Red Dead Redemption 2: Good or shit?

[Victor1234]

I wouldn't believe it myself had I not experienced it directly. Of course I don't expect anybody to take me at my word, but I insist that the game is a stunning achievement and profound meditation on suffering and meaning.

Yeah no, you are trying tell me that playing some Rockstar open world popamole is the equivalent of reading Dostoyevsky. There is no way I can take this shit seriously. I'll "demo" it one of these days when I have a new GPU but I give it close to zero percent chance that you are actually right about this.

+1

I haven't played it either, but seen a lot of videos on Youtube. My impression is it's an open world game that had a ton of work put into it (cue joke videos about devs working on getting realistic looking horse turds...) that actively discourages you from being in an open world. Apparently there's an invisible wall around the paths you're supposed to take to complete the story, and if you step outside the circle, wildlife/something bad spawns to kill you to encourage you to stay on the literal right path, next time.

Lots of people praise the story too, but as far as I can tell, it's a Western set in the not classical West (immediately after US Civil War) but when Teddy Roosevelt was President, so kind of a shit setting for a Western to begin with.

If we're going by movies, it's as if Big Jake (1971) was pretending to be Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and expected nobody to notice.

 

[unseeingeye]

Yeah no, you are trying tell me that playing some Rockstar open world popamole is the equivalent of reading Dostoyevsky. There is no way I can take this shit seriously. I'll "demo" it one of these days when I have a new GPU but I give it close to zero percent chance that you are actually right about this.

Suit yourself, I'm sharing my thoughts on it at length not to convince you specifically but to give my insights generally to anybody who may read this thread. And I never said it was the equivalent of Dostoevsky; in my previous post I only mentioned the Brothers Karamazov in relation to my personal experience with the game in that I would not have been emotionally mature enough to be effected by it as deeply had I been a decade younger similarly to how reading that novel in my early twenties and only after having witnessed my first spiritual visionary experience enabled me to grasp Dostoevsky on a spiritual, as opposed to only an intellectual and literary level. That you are even considering this in terms of me being "wrong" is not exactly a reassuring sign that it is something you would enjoy but perhaps not.

 

[unseeingeye]

I haven't played it either, but seen a lot of videos on Youtube. My impression is it's an open world game that had a ton of work put into it (cue joke videos about devs working on getting realistic looking horse turds...) that actively discourages you from being in an open world. Apparently there's an invisible wall around the paths you're supposed to take to complete the story, and if you step outside the circle, wildlife/something bad spawns to kill you to encourage you to stay on the literal right path, next time.

Right, as I described above there is the main story and overarching structure which serves as a frame narrative, within which are self-contained subplots and nested stories either directly or indirectly relevant to the broader story connected by diverging threads the completion of which you frequently may determine, which changes certain aspects of the others. However, as in the other Rockstar open-world games, the main missions are very much determined affairs and although there are many instances of approaching them in different ways, ultimately your interacting is contained to the present circumstances and there are limits while on many missions of how far you can stray from the other gang members or the locations of the plot-relevant objectives (as would make sense given the way these things are rendered being determined by visibility and distance). That being said, many times I've found I was able to venture quite far away from the whatever focus the present mission moment is oriented on, surprisingly so in some cases. But there is no question that while out on main missions, there is a very cinematic presentation and it does limit to a degree how creatively and spontaneously you can play.

But as I went to some lengths to explain above, this is not the even the highlight of the game for, the main story missions I mean. For most people sure, I imagine that is the primary appeal and it is in this sense modeled on the Grand Theft Auto formula. For me though it is the time spent between missions, just as in real life the moments I find most meaningful and spiritually rewarding are those liminal moments between major events during which I find myself in contemplative states of reflection. Again, you could play through the entire story missions to conclusion and I maintain you will only see 5% of what the games world has to offer. This game is the epitome of developers going obscenely out of their way to make an interactive world overflowing with detail and reactivity that the vast majority of players will never even see, something that I find is one of the most common links in many of my favorite games and especially so for CRPGs. What must be comprehended before this game can be enjoyed (well, one of many things, several of which are impossible to express) is that the story missions and the open world are two distinct things. They of course are woven around each other and seamlessly bleed into one another, but my point is that you have to change your expectations of what is possible and of how you approach the gameplay while switching between the two. This is a big part of why I so often don't return to the camps for in-game weeks or sometimes months on end, because for me the open world is why I play this game. I am very much interested in this precise period of history, with one of my favorite works of history being written in the exact same year that the games first six chapters take place (that being History of the United States of America 1801–1817 by the incomparable Henry Adams, second in historical prose only to Edward Gibbon), so exploring an imagined virtual recreation of this era is an especial bonus for me.

As for it being a Western not being set in the classical West, right that was never in question, it is literally one of the most fundamental themes explored in the narrative both overtly and symbolically in myriad ways. The characters and other outlaws are often recognizing that their "time" is over, with Arthur reflecting that he and another character are more ghosts than people (though this comes late in the game and has another meaning related to having no external objective reasons to remain alive after having lost everything and everyone they ever truly loved). I don't know really what else to say in this regard, it is not a proper cowboy Western and only takes inspiration from that genre, neither was the previous game, both of which are more concerned with the loss of that world and lifestyle than with the prime of its influence. Redemption is of course the "main" theme but there are many others just as important to the experience.

