All in all, I enjoyed my time in RDR2, but going back I wouldn't buy it and play it again. It's nice looking world to explore and immerse yourself, squandered by the worst of Rstar game design.
Playing on PC, each time I booted up the game on pc I had to log into the Rstar social club because reasons. But whatever, that's barely mildly annoying. Then the game reverted my graphic settings at every launch, so I had to re-edit back everything, every time. But okay, I could live with that.
Now, let’s list how RDR2 allows you to partake in its “open world”:
1. I tried to turn off radar and directions for a more immersive experience in this beautiful game, and got a game over twice in the first mission because it's not enough to just move towards your destination, you have to guess and follow the ONE specific route you're supposed to take.
2. My first duel went with a tutorial on the bottom centre, a prompt on the bottom right and another tutorial on the top left, all at the same time. I got killed five times trying to process all the info. This one is on me I guess, but that's really a counterintuitive way to explain stuff.
3. There were two separate missions where I tried to sneak close to a target and capture them without problems, but I couldn't do that because I had to follow the prompts and learn the tutorials for catching them while they were running away, which basically means riding a horse, the first thing the game teaches you.
4. In fact, in multiple instances I tried to solve a boring mission using a bullet or, again, sneaking, but every time I tried the game then just went "X cannot be done now, come back later", so I can't even choose to fail.
5. Hunting is dogshit. Chasing around critters following smoke trails with my witcher sense is something I can get by in small amounts, but the legendary hunts, the ones that should feel more like a test of your hunting skill, all boil down to go to one specific point in the map, following the same three tracks each time and unloading three rifle cartridges into an animal brain. If anything, the legendary hunts should be the harder to track and easier to kill, not viceversa, what the fuck is wrong with you, Rstar?
6. Once I got my horse stuck into the woods and kept whistling for a good minute because I refused to accept this nonsense was possible. While whistling a lawman saw me and, for some reason, I was now wanted. Very immersive indeed.
7. Speaking of immersion, in Rstar endless bullshit quest for achieving realism, there are perfectly climbable slopes in the world that, despite being visibly walkable if you were a human being, just makes you slip no matter how you approach them, slow, fast, jumping, crouching, you cannot traverse otherwise realistically traversable paths.
Bullshit realism aside let's talk about the mission structure. It's terrible.
The storyline wouldn't work if Arthur wasn't the world's greatest doormat and if the gameplay allowed for choices (not choices about the narrative but regarding what tools to utilize for each situation), but that's apparently Rstar whole template. The best mission I've played up to chapter 3 was the one where Arthur had to get drunk with Lenny, not because it was necessarily a good mission, although it was funny, but because it stuck out into the endless bog of sameness that prevents any mission from being unique. One mission starts with Molly trying to open up about her personal life, and immediately she's cut off for a robbery with horse chases and shootouts, she’s not heard from for another 15 hours. That's the entirity of RDR2, which would be fine if the game was more upfront about it. Instead, there are missions with a legitimate interesting premise (a jail break, a fishing trip with friends, sheep hustling, train robberies, stealth infiltrations) but screw it, at some point it turns, unavoidably, in horse chases and shootouts, with dozens of bodies piling up, bloody hell. The open world does not matter, at all, just like in every GTA since 3 you can either play what is essentially House of Dead during each mission or go screw yourself elsewhere until you stop finding new activities to try.
And, oh boy, aren’t these secondary objectives fun? Once, a man literally asked me to pick up pig manure and the only way I could play that mission was by doing that, the main character plainly stating "all right, but I ain't gonna like it", EVEN THE BLOODY PROTAGONIST WISHES THERE WERE OPTIONS IN THE GAME. I get punished for trying a different approach in a sandbox game (some sites like backloggd even say RPG lol), and the punishment is doing the task deemed, by the narrative itself, too stupid to do. Meanwhile Micah can decide to shoot up a whole town for no good reason and I can’t just laugh it off and run in the opposite direction, I must partake in the massacre because it’s not really a redemption if I’m not the biggest of the assholes around here, right?
Actually, at one point I did find the roleplaying feature: during a stealth mission the gang was, bloody of course, discovered and chase and shootout ensued. I was so done by that point that I just let the mission fail and discovered that, if you fail enough times, the game offers you to skip the checkpoint and proceed to the next part of the game. Which I did and, from a narrative perspective, it seemed like I had successfully completed the mission and left without problems.
So, Rstar actually did put the option to choose your own adventure, by letting you choose to skip it.
This is such a weird, bizarre, welcomed and utterly awful feature. If the devs were so uninterested in having the player play the game like they planned, then why not give them the possibility to choose how to approach a mission? The rails of each mission are fixed but, if I don't like them, I can just move on anyway instead of having an actual choice in the gameplay. And the only explanation I can find is that they were so confident in the narrative and so aware of the gameplay shortcomings that this seemed like the better choice? What the hell.
At that point I was actively avoiding story missions for as long as I could, I just travelled around trying to engage with npcs on the road and in the cities, walking around the camp looking for odd jobs, doing menial tasks, trying to balance hunting and wildlife preservation, finding random fun events that weren’t just copy-and-pasted for the gazillionth time. Apparently pointless stuff but, again, I was just trying to have fun by immersing myself into this world, anything but having to do only those obnoxious horse chases and shootouts.
I won’t get too deep into the story, only a couple of things on theming and presentation: pacing issue aside, I like the decadent western setting where there are no heroes, only criminals masquerading their atrocities as a search for freedom and a government that vexes its people with corruption, idiocy and militarism. Both are a most accurate representation of the United States, indeed.
Problem is, the way the story is told is so padded, the important bits relegated to sparse cutscenes or long debates on horse-back riding, which are funny but so overlong yet so overconfident in their delivery.
