Skip to the end for a tl;dr
I really, really wanted to like this game (and to a certain extent I did), but damn was I let down by so many things, far too many to justify all of those "10/10s" that the game was getting by journalists before coming out.
If you played the game you already know the positive aspects: the story, the acting, the soundtrack, the scenery and so on; all of those can't still sadly hide how horrendously sluggish, slow-paced and hard to manovreur the game can be most of the time.
They pushed a lot on the graphics like they kind of did on the first one, and on that aspect they also kept the wonky frame rate - good luck trying to manually aim when there's more than a couple of things happening on the screen, adding to consideration how morbidly slow they made the character move!
"Realism" in this game was something that a lot of people liked - I personally didn't; everytime you move your character has to do a start animation and a stop animation, slowly, making the controls feel delayed and unresponsive (both walking and on horse), and everything becomes a chore: looting means weird camera angles and little twitches on your analog stick to properly focus items, quick menus are overbloated and not quick at all, walking in your own damn camp is the only thing you can do and no running allowed meaning that trying to talk with NPCs also means feeling like you're walking through quicksands.. oh, and let's not forget about cooking!
You can make items that greatly recover your hp, dead eye and stamina by cooking meat mostly, and guess what? You need to do them one by one, having around 7/10 seconds between each piece of meat cooked (that you have to click and confirm everytime, meaning you can't even go afk, let's say) so you can imagine how fun that is when you have 20 pieces of meat to cook that you can't cook in bulk.
It's terrible, slow and it doesn't make any sense - it's why you don't push so much realism on RPG elements, it's why you don't put things that people are trying to forget when playing video games - boring real life chores.
Gosh, even the quick travel requires you to
- be in a city (which means you'll have to ride there if you're not at your base camp)
- find the quick travel NPC on the map
- talk with the coachman
- "wHeRe Do YoU wAnNa gO SiR!"
- cutscene showing you that the wagon is moving
- loading the chunk of map where you'll get teleported
- cutscene showing you that you have arrived, dismounting the wagon
- the end. that's a quick damn travel.
tl;dr: the game has an absurd amount of quality when it comes to certain sides of the production such as cinematics, the acting and the "alive" open world, but fails to be a smooth experience and you'll constantly feel like you're dragging your feet to reach the most basic goals, featuring long boring activities and limited quick travel options. In total, a 50/60 hours adventure that could probably be cut to 30/40h if you were to remove all the (made on purpose by rockstar, mind you) sluggy features.
I really, really wanted to like this game (and to a certain extent I did), but damn was I let down by so many things, far too many to justify all of those "10/10s" that the game was getting by journalists before coming out.
If you played the game you already know the positive aspects: the story, the acting, the soundtrack, the scenery and so on; all of those can't still sadly hide how horrendously sluggish, slow-paced and hard to manovreur the game can be most of the time.
They pushed a lot on the graphics like they kind of did on the first one, and on that aspect they also kept the wonky frame rate - good luck trying to manually aim when there's more than a couple of things happening on the screen, adding to consideration how morbidly slow they made the character move!
"Realism" in this game was something that a lot of people liked - I personally didn't; everytime you move your character has to do a start animation and a stop animation, slowly, making the controls feel delayed and unresponsive (both walking and on horse), and everything becomes a chore: looting means weird camera angles and little twitches on your analog stick to properly focus items, quick menus are overbloated and not quick at all, walking in your own damn camp is the only thing you can do and no running allowed meaning that trying to talk with NPCs also means feeling like you're walking through quicksands.. oh, and let's not forget about cooking!
You can make items that greatly recover your hp, dead eye and stamina by cooking meat mostly, and guess what? You need to do them one by one, having around 7/10 seconds between each piece of meat cooked (that you have to click and confirm everytime, meaning you can't even go afk, let's say) so you can imagine how fun that is when you have 20 pieces of meat to cook that you can't cook in bulk.
It's terrible, slow and it doesn't make any sense - it's why you don't push so much realism on RPG elements, it's why you don't put things that people are trying to forget when playing video games - boring real life chores.
Gosh, even the quick travel requires you to
- be in a city (which means you'll have to ride there if you're not at your base camp)
- find the quick travel NPC on the map
- talk with the coachman
- "wHeRe Do YoU wAnNa gO SiR!"
- cutscene showing you that the wagon is moving
- loading the chunk of map where you'll get teleported
- cutscene showing you that you have arrived, dismounting the wagon
- the end. that's a quick damn travel.
tl;dr: the game has an absurd amount of quality when it comes to certain sides of the production such as cinematics, the acting and the "alive" open world, but fails to be a smooth experience and you'll constantly feel like you're dragging your feet to reach the most basic goals, featuring long boring activities and limited quick travel options. In total, a 50/60 hours adventure that could probably be cut to 30/40h if you were to remove all the (made on purpose by rockstar, mind you) sluggy features.