EDIT - I just realized after posting what I think you are referring to with the wildlife spawning to kill you if you go out of bounds; there is only one instance of this and it isn't wildlife, initially it is large roving bands of bounty hunters, and if you somehow manage to overcome them and the rangers who appear next, there is a sniper that will automatically kill you if you proceed too far west. This is because there is a western portion of the map that you and your gang are wanted in dead or alive with the major town and surrounding territories all in lock-down because of how egregious and violent what happened there was and how much money was stolen. In other words there are narrative reasons why you cannot venture that way in the beginning, and it is made very obvious that to do so would be suicide even if you take out the gamified causal reasoning. You do go there later in the story, and the overwhelming majority of the map and content is accessible the moment you step out of the mountains at the end of the prologue chapter (to which you can return afterwards, you just are not able to leave them until clearing the tutorial chapter).

 

[DJOGamer PT]

It's not shit but it also isn't that good.
It's an okay if highly overrated game.
It's a technical marvel sure, but also a open-world sandbox of middling mechanical design, whose main campaign actively punishes exploration and free-form gameplay (you know, the things that open-world and sandbox games are respectively all about).
It's a game whose appeal firmly lies with storyfags and graphics whores that just want a good looking theme park to larp as cowboy for a few hours...

Calling it a masterpiece of the medium is specially laughable
Not saying that it doesn't possess "literary" qualities, it may very well be as good unseeingeye is making it out to be
Though ultimately that doesn't matter because the fact remains it can't be a masterpiece of the medium, regardless of popular consensus, for the simple reason that this game rejects the inherent qualities of its medium

 

[unseeingeye]

I've always found it odd that for most people the default mode when speaking on works of art is to adopt a perspective of objective arbitration. The game is and is not many things, but "good" or "shit" are not definite qualities belonging to virtual objects, they are reactionary adjectives the likes of which will always vary wildly amongst other observers. My manner of writing is ordinarily dismissed as pretentious but I at least try to maintain an awareness that my opining on any game is highly subjective and inevitably bound to change. I get that not everybody approaches online conversations with a deference to civility but the tendency to assume authority strikes me as peculiar.

If you look at my past posts, I can't remember if it is within this thread or if it was a different one, I was posting similar sentiments to those expressed by the majority here, minus the hivemind colloquialisms and appeals to virtual validation by affectation of dispassionate sarcasm. I criticized the game about 2 years ago during a period in which I'd not replayed it since finishing my first play through upon release, stating how it lost its appeal after a certain point and I recall criticizing the shooting mechanics and overall "feel" of the gameplay, the flow of interaction with the environment especially when looting people. I don't even remember why I reinstalled a 120 GB game on my laptop with limited memory space, probably out of boredom and curiosity to see how it was on PC. And upon replaying the game I had such a totally different reaction, almost immediately I was looking at the game from a different perspective that was for whatever reason not present in me the first time around. Everything just sort of clicked into place for me automatically, whereas before I had to work at even having the enthusiasm to finish it.

Perhaps it was certain psychological stresses I'd endured across the interim, or the loss of a guarded front affected in my observation of practically everything that is new given my utter abhorrence of contemporary culture and the shoddy products it produces to consumers of even shoddier ideologies. My opinion on video games as a whole is that it peaked at about 1988 and persisted to 1998 and with few exceptions (Morrowind, Stalker, Dark Souls, etc) it has been downhill ever since. Maybe it was a combination of these and more, I sincerely have no idea but it was as if I was "seeing" the game for the first time despite having spent well over a hundred hours on my first play through. I enjoyed the game for most of my first time through it, but I was severely disappointed by the epilogue mostly because I could immediately tell that the vast territory unlocked post-game was largely empty because it was going to be heavily featured in the announced Red Dead 2 Online mode to be released, and finishing up all of the Stranger missions and collecting all of the cigarette cards, completing all of the treasure hunts &c immediately lost any appeal and I struggled through the remainder. This left a bad aftertaste and my opinion of the game turned more negative than positive so I basically had written it off as a decent attempt but ultimately nowhere near as remarkable as the previous game.

My relationship with the game in hindsight is rather odd, one with its own development that is by no means straightforward. At release, my eyes could only see things through an apathetic, misanthropic lens; the woke injections, the on-rails cinematic presentation of the story missions, the Ubisoft padding filler of collectibles. Sure I thought the world design and the frontiersman simulation aspects were fantastic, but these paled in significance due to my visceral and vitriolic reaction to the relatively few woke moments and what people keep referring to as the antithesis of open-world mechanics contrasted with the in-game world against which it is superimposed. Something seriously changed in me though, and like the infants "blooming, buzzing world" of newness I was open to, or more receptive to the game in a whole new way, and that altered state left me with a feeling of childlike bliss that is next to non-existent in people over about 30 or so.

As for my regarding it a masterpiece, and as the singular masterpiece in so far as its realization of the unique experience it sought to accomplish is considered, this is again a matter of personal opinion and there is no "can be" and "can't be". Popular consensus doesn't even register for me; I couldn't give a fuck what is popular and what isn't, what so-called gaming journalists or advertisement-whore talking heads on YouTube have to say about its virtues or demerits, nor whatever the Reddit-like circle jerk conformity to groupthink that passes for memetic humor around here considers it to be. I only care what a person being entirely genuine thinks, which is rarer to encounter online than free cash blowing in the wind. Having a mentality that has abject kneejerk reactions to anything because of what the trained apes composing this Godless herd pretending at sophisticated civilization regurgitates verbatim from their choice of binary mouthpieces is something I'm sympathetic to, but an adamant abstinence to exploring certain works of art because it transgresses the taboo of appealing to the high and the low brow is something else entirely.

