A truly beautiful looking game. The world is such a great sight, which is lucky since you'll be riding through the same spots over and over. The soundtrack also surprised me with just how good it can get. It's packed full of content, and the world seems to react and evolve to your actions seamlessly.
But the game just feels so slow. I don't mean the pacing, I mean every little thing. Every small action will require you to do something that would otherwise be automatic for user experience purposes in other games. And then there's the amount of times the game forces you to go at its pace rather than your own. Sooooo many missions start out with "Follow X character to X location" where you have to go at a snails pace while listening to the dialogue. It's like the game is full of hidden cutscenes that disguise themselves as gameplay.
The game practically needs to be carried by its story. Luckily the story IS great, with equally well written characters, and if it wasn’t for the heavy flaws dragging it down, the game could have been amazing. But as it is it just kind of annoyed me how often Rockstar seemed to think “This story is so unbelievably amazing that the player won’t mind hundreds of hours of slow progress to hear it all!”
This disguised gameplay can go way too far sometimes. Like it's one thing to make you personally travel to each location while listening to dialogue instead of just achieving the exact same purpose in a full cutscene, but there's a couple of times when you're watching an actual cutscene then all of a sudden you get a prompt to push the analogue stick to move forward. I just don't get it, the game desperately tries to force interaction into it in order to hide the fact there's so much story to get through.
The game also suffers from a lot of Rockstar's typical problems. Clunky controls, glitchy interactions (have fun trying to reposition yourself a few inchs constantly to get a certain prompt to light up). A couple of times I tried to run up to my horse and jump on top of it, only to accidentally tackle a poor bystander to the ground because it's attached to the exact same button. Speaking of which, it is way too easy to lose honor in this game. Randomly bumping into someone, which will happen a lot due to the horrible controls, can cause them to get angry and attack you, but if you dare defend yourself you lose honor and get a bounty on you.
It takes realism too far and suffers from it. For example, when you get sick health restoring items just stop working. That might not be too bad if it was a balancing effect from another thing (like maybe an alcoholic drink that raises your stats), but getting sick is a story forced plot point.
Want to loot a bunch of dead victims after a huge shoot out? Be prepared for your mission allies to coooonstantly scream at you to hurry up.
The world is full of stuff to do at least. I think that sometimes it's a bit too much of a chore though. Early on I did a mission that involved getting perfect carcasses of certain animals. You'd think that the sections on the map that have those animals drawn on them would spawn a lot of them, but it could take me 30 minutes to find a rabbit in a rabbit-marked area. Trying to catch a legendary fish could take 10 minutes of constantly rotating the analogue stick. Treasure maps are so vague they're unreadable most of the time. It's weird because when you're in a mission the game gives you plenty of info and direction, but anything outside of a mission and you're on your own with little to no hints, like if a camp friend wants an item. You have no idea where it is, the game doesn't tell you where it is. I guess the point is that, if you're not looking it up online, you're supposed to just be happy exploring and finding what you find free roam, but after I did a lot of them early-game, I found I was wasting so much time that by chapter 3 of the game I was just travelling from mission to mission, the idea of wasting time exploring every nook and cranny in such a huge world, with stiff controls, was daunting.
It's definitely not a bad game. Not at all. It has the story, it has the music, it has the characters, it has the level of depth, it has the gun mechanics (although I wouldn't mind those being a bit better due to the sheer amount of endless shoot outs you're forced in to). It just lacks a bit of polish and smoothing down, and to realise when realism becomes a chore.
But the game just feels so slow. I don't mean the pacing, I mean every little thing. Every small action will require you to do something that would otherwise be automatic for user experience purposes in other games. And then there's the amount of times the game forces you to go at its pace rather than your own. Sooooo many missions start out with "Follow X character to X location" where you have to go at a snails pace while listening to the dialogue. It's like the game is full of hidden cutscenes that disguise themselves as gameplay.
The game practically needs to be carried by its story. Luckily the story IS great, with equally well written characters, and if it wasn’t for the heavy flaws dragging it down, the game could have been amazing. But as it is it just kind of annoyed me how often Rockstar seemed to think “This story is so unbelievably amazing that the player won’t mind hundreds of hours of slow progress to hear it all!”
This disguised gameplay can go way too far sometimes. Like it's one thing to make you personally travel to each location while listening to dialogue instead of just achieving the exact same purpose in a full cutscene, but there's a couple of times when you're watching an actual cutscene then all of a sudden you get a prompt to push the analogue stick to move forward. I just don't get it, the game desperately tries to force interaction into it in order to hide the fact there's so much story to get through.
The game also suffers from a lot of Rockstar's typical problems. Clunky controls, glitchy interactions (have fun trying to reposition yourself a few inchs constantly to get a certain prompt to light up). A couple of times I tried to run up to my horse and jump on top of it, only to accidentally tackle a poor bystander to the ground because it's attached to the exact same button. Speaking of which, it is way too easy to lose honor in this game. Randomly bumping into someone, which will happen a lot due to the horrible controls, can cause them to get angry and attack you, but if you dare defend yourself you lose honor and get a bounty on you.
It takes realism too far and suffers from it. For example, when you get sick health restoring items just stop working. That might not be too bad if it was a balancing effect from another thing (like maybe an alcoholic drink that raises your stats), but getting sick is a story forced plot point.
Want to loot a bunch of dead victims after a huge shoot out? Be prepared for your mission allies to coooonstantly scream at you to hurry up.
The world is full of stuff to do at least. I think that sometimes it's a bit too much of a chore though. Early on I did a mission that involved getting perfect carcasses of certain animals. You'd think that the sections on the map that have those animals drawn on them would spawn a lot of them, but it could take me 30 minutes to find a rabbit in a rabbit-marked area. Trying to catch a legendary fish could take 10 minutes of constantly rotating the analogue stick. Treasure maps are so vague they're unreadable most of the time. It's weird because when you're in a mission the game gives you plenty of info and direction, but anything outside of a mission and you're on your own with little to no hints, like if a camp friend wants an item. You have no idea where it is, the game doesn't tell you where it is. I guess the point is that, if you're not looking it up online, you're supposed to just be happy exploring and finding what you find free roam, but after I did a lot of them early-game, I found I was wasting so much time that by chapter 3 of the game I was just travelling from mission to mission, the idea of wasting time exploring every nook and cranny in such a huge world, with stiff controls, was daunting.
It's definitely not a bad game. Not at all. It has the story, it has the music, it has the characters, it has the level of depth, it has the gun mechanics (although I wouldn't mind those being a bit better due to the sheer amount of endless shoot outs you're forced in to). It just lacks a bit of polish and smoothing down, and to realise when realism becomes a chore.