Phew, finished. About 105 hours. My rating of this game slowly went from "OMG blown away, 10/10", to the final 7/10.
First the good:
- Muh visuals. Never seen anything like that. With my powerful rig, on ultra, the visuals kept blowing me away until the fucking end. Fishing in the sunset, waking up in the low mist, hunting eagles on the snowy peaks, shootouts with los banditos in the desert and many, many more. The volumetric ligting and particle effects are out of this world. The forests are not as next-level as in Kingdom Come but overall this is the best looking game to date, at least on a stronk PC.
- Writing. Much like Witcher 3 the overal plot is nothing to write home about but the moment-to-moment writing, especially dialogues, is top notch.
- Vibe. I fapped 10x a day over the realistic-but-not-grimdark vibe. It's as if you can touch the leather of you jacket, smell the horses, feel the warmth of your campfire. Incredible. Whatever they did with the lighting the various materials and textures and the way light bounces off them feel incredibly tactile. The production values are off the charts, walking in a cabin or a lodge is like being there for real. This game must've cost several gazillion dorra and you can feel every penny.
- VA. Best VA ever made for a videogame, dethroning Witcher 3. Roger Clark as Arthur must be about the single best acting performance in a videogame ever. The actors for Dutch and John also top notch. The rest of the cast never dips below "p. good".
The bad and ugly:
- Who else was fucking ready to uninstall after the first 3 chapters? The mission design is shockingly bad. Stunningly terrible. Walk up to a mission giver, watch cutscene, mount your horse, press V for cinematic camera, watch automatic ride for 5 minutes while NPCs banter/give exposition, arrive at the destination, investigate/loot and flee in a massive shootout where you slaughter dozens of enemies. Rinse and repeat about 50 times. Absolutely shocking. Two thousand people worked on this game for 8 years. Nobody ever said "uuh, maybe change things up a little now and then?". Jesus fuck. I was so sick of this stupid, boring repetition that when the epilogue started I straight up delighted in all those dumb, menial activities as John. Even shovelling shit was a breath of fresh air compared to the standard Rockstar formula.
- The forced slow walking. Sweet lord the constant slow walking was driving me up the ceiling. That's what happens when you decide collision have to be "realistic", so that even a slight bump into somebody can injure them or push them down the cliff or something. So you can't allow this for essential NPCs so you have to surround them with "safety bubble" of forced slow walking. The collisions are immensely retarded btw, dramatic sommersaults after your horse catches a tiny branch sticking from the ground, massive shootouts with entire towns because you bumped into someone in the streets, murder bounties because other riders on country roads love to head-crash into you, jesus.
- No difficulty options. Without them game must cater to all, therefore it inevitably caters to casuals, as usual. Therefore 95% of the various upgrades and improvements are completely pointless. You don't really need to eat or clean your weapons or upgrade your belts or your camp or craft anything or make money for that matter. Because why the fuck would you need money when you don't need to buy anything. All that because the casuals would squeal they can't just breeze through the story and they have to "grind" (i.e. doing the actually fun stuff like robbing trains, kidnap stagecoaches and hunt for treasures). And just in case, even if you don't need a single penny, you're given thousands of dollars during the main quest, so that you don't have to "grind". This game would be 10x better with some sort of Simulation Mode where all the features and tools you have available actually mattered. As it is though they're just window dressing.
- People shit on the gunplay, dunno. I don't play shooters much so I don't have any comparison. Without deadeye both shootouts and hunting are p. much impossible. With deadeye it's retardedly easy. Could they do more with the formula? No idea. Probably.
- Horse controls. Realistic horse controls should be illegal, punishable by cruel torture. I do appreciate the absence of magical teleporting horse though, it was such a goofy stupid thing in Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come.
- Game LOVES to waste your time. Skinning animations, minute long "fast" travelling cutscenes, jesus. There is realism and then there is retardery. Rockstar can't tell them apart.
- Game lacks SJWisms for the most part, probably because it was conceived and designed many years ago, but there are small hints, like Sadie, the feminist idea of a stronk femyn, or 95% of bad guys being librul caricatures of raysiss southern hicks, rednecks and yahoos, complete with the Micah-style beards. You always know a dude is a baddie when he's sporting this sort of villanous moustache.
This is a one-of-a-kind experience. The visuals, vibe, aesthetics, VA are revolutionary. A new standard. You can see there was a strong author's vision driving all this. But it's just not a good videogame. After 15 or so hours the only fun I had was just riding around, exploring, hunting, fishing and doing side activities. Spent dozens of hours on that and it would be much, much better if any of it actually mattered for the gameplay. Definitely glad I bought and played it but this will get uninstalled and stay uninstalled forever.