In fact I am probably among the people most disgusted at the video game industry in its current condition, and play far less new games than most people who frequent this forum, or even relatively new games. I despise cinematic games so your God of Wars, your Lasts of Us, your Mass Effects and your Uncharteds all are fairly equally repulsive to me. I don't even like cinema in general for that matter, and consider only those transcendent works by a handful of inspired geniuses worth watching (people like Lynch, Herzog, Bergman, Fellini, Kubrick &c) so the games seeking to replicate that experience are such that I have zero interest in, I even regret that they exist at all. Rockstar to me is the epitome of the fallen state of the industry, a corrosive monolithic monster contributing to the further degradation of what could be the greatest artistic medium possible by setting a standard of cinematic nihilism and soulless satire presented through an interface of online multiplayer mindless indulgence that relies on suggestive thinking and manipulative marketing strategies to drain players wallets in exchange for virtual vanities. The whole thing is for me truly vile, awful and predatory. And yet somehow from this begrimed mire of putrefied ideas a masterpiece arose, like Christ incarnating into gross matter or a phoenix rising from the Arizona. I suspect it was Dan Houser's swan song, his own reaching for redemption that guided this totally subversive modern masterpiece in its shaping. Forged in the fires of hell, it was. What to make of such a paradox, of such a grand mystery? Who can say. Some things are not meant for mortal man to know.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I hate to agree with aweigh on anything, but his post summed it up pretty well.

RDR2 is a very bad game for several important reasons:

1. Good open world games are all about player freedom. RDR2 will suffocate you with its missions and story. The missions are so on-rails, it's not even funny, they make GTA missions look free-form by comparison. It's like in RDR2, Rockstar stopped being a video gamer developer and fancied it became a movie director. For the dullest movies ever (to be addressed below). Almost every mission forces you to play it exactly the way the developers intended, which is anathema to open world games, and a single misstep of freedom will bring about a mission failed screen. Some very obvious examples to illustrate this early on in the game:

- there is a mission early on where your character and another guy from your gang jump from a bridge onto a moving train. Never mind that the whole sequence before of bombing the tracks, etc was completely on rails and involved zero input from you other than following on-screen prompts. But once you jump onto the train, your retarded buddy proceeds to run to the front of it like a retard, straight into the hail of gunfire from the train guards. Well, you might think, Darwin Awards and all that, just let that retard die, and you can then slowly take the guards out the right way... Except the moment he dies, you FAIL THE MISSION, and have to redo it. So now, you are running like a retard alongside him, having to take guards out on the fly, before they kill him, or you, or die laughing at you both.
- there is another mission later on where you and this other guy from your gang have to hunt down a giant bear. So he tells you to go and set the bait on the trap, and the way its communicated to you, you have to be below 30IQ not to realize that the bear will attack the moment you go. But you still have no choice or leeway, you must go there, and then the bear will predictably attack, and then you have to run around like a moron and try to kill it while running backward and shitting yourself.
- there is a mission where you rob something, and then a local posse is after your gang. So I saw a bunch of them pursuing us, so using initiative (a fucking BAD idea in the ARMY and in Rockstar games as of late), i jumped off my horse behind a rock outcropping which provided great cover, and ambushed the posse with a good shotgun. As they ride around the outcrop, I blast them from both barrels, taking out 2 guys, then take out the third with a sidearm revolver. 3 guys down in 2-3 seconds, I am going HOLY SHIT this is awesome and thinking about the rest of them when suddenly MISSION FAILED screen. Apparently I was too far away from the rest of the gang.

So yeah, if you enjoy this kind of cinematic jump through developer hoops bullshit, RDR2 might be for you. But this is the exact opposite of how open world games are supposed to work.

2. The story and characters and setting are just about the worst I've ever played. I love a good setting (say Witcha games, or KCD), but RDR2 stuff is so boring and pretentious, again, it's like Rockstar fancy themselves directors or serious writers now, but have no ability to pull this off whatsoever. Spoilers below:

- Wild West was cool in its prime so to speak, the era from around say 1840 to 1880s. Wild, desolate places, tough settlers braving difficult situations, cool lonesome men getting into (Hollywood invented but still) duels and shoot outs. RDR2 shits all over this by setting the game well past this era, so all you see is its rotting carcass, as boring cities and technologies take over.
- The characters are even worse. Most are so fucking boring, I already forgot all about them. The only 2 I rememebr are Dutch and Arthur. Dutch is an obvious liar and asshole, and this becomes obvious about 2 hours into the game. So the fact that your character then remains his bitch for the rest of the long game is ... retarded. And Arthur, your character, is the worst protagonist ever, a literal cuck for the age of cucks. He is a 2-bit henchman for Dutch, who goes along with him no matter what, like a helpless puppy, which is just about the opposite of what the Wild West was all about (at least thematically).
- The story has zero interesting twists or anything really, it's just a very long, drawn out sequence of Arthur being Dutch's bitch as Dutch drags the gang along through some nonsensical schemes and plans.


