arthur couldn't even get the gold at the end, because he's the one person that would have been generous with it. I wanted to like Arthur, and at first did, but in the end, I only resented that they wrote him as a loser.

The only character in the whole game I ended up caring about was Sadie, whom is brilliantly voiced with excellent dialog by Alex McKenna. Part of my frustration was for some reason, because I didn't play RDR1 or know any of it's story details, RDR2 led me to believe it took place after RDR1. I didn't even know it was a prequel until I read online that John Marston and his wife die at the end of RDR1, and that was when I was near the end of the final chapter.

In summary, RDR2 had potential, but IMO they really screwed the pooch on a lot of story and gameplay details. Gameplay wise a lot of it felt very polished, but the controls at times during combat were maddening, especially on KB/M. I rarely used Dead Eye target marking multi auto kills at all, preferring to quickly turn focus on and off to get a bit of slow mo for each shot. I really only even did that much because the aiming was too hard otherwise due to the awkward control scheme.

I ended up uninstalling it after one play through, I just couldn't justify it taking up so much space on my 500GB NVMe drive. I'd give it a 7/10. BTW, I'm really glad Dan Houser retired from Rockstar. Hopefully the quality of games will improve with him gone. IMO the last good game they made was Max Payne 3.