WHAT PLAY YOU!? Version 3.0

[Steve Justice]

6 hours ago, Version1.0 said:

95 hours into Rebirth. Still going!

Jeez, that's a long labour.

[FLips]

After years of hearing how great Red Dead Redemption 2 is, combined with it winning the UKFF's favourite game, I finally picked it up cheap.
I'd always held off on it because I knew the size of the game and quite frankly couldn't be bothered, and times when I could a more appealing big open world game like Tears of The Kingdom was out.

It's early doors, so don't take this as my final thoughts, but this game is exhausting already.
I've spent something like 3 or 4 hours on it and finally got to the part where I think the game is going to open up as I can finally manual save it (where you park your wagons and make a camp) but I feel all I've done for those 4 hours is Hold A and listen to boring conversation. I get it, they're building a story and need to teach me mechanics, but fuck me. Holding A to follow a horse or drive a wagon endlessly has not made me feel good about this game so far.

The controls are all over the place and not particularly welcoming. Two different wheels to put a mask on, swapping and changing weapons on your horse, holding X for some things and Y for other things which aren't really different things and maybe could just be one button. To converse with someone while on horseback I had to hold and press about four different buttons to keep my horse moving, open the dialogue box, select an option and also steer the horse.
At one point during a train robbery I was told explicitly "Hold RT to aim" and so I held RT and accidentally shot a guy. LT was aim earlier so why is it RT now?

During the wagon ride which went on forever, I had to go up a hill and round a corner and following the yellow trail on the map steered me into a rock and as soon as my horse got a sniff of it, it collapsed dead and I had to do the whole wagon journey again.

I finally set up camp and the game bombarded me with a load of sim mechanics. Watch your weight, change your clothes for the weather, your beard is getting long. Just give me GTA with horses and let me play the game please.

[The Gaffer]

It's peak Rockstar "We make movies". Absolute slog of a game. Can totally see why people would have it as one of their favourites ever but it wasn't for me. 

[gmoney]

Here's where you find out this has been an elaborate prank.

Nah, it's a very good game, but glacial to start with. I don't rate it super highly though. I completed it once and will probably never pick it up again. 

[FLips]

2 minutes ago, gmoney said:

Here's where you find out this has been an elaborate prank.

Nah, it's a very good game, but glacial to start with. I don't rate it super highly though. I completed it once and will probably never pick it up again. 

I'm starting to fear I just don't get it. Since my last post I founded my little camp and got battered with info about my beard and how fat I was and then it was like "bring back animals you've hunted to feed to camp". Ok, how?

Where is the bow I had? Where do I go because there is no animal trails I'm picking up? Ok whatever, I'll mooch about camp.

Here is a charity box, I put $10 in and it does nothing. Maybe it does, it's not explained to me. I eat some stew and drink a coffee. Again, it's making me manually do these things by holding buttons. I feel like the game is deliberately just trying to waste my time. Hold X to pick up the stew bowl, hold RT to eat the stew. Hold Y to drink some coffee, hold Y to drink some more. Press B to stop. Please leave me alone.

Ok so I'll try a mission. Oh I'm back in the wagon again and have to hold A for 10 minutes to go to the next town over. Hold A to chase a man on a horse, Hold A to run the horse back to town. Here's a bar brawl which becomes very obviously scripted after a few punches. Hold Y to pick up your hat.

Ok so now I'm in the town. I've done a horse chase, I've done a scripted brawl, I've held A a lot. Here's a dozen symbols on your map. Want to know what they are? Fuck you.

I shot a guy in the legs for no reason and the cops gunned me down in the street like a dog. It felt like a more fun outcome than the inevitable A holding back to my camp.

I remember the day I got GTA V on the 360 and a load of us gathered in the Uni dorm to play it and it took no time at all before we were zooming around the city with the radio on, hunting down the airport and getting eaten by sharks. Red Dead seems to be only the parts from GTA where someone phones you and you get forced to walk everywhere.

[Chest Rockwell]

I'm loving this review and that it vindicates my decision not to play the game. I hope you continue to enjoy it just enough to keep playing it but hate it enough for the review to continue to be this entertaining.

[Arch Stanton]

I'm loving hearing your thoughts on it too, @FLips. I wasn't sure how you'd get on with it, as you're somebody that plays games seemingly obsessively and has such a varied taste in them. You seem to enjoy jumping between a tonne of different games at a time, whereas RDR2 just isn't going to let you do that. It wants you to immerse yourself in it fully. I pretty much played no other games for six months when I was fully invested in RDR2. No time to. By the time I stopped playing, I had put in close to 100 hours post-completion of the main story, just pottering around, living in that world.

I love the whole world and setting of the game though, love westerns and all the lore and legends around the genre. It made me totally forgiving of any of the faults in the gameplay, not that I believe there are many at all, once you get used to the controls.

Interesting your comparison to GTAV though, because my experience of that game is probably similar to your experience of Red Dead so far, in that I've come to the party late and played it after years of everyone has been raving about it, and just not been able to get into it. Almost right at the start of the game there's a driving mission and I just fucking hated the loose driving mechanics and the fact that it's so easy to get lost or crash. I failed that part of the mission repeatedly and I found myself thinking that if the whole game involves driving around like that then I'm just not ever gonna like it.

Edited May 5 by Arch Stanton

[Cousin Jim Bob]

The controls on Red Dead 2 are notoriously bad. 