3. Finally, the open world that everyone raves about is beautiful yes, but it is also completely boring compared to other Rockstar offerings. In GTA games, you can constantly get into amusing shit in between story missions. Hit somebody's car, this starts a melee fight, which turns into a shoot-out with the cops, which turns into a flaming chase, etc. RDR2 is completely empty by comparison, there is barely anything to run into, and when you do, it resolves fairly quickly. The controls are also fucking retarded, it's as if to prepare you for being led by their prompts in missions, they also made controls context specific, where you have to read the letters on the screen to know what to press to open a drawer or pick something up.


But they did spend thousands of dollars on simulating horses shitting constantly and the snow physics, so your results might vary.

 

[Justicar]

TRASH

 

[9ted6]

Boring as shit, story's garbage, and the characters are horrible. It doesn't try to carry an authentic Wild West tone, it's the Wild West as envisioned by sheltered coastal Californianites who think all the history of the world needs told through Twitterspeak.

 

[unseeingeye]

3. Finally, the open world that everyone raves about is beautiful yes, but it is also completely boring compared to other Rockstar offerings. In GTA games, you can constantly get into amusing shit in between story missions. Hit somebody's car, this starts a melee fight, which turns into a shoot-out with the cops, which turns into a flaming chase, etc. RDR2 is completely empty by comparison, there is barely anything to run into, and when you do, it resolves fairly quickly. The controls are also fucking retarded, it's as if to prepare you for being led by their prompts in missions, they also made controls context specific, where you have to read the letters on the screen to know what to press to open a drawer or pick something up.

This is just absolutely not even remotely true. Much of the rest of your post, of which I tend to disagree, has valid arguments that although some are exaggerated I can concede to given that the game is idiosyncratic in design and as with any bold artistic experiment is going to prove viscerally decisive. To my mind the distinction drawn between it and other open world games with interesting settings and strong narratives has no veracity and comes down to personal taste, because any game with a strong narrative is going to feature mission scenarios which are on-rails. They are there in all of them and some are able to conceal the limitations imposed by necessity better than others depending on the nature of the gameplay. In the Witcher you're missions are almost invariably focused on tracking a predetermined path to then fight a predetermined monster in a predetermined place, but the boundaries aren't as immediately conscious given the narrow focus on the immediacy of one-on-one combat. There are clever ways of hiding it but this is an unavoidable aspect of narrative design. A game cannot possibly anticipate every single potential variable that players will alter and simultaneously present a complex and branching narrative with hundreds or thousands of moving pieces, and it is an exaggeration to say that any deviation from a tightly-defined set of gameplay behavior expectations will result in a mission failure. Within the parameters of a given story mission there are numerous ways you can go about attaining both the overall goal and the side goals introduced throughout, and what is impressive is that the characters involved will react to those most of those actions, but no you cannot rewrite a script as it unfolds though in my opinion there is significant room for improvisation and deviation, typically missions only fail if an ally is killed or if you flee the scene. There are exceptions but this is the typical causes of failure scenarios.

But this final point about an empty world is simply false. There are hundreds of instances of random encounters you can come across by not fast traveling and going off onto your own. Either we're simply not playing the same game, you're extremely unlucky and encountered some hitherto unheard of critical bug, or you haven't actually tried to engage with it much outside of story missions, because as far as games with counted hours goes this is my second most-played game and yet every single session I witness some new encounter I somehow haven't seen across 8 play throughs and several hundred hours. There are many sorts of 'random' encounters in this game, from those which are practically guaranteed to occur and have several variants (the snake-bite victims for instance, or the guy who challenges you to shooting competitions) and only vary by a small number of locations in which they spawn along major routes between towns, to those which can spawn almost anywhere on the map and are determined apparently by chance. Some recur, while the majority are single-instanced interactions, and there are very, very many of them. The latter are especially numerous and I've long been confused as to what exactly triggers them because I've had save files where I would have encounters almost constantly every time I took a ride in any direction, yet I've had others where they were far and few between, and often this would vary between playing sessions.

Anyway, as I stated in previous posts you have to expect that the open world and the story missions are two partially distinct things as is the case for every narrative-driven open-world game, though in my opinion they did an admirable job of having the two blend in a persistent manner; for instance in Grand Theft Auto when you kill people, commit crimes and escape the law, the entire thing cache resets and it is as if nothing ever happened. I'm not saying that in this game everything you do has a lasting impact, obviously that is impossible, but if you commit crimes there are many ways in which this persists across the rest of your game experience with characters acknowledging your past. When you kill people and leave bodies littered about within a certain distance of civilization, you will see lawmen or in more remote areas regular townspeople come and pick the bodies up to take and be buried or burned. If you leave bodies in the wilderness they have I think 4 stages of decomposition before being reduced to bones and you will see not only scavenger birds but animals like pigs eventually come and eat away at them. Animal carcasses also will persist but as with the chance encounters this seems to be either random, or dependent upon context and location. I have save files where dead animals and dead peoples bodies reduced to bones are still there across chapters, which I think is pretty cool.

The open world and the story missions are complementary but ultimately apart and though I've come to adore the narrative and characters, it is the open world which makes this game so special for me. The wild West was cool, I agree but I am just as interested in the period that this story takes places across because it has so many correlations with our own time. This is purely a matter of preference and not worth trying to argue about.

But as for Arthur being loyal to Dutch.. you did finish the game, right? Dutch is essentially a father figure to Arthur for over 20 years at that point, and his ultimate coming to terms with the fact that he'd been living a lie to avoid shining light on the fact that he is simply a murderer with no way to atone for his sins, no matter how romantic a notion Dutch painted of themselves, is literally the crux of the entire narrative. Dutch isn't just an asshole and a liar, much of the backstory is revealed through random conversations held at camp and by reading Arthur's journal and things like newspaper clippings or personal letters, it isn't fed to you through missions but suffice to say that there is 20 years of history between the two and Dutch is a very complex figure who we are seeing through Arthur's eyes; to us as players it is immediately obvious that he is a sociopath and even has psychopathic tendencies, but to Arthur he is watching what he believes to be a great man slipping into madness. The first two chapters are constantly alluding to this and you see as he goes from begrudged acquiescing to outright acknowledging that Dutch has lost his mind, making it his purpose to see the relatively "good" bunch of the gang out of Dutch's hands so that they aren't dragged down with him, though accepting that he himself does not deserve such a life. How he is a cuck made for the age of cucks is beyond me; never mind that every age is one of obeisance and subservience to authority of one kind or another including everybody in this forum who isn't in prison (though I've been, and meant many people with stories very relatable to Arthur).

 

[Justicar]

3. Finally, the open world that everyone raves about is beautiful yes, but it is also completely boring compared to other Rockstar offerings. In GTA games, you can constantly get into amusing shit in between story missions. Hit somebody's car, this starts a melee fight, which turns into a shoot-out with the cops, which turns into a flaming chase, etc. RDR2 is completely empty by comparison, there is barely anything to run into, and when you do, it resolves fairly quickly. The controls are also fucking retarded, it's as if to prepare you for being led by their prompts in missions, they also made controls context specific, where you have to read the letters on the screen to know what to press to open a drawer or pick something up.

This is just absolutely not even remotely true. Much of the rest of your post, of which I tend to disagree, has valid arguments that although some are exaggerated I can concede to given that the game is idiosyncratic in design and as with any bold artistic experiment is going to prove viscerally decisive. To my mind the distinction drawn between it and other open world games with interesting settings and strong narratives has no veracity and comes down to personal taste, because any game with a strong narrative is going to feature mission scenarios which are on-rails. They are there in all of them and some are able to conceal the limitations imposed by necessity better than others depending on the nature of the gameplay. In the Witcher you're missions are almost invariably focused on tracking a predetermined path to then fight a predetermined monster in a predetermined place, but the boundaries aren't as immediately conscious given the narrow focus on the immediacy of one-on-one combat. There are clever ways of hiding it but this is an unavoidable aspect of narrative design. A game cannot possibly anticipate every single potential variable that players will alter and simultaneously present a complex and branching narrative with hundreds or thousands of moving pieces, and it is an exaggeration to say that any deviation from a tightly-defined set of gameplay behavior expectations will result in a mission failure. Within the parameters of a given story mission there are numerous ways you can go about attaining both the overall goal and the side goals introduced throughout, and what is impressive is that the characters involved will react to those most of those actions, but no you cannot rewrite a script as it unfolds though in my opinion there is significant room for improvisation and deviation, typically missions only fail if an ally is killed or if you flee the scene. There are exceptions but this is the typical causes of failure scenarios.

But this final point about an empty world is simply false. There are hundreds of instances of random encounters you can come across by not fast traveling and going off onto your own. Either we're simply not playing the same game, you're extremely unlucky and encountered some hitherto unheard of critical bug, or you haven't actually tried to engage with it much outside of story missions, because as far as games with counted hours goes this is my second most-played game and yet every single session I witness some new encounter I somehow haven't seen across 8 play throughs and several hundred hours. There are many sorts of 'random' encounters in this game, from those which are practically guaranteed to occur and have several variants (the snake-bite victims for instance, or the guy who challenges you to shooting competitions) and only vary by a small number of locations in which they spawn along major routes between towns, to those which can spawn almost anywhere on the map and are determined apparently by chance. Some recur, while the majority are single-instanced interactions, and there are very, very many of them. The latter are especially numerous and I've long been confused as to what exactly triggers them because I've had save files where I would have encounters almost constantly every time I took a ride in any direction, yet I've had others where they were far and few between, and often this would vary between playing sessions.

Anyway, as I stated in previous posts you have to expect that the open world and the story missions are two partially distinct things as is the case for every narrative-driven open-world game, though in my opinion they did an admirable job of having the two blend in a persistent manner; for instance in Grand Theft Auto when you kill people, commit crimes and escape the law, the entire thing cache resets and it is as if nothing ever happened. I'm not saying that in this game everything you do has a lasting impact, obviously that is impossible, but if you commit crimes there are many ways in which this persists across the rest of your game experience with characters acknowledging your past. When you kill people and leave bodies littered about within a certain distance of civilization, you will see lawmen or in more remote areas regular townspeople come and pick the bodies up to take and be buried or burned. If you leave bodies in the wilderness they have I think 4 stages of decomposition before being reduced to bones and you will see not only scavenger birds but animals like pigs eventually come and eat away at them. Animal carcasses also will persist but as with the chance encounters this seems to be either random, or dependent upon context and location. I have save files where dead animals and dead peoples bodies reduced to bones are still there across chapters, which I think is pretty cool.