Pretty much all open world Rockstar games are known for how bad they control.  

[Mr_Danger]

As much as I love RDR2, FLips hasn’t spoken a single untruth on it so far. I started replaying it from the start last year and I tapped out after the first long arse wagon journey. Much better to stick with my finished game and mooch about as and when I feel the need.

[TheScarlettChad]

It makes me wonder how detailed VI will be. Will we be able to go to the gym like in SA? 

[FLips]

I took your advice and tried to immerse myself in the world of Red Dead. Maybe I was approaching it wrong, and I'd enjoy it more if I slowed down a bit.

So yesterday morning I started in camp and I shaved my beard and rode my horse into town for a fresh haircut and a wander about. I petted a dog, petted my horse but sadly couldn't pet the pigs or chickens. I went around town saying good morning and hello to everyone until a guy on his porch decided I'm too friendly and shouted at me, so I defused the situation and walked away.

Instead of trying to go all GTA about it, I decided to do the main missions as I was clearly still in a tutorial at this stage. I got a new horse and naturally called it Epona. I am now so attached to the horse that if I hold X I can do drifts on it. I'm more concerned about the horse's wellbeing than mine.

I overhear two men arguing in the road and one gets shot. The shooter challenges me to a duel which I gladly accept. I don't know how to duel and the game tries to teach me on the fly, which in a quick draw situation, is a bad idea. I'm promptly gunned down. DEAD.

I take on a bounty to apprehend a snake oil salesman. I park my horse a little down from the cave he's hiding in and slowly sneak up through the bushes to ambush him with my lasso when a prairie dog or some sort of rat bites me on the shin. I surprisingly remain unheard and approach the bounty but sadly the game needs me to talk to him because it's a set peice where I need to chase him downriver after he jumps in. A little disappointed but fair enough, it was fun fishing him out of the rapids, hog tying him and riding him to jail.

Next thing I know I'm hunting a legendary bear. For the first time playing this, a character says "it's a couple of days travel" and I don't get overcome with dread. Maybe this is finally landing for me.
I successfully kill the bear and ride back to town with my legendary pelt, excited to sell it for a high price to donate to my camp. The shop won't take it. I look it up and there are trappers I need to sell pelts to exclusively and my nearest one is aaaaages away. The benefit of the doubt I was giving the game starts to fade but I make it there in the end and get a cool bear hat. All is forgiven.

I start making the habit of greeting everyone I pass on my horse and constantly stopping to feed and brush it. Reassuringly patting it when a snake spooks it.

I chase a drunk reverend down and get sidetracked sitting in for him in a game of Poker. I lose all my money and then chase him to a nearby plain where I fend off his attacker and get wrongly accused of murder. I chase the witness down but misjudge the terrain and eat a load of shit flying off a bank.

Between all of this I've started to find some of those weird Rockstar side mission characters, spent 40 minutes this morning before work playing dominoes, went and done some debt collecting and everything is slowly started to take shape for me. I'm starting to get a feel for the character and the world around him. If the travel takes it's toll I set up camp and do a little cooking, or go off the beaten path to sight see or hunt.

My mistake was wanting too much at once and getting next to nothing. Slowing myself down and doing missions is opening the world up to me and I'm finding doing it this way is actually more liberating than riding off and trying to do it myself. It's giving me breathing room to let me discover things at a nice pace rather than expecting it all at once. Doing the dumb little things like greeting strangers, getting haircuts and getting all My Lovely Horse about it is making the game more fun.

Giddyup.
 

 

 

Edited May 7 by FLips

[Keith Houchen]

Yep you’re right @FLips, it’s a change of pace and a change of mindset. There were so many gta bellends moaning about the game being boring and whatnot shortly after its release. I think they missed the point. It isn’t San Andreas in the Wild West!

No spoilers, but some of the stories and cut scenes will make you run the gamut of emotions. There’s one particular bit later on that is shot and composed like pure cinema. You just know shits about to go down. There’s also one which made me belly laugh like nothing in a game has done before or since. 

[The Gaffer]

Alright fine I'll try it again. 

[Tommy!]

First time I played it I gave up early in chapter 2 because it is a bit of a chore until you aren't trotting along slowly with some else doing something mundane. About half way into chapter 2 it lets the story flow in a cut scene and then you get onto the fun of the mission, which is much better than the game craming story into the mission as you trot along so the mission drags.

Once it gets to that point, and as the story starts to ramp up through chapter 3 onwards, it's what makes it so good in my opinion.

The little things characters say and do as you mill around is great too, some things you pass off really loop around nicely further into the game

[BomberPat]

it's sounding like your experience of the game was very similar to mine; if I hadn't played it during lockdown, I don't know how long I would have lasted on it, because the first hour or so is a bit of a slog, and then when the world starts to open up it goes the opposite way and just starts to feel huge and daunting. But I completely fell in love with the small details, with dressing Arthur how I wanted him to look, and just exploring the world at my own pace.

I don't think any game has done open world better; it takes a long time before random encounters start to feel repetitive, and there's so much out there that's waiting for you to stumble across it that exploring always feels worthwhile. It helps that the landscape is stunning too, so riding around it on a horse is always lovely. Daft stuff like characters having different lines of dialogue if Arthur gets really fat are fun too.

I was always told the story was incredible, but I was in love with the game before I got to a point where I realised that; I thought the world was fantastic, and the story snuck up on me, and I think that's probably the best way to experience it.