The open world and the story missions are complementary but ultimately apart and though I've come to adore the narrative and characters, it is the open world which makes this game so special for me. The wild West was cool, I agree but I am just as interested in the period that this story takes places across because it has so many correlations with our own time. This is purely a matter of preference and not worth trying to argue about.

But as for Arthur being loyal to Dutch.. you did finish the game, right? Dutch is essentially a father figure to Arthur for over 20 years at that point, and his ultimate coming to terms with the fact that he'd been living a lie to avoid shining light on the fact that he is simply a murderer with no way to atone for his sins, no matter how romantic a notion Dutch painted of themselves, is literally the crux of the entire narrative. Dutch isn't just an asshole and a liar, much of the backstory is revealed through random conversations held at camp and by reading Arthur's journal and things like newspaper clippings or personal letters, it isn't fed to you through missions but suffice to say that there is 20 years of history between the two and Dutch is a very complex figure who we are seeing through Arthur's eyes; to us as players it is immediately obvious that he is a sociopath and even has psychopathic tendencies, but to Arthur he is watching what he believes to be a great man slipping into madness. The first two chapters are constantly alluding to this and you see as he goes from begrudged acquiescing to outright acknowledging that Dutch has lost his mind, making it his purpose to see the relatively "good" bunch of the gang out of Dutch's hands so that they aren't dragged down with him, though accepting that he himself does not deserve such a life. How he is a cuck made for the age of cucks is beyond me; never mind that every age is one of obeisance and subservience to authority of one kind or another including everybody in this forum who isn't in prison (though I've been, and meant many people with stories very relatable to Arthur).

Nobody is gonna read this shit nigger it's a trash game for trannies like you.

KEEP COPING

WE JUST NEED A BIT MORE MUNNNYEH ARTURD

ARTURD YOU ARE SO NICE AND NOT RACIST.

 

[unseeingeye]

Nobody is gonna read this shit nigger it's a trash game for trannies like you.

Your sycophantic posturing of affected detachedness only projects your own insecurities, and I could care less who does or does not read it. Not my fault your an overweight loser who spends his wasted lonely and miserable existence trying to make other people in a virtual environment as wretchedly embittered and neglected by women as you and your grossly receded hairline.'

EDIT - Looks like I replied before your edit. LOL what a fag

 

[unseeingeye]

Aw how cute, one of your boyfriends (the one who started a post with "yea no") left your inane comment a laughing emoji like a tween girl, to give you the virtual validation that your obese, balding and virginal suffering isn't without sympathy from the similarly mentally deficient.

 

[9ted6]

But as for Arthur being loyal to Dutch.. you did finish the game, right? Dutch is essentially a father figure to Arthur for over 20 years at that point, and his ultimate coming to terms with the fact that he'd been living a lie to avoid shining light on the fact that he is simply a murderer with no way to atone for his sins, no matter how romantic a notion Dutch painted of themselves, is literally the crux of the entire narrative. Dutch isn't just an asshole and a liar, much of the backstory is revealed through random conversations held at camp and by reading Arthur's journal and things like newspaper clippings or personal letters, it isn't fed to you through missions but suffice to say that there is 20 years of history between the two and Dutch is a very complex figure who we are seeing through Arthur's eyes; to us as players it is immediately obvious that he is a sociopath and even has psychopathic tendencies, but to Arthur he is watching what he believes to be a great man slipping into madness. The first two chapters are constantly alluding to this and you see as he goes from begrudged acquiescing to outright acknowledging that Dutch has lost his mind, making it his purpose to see the relatively "good" bunch of the gang out of Dutch's hands so that they aren't dragged down with him, though accepting that he himself does not deserve such a life. How he is a cuck made for the age of cucks is beyond me; never mind that every age is one of obeisance and subservience to authority of one kind or another including everybody in this forum who isn't in prison (though I've been, and meant many people with stories very relatable to Arthur).

I could buy Arthur being in denial about Dutch and the rest of the gang if there was the slightest attempt to make Dutch seem positive or good towards Arthur, but there's not. He's a totally narcissistic retard from the start and the fact Arthur has to doubt whether Micah, one of the most blatantly evil characters I've ever seen in a video game, is trustworthy makes Arthur look like a huge retard too. The characters don't behave or think like human beings and to do what Arthur does would require a level of delusion and disassociation nearly schizophrenic.

 

[Multidirectional]

The characters don't behave or think like human beings and to do what Arthur does would require a level of delusion and disassociation nearly schizophrenic.

Probably about the same level of delusion it takes to write massive pretentious walls of text about how this popamole garbage is da greatest vidya gaem ever and also 2 deep 4 u. This guy seems to be seriously touched in the head.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

3. Finally, the open world that everyone raves about is beautiful yes, but it is also completely boring compared to other Rockstar offerings. In GTA games, you can constantly get into amusing shit in between story missions. Hit somebody's car, this starts a melee fight, which turns into a shoot-out with the cops, which turns into a flaming chase, etc. RDR2 is completely empty by comparison, there is barely anything to run into, and when you do, it resolves fairly quickly. The controls are also fucking retarded, it's as if to prepare you for being led by their prompts in missions, they also made controls context specific, where you have to read the letters on the screen to know what to press to open a drawer or pick something up.

This is just absolutely not even remotely true.

Fake news.

Much of the rest of your post, of which I tend to disagree, has valid arguments that although some are exaggerated I can concede to given that the game is idiosyncratic in design and as with any bold artistic experiment is going to prove viscerally decisive. To my mind the distinction drawn between it and other open world games with interesting settings and strong narratives has no veracity and comes down to personal taste, because any game with a strong narrative is going to feature mission scenarios which are on-rails. They are there in all of them and some are able to conceal the limitations imposed by necessity better than others depending on the nature of the gameplay. In the Witcher you're missions are almost invariably focused on tracking a predetermined path to then fight a predetermined monster in a predetermined place, but the boundaries aren't as immediately conscious given the narrow focus on the immediacy of one-on-one combat. There are clever ways of hiding it but this is an unavoidable aspect of narrative design. A game cannot possibly anticipate every single potential variable that players will alter and simultaneously present a complex and branching narrative with hundreds or thousands of moving pieces, and it is an exaggeration to say that any deviation from a tightly-defined set of gameplay behavior expectations will result in a mission failure. Within the parameters of a given story mission there are numerous ways you can go about attaining both the overall goal and the side goals introduced throughout, and what is impressive is that the characters involved will react to those most of those actions, but no you cannot rewrite a script as it unfolds though in my opinion there is significant room for improvisation and deviation, typically missions only fail if an ally is killed or if you flee the scene. There are exceptions but this is the typical causes of failure scenarios.

You are strawmanning here. You are basically saying all open world games with a static narrative are linear to some degree, so RDR2 is no different. But in reality, there can be a tremendous amount of difference between some narrative linearity and the kind of insane cinematically driven developer imposed linearity as found in RDR2. Of which I already gave explicit examples above. Most good open world games present the player with a lot of leeway when tackling quests, storylines, etc. From being able to choose actual direction of the story (e.g. siding with NCR or Legion or House in FNV, or handling the Bloody Baron plotline in Witcher 3, or the amazing amount of freedom in BotW), to just being able to approach quests from different directions and use the open world to help you resolve them. RDR2 is the explicit opposite of that, forcing you to literally walk on rails in almost every scenario. Get too far from your quest companions, automatic Mission Failed screen, this is not an exageration, it is literally what happened to me multiple times in the game. Try to tackle missions in your own way, Mission Failed screen.

But this final point about an empty world is simply false. There are hundreds of instances of random encounters you can come across by not fast traveling and going off onto your own. Either we're simply not playing the same game, you're extremely unlucky and encountered some hitherto unheard of critical bug, or you haven't actually tried to engage with it much outside of story missions, because as far as games with counted hours goes this is my second most-played game and yet every single session I witness some new encounter I somehow haven't seen across 8 play throughs and several hundred hours. There are many sorts of 'random' encounters in this game, from those which are practically guaranteed to occur and have several variants (the snake-bite victims for instance, or the guy who challenges you to shooting competitions) and only vary by a small number of locations in which they spawn along major routes between towns, to those which can spawn almost anywhere on the map and are determined apparently by chance. Some recur, while the majority are single-instanced interactions, and there are very, very many of them. The latter are especially numerous and I've long been confused as to what exactly triggers them because I've had save files where I would have encounters almost constantly every time I took a ride in any direction, yet I've had others where they were far and few between, and often this would vary between playing sessions.

I never said there was nothing in the open world. What I said was it was barren. That means the ratio of empty land where nothing is happening to points of interest is very high. You will ride back and forth on horses for fucking hours and most of that time you will be bored, because nothing is happening. The ratio is other similar games (e.g. GTA games) is much higher. Driving a car in traffic in a densely populated city obviously presents a lot more stimuli than riding on a horse in the middle of nowhere. Just plain common sense.

But as for Arthur being loyal to Dutch.. you did finish the game, right? Dutch is essentially a father figure to Arthur for over 20 years at that point, and his ultimate coming to terms with the fact that he'd been living a lie to avoid shining light on the fact that he is simply a murderer with no way to atone for his sins, no matter how romantic a notion Dutch painted of themselves, is literally the crux of the entire narrative. Dutch isn't just an asshole and a liar, much of the backstory is revealed through random conversations held at camp and by reading Arthur's journal and things like newspaper clippings or personal letters, it isn't fed to you through missions but suffice to say that there is 20 years of history between the two and Dutch is a very complex figure who we are seeing through Arthur's eyes; to us as players it is immediately obvious that he is a sociopath and even has psychopathic tendencies, but to Arthur he is watching what he believes to be a great man slipping into madness. The first two chapters are constantly alluding to this and you see as he goes from begrudged acquiescing to outright acknowledging that Dutch has lost his mind, making it his purpose to see the relatively "good" bunch of the gang out of Dutch's hands so that they aren't dragged down with him, though accepting that he himself does not deserve such a life. How he is a cuck made for the age of cucks is beyond me; never mind that every age is one of obeisance and subservience to authority of one kind or another including everybody in this forum who isn't in prison (though I've been, and meant many people with stories very relatable to Arthur).

You are covering up here for a shit narrative. If it's obvious af to us after 2 hours that Dutch is a lying asshole, then it should've been obvious to Arthur as well. If they really wanted to make this a good narrative, Dutch should've been presented as someone who seems good but is gradually revealed in nuanced ways to be evil. Instead, they reveal everything right off the bat, and it becomes an exercise in patience to see why the cuck Arthur cannot see this obvious shit in front of him.


More importantly, this is not some 2 hour movie about the psychological nature of abuse, this is a very long game set in the Wild West, you know, the setting typically reserved for tough characters who go out there and fight bandits and Indians and the difficulties of nature. How the fuck does Arthur fit into this? It seems to be some kind of a modern woke deconstruction of the setting, where tough men are turned into confused follower jackals. Which is not interesting at all.

 

[Barbarian]

I have just replayed this after 5 years.

Very wholesome game. I like how the plot is centered around redemption(if you play high honor), and how its morals are very much Christian. Arthur meeting his end after reminiscing about the good deeds he had done of late after a life of crime and violence was very enjoyable.

I don't really understand the skepticism around Arthur and others being foiled by Dutch. Perhaps because I have never played the first game and didn't even know he was set to be an eventual antagonist when I first played this? The man is presented as someone charismatic and intelligent who has given his gang subjects a sense of belonging and purpose - even going as far as being a father figure to most of them. Perhaps he wasn't even false on the "belonging" part(being that most of the Van der Linde gang members actually treat each other as family members and have no qualms about taking risks or making sacrifices to help each other). Exception being the token psychos Bill and Micah.

 

[9ted6]

and how its morals are very much Christian.

Christianity is included to be the butt of every "clever" joke and satire in RDR2, just like every other Rockstar game. The Russian wife in GTA 4's the only time it ever got treated sort of positively.

 

[Barbarian]

and how its morals are very much Christian.

Christianity is included to be the butt of every "clever" joke and satire in RDR2, just like every other Rockstar game. The Russian wife in GTA 4's the only time it ever got treated sort of positively.

Where is that? Cite examples.

The monk and the nun(most overtly Christian characters I can remember) are probably the two most decent people you meet in the entire game.

 

[Justicar]

Aw how cute, one of your boyfriends (the one who started a post with "yea no") left your inane comment a laughing emoji like a tween girl, to give you the virtual validation that your obese, balding and virginal suffering isn't without sympathy from the similarly mentally deficient.

WE JUST NEED THIS ONE SCORE ARTURD AND IT WILL FINALLY BE A GOOD GAME WE JUST NEED ONE MORE RAILROADED SET PIECE.

Go play your goyslop tranny.

 

[Justicar]

Very wholesome game. I like how the plot is centered around redemption(if you play high honor), and how its morals are very much Christian. Arthur meeting his end after reminiscing about the good deeds he had done of late after a life of crime and violence was very enjoyable.

Very Christian especially the part where they named the most blatantly evil backstabbing character after one of Gods prophets.

Or the part where you get redemption by killing lawmen at the end.

 

[Ash]

This just in, unseeingeye is a faggot with no self-respect, as one with self-respect would not waste 50 hours of their life on this fucking trash, then go on forums trying to persuade those with standards that it isn't the turd we know it to be.

 

[BruceVC]

and how its morals are very much Christian.

Christianity is included to be the butt of every "clever" joke and satire in RDR2, just like every other Rockstar game. The Russian wife in GTA 4's the only time it ever got treated sort of positively.

I also dont believe this, you conflating jokes about societal realities and historical realities in Rockstar games with jokes about Christianity. And a joke is a joke, its not meant to be taken seriously. Learn to laugh at yourself, its therapeutic

I loved RDR2, I completed the SP game about 2 years ago and I maxed out all the roles in the Online game. I still play the SP game as John Marston and have spent 1500 hours overall on the game. I use mods that add activities like gold prospecting and additional Bounty Hunting

The design of the game world is supposed to about large open spaces and even though I agree large parts of it are "empty " of quests they not empty of things to do like hunting, searching for fossils, locating stone carvings and other similar things. And yes there are boundaries in quests but you dont have to initiate quests and then you can explore and do what you want

PorkyThePaladin you musnt get confused with this design and games likes GTA or Witcher, which I also love, and expect to find dragons or strip clubs. Sorry my friend but this is a Western theme game....no monsters here ( saying that there is a Vampire quest Easter Egg you can find in St Denis )

And I also never had an issue with the relationship and decisions that Dutch made, the Wild West was a tough era and Dutch actions were about survival of the group. I dont consider the Dutch gang a cult. They made ostensibly controversial decisions to ensure they could avoid law enforcement agencies like the Pinkertons

But its an incredible game if you understand what it is about

 

[BruceVC]

This just in, unseeingeye is a faggot with no self-respect, as one with self-respect would not waste 50 hours of their life on this fucking trash, then go on forums trying to persuade those with standards that it isn't the turd we know it to be.

Maybe you just have different taste in games, you never know ?

 

[Ash]

I like open world games. I like westerns. I like third person shooters. I like most older Rockstar games, flawed as they may be. I am a male with power fantasies. Most of all,
I love video games. I should firmly be the target demographic, except I am not a retard, and this game was unfortunately made for retards.

 

[BruceVC]

I like open world games. I like westerns. I like third person shooters. I like most older Rockstar games, flawed as they may be. I am a male with power fantasies. Most of all,
I love video games. I should firmly be the target demographic, except I am not a retard, and this game was unfortunately made for retards.

So summarize in a few points what you think is retarded about it, I can respect your opinion and we can agree to disagree but I want to know in summary what you dont like about it?