And all in all, it's just doesn't never hit emotional high, because the stakes are always so undercut by (supposedly) adrenaline pumping action. In the camp (the hub being actually one of the best features in the game) Arthur complains about feeling angry all the time and, by extent, killing a lot of people needlessly, when my playthrough instead was with no civilian death, so is he talking about the dozens of cannon fodder I had to slay with no saying in the matter? Bloody hell, at least Deus Ex or Mass Effect let me get to the ending before telling me, in the face, that every choice I made was equally useless, RDR2 doesn't even wait for the middle act. By that point the game has forced you to kill so many people that you’ve gone numb to it as one of many menial tasks you need to do to progress into the game, but now apparently it matters, even though the game sure as hell won’t stop having you mow down hundreds of mobs from that point onward.
All of this to say, no new ground in the western canon is being explored here (this genre has been used to tell how terrible white America is since, afaik, the 1950s, and it only progressively became more explicit with titles like High Noon, The Searchers, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, Heaven's Gate, Unforgiven, Once upon a time in the West, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, etc etc you get the idea) and everything that the game's story actually explores would be good if it wasn’t unceasingly undercut by the worst ludonarrative dissonance.
Playing on PC, each time I booted up the game on pc I had to log into the Rstar social club because reasons. But whatever, that's barely mildly annoying. Then the game reverted my graphic settings at every launch, so I had to re-edit back everything, every time. But okay, I could live with that.
Now, let’s list how RDR2 allows you to partake in its “open world”:
1. I tried to turn off radar and directions for a more immersive experience in this beautiful game, and got a game over twice in the first mission because it's not enough to just move towards your destination, you have to guess and follow the ONE specific route you're supposed to take.
2. My first duel went with a tutorial on the bottom centre, a prompt on the bottom right and another tutorial on the top left, all at the same time. I got killed five times trying to process all the info. This one is on me I guess, but that's really a counterintuitive way to explain stuff.
3. There were two separate missions where I tried to sneak close to a target and capture them without problems, but I couldn't do that because I had to follow the prompts and learn the tutorials for catching them while they were running away, which basically means riding a horse, the first thing the game teaches you.
4. In fact, in multiple instances I tried to solve a boring mission using a bullet or, again, sneaking, but every time I tried the game then just went "X cannot be done now, come back later", so I can't even choose to fail.
5. Hunting is dogshit. Chasing around critters following smoke trails with my witcher sense is something I can get by in small amounts, but the legendary hunts, the ones that should feel more like a test of your hunting skill, all boil down to go to one specific point in the map, following the same three tracks each time and unloading three rifle cartridges into an animal brain. If anything, the legendary hunts should be the harder to track and easier to kill, not viceversa, what the fuck is wrong with you, Rstar?
6. Once I got my horse stuck into the woods and kept whistling for a good minute because I refused to accept this nonsense was possible. While whistling a lawman saw me and, for some reason, I was now wanted. Very immersive indeed.
7. Speaking of immersion, in Rstar endless bullshit quest for achieving realism, there are perfectly climbable slopes in the world that, despite being visibly walkable if you were a human being, just makes you slip no matter how you approach them, slow, fast, jumping, crouching, you cannot traverse otherwise realistically traversable paths.
Bullshit realism aside let's talk about the mission structure. It's terrible.
The storyline wouldn't work if Arthur wasn't the world's greatest doormat and if the gameplay allowed for choices (not choices about the narrative but regarding what tools to utilize for each situation), but that's apparently Rstar whole template. The best mission I've played up to chapter 3 was the one where Arthur had to get drunk with Lenny, not because it was necessarily a good mission, although it was funny, but because it stuck out into the endless bog of sameness that prevents any mission from being unique. One mission starts with Molly trying to open up about her personal life, and immediately she's cut off for a robbery with horse chases and shootouts, she’s not heard from for another 15 hours. That's the entirity of RDR2, which would be fine if the game was more upfront about it. Instead, there are missions with a legitimate interesting premise (a jail break, a fishing trip with friends, sheep hustling, train robberies, stealth infiltrations) but screw it, at some point it turns, unavoidably, in horse chases and shootouts, with dozens of bodies piling up, bloody hell. The open world does not matter, at all, just like in every GTA since 3 you can either play what is essentially House of Dead during each mission or go screw yourself elsewhere until you stop finding new activities to try.
And, oh boy, aren’t these secondary objectives fun? Once, a man literally asked me to pick up pig manure and the only way I could play that mission was by doing that, the main character plainly stating "all right, but I ain't gonna like it", EVEN THE BLOODY PROTAGONIST WISHES THERE WERE OPTIONS IN THE GAME. I get punished for trying a different approach in a sandbox game (some sites like backloggd even say RPG lol), and the punishment is doing the task deemed, by the narrative itself, too stupid to do. Meanwhile Micah can decide to shoot up a whole town for no good reason and I can’t just laugh it off and run in the opposite direction, I must partake in the massacre because it’s not really a redemption if I’m not the biggest of the assholes around here, right?
Actually, at one point I did find the roleplaying feature: during a stealth mission the gang was, bloody of course, discovered and chase and shootout ensued. I was so done by that point that I just let the mission fail and discovered that, if you fail enough times, the game offers you to skip the checkpoint and proceed to the next part of the game. Which I did and, from a narrative perspective, it seemed like I had successfully completed the mission and left without problems.
So, Rstar actually did put the option to choose your own adventure, by letting you choose to skip it.
This is such a weird, bizarre, welcomed and utterly awful feature. If the devs were so uninterested in having the player play the game like they planned, then why not give them the possibility to choose how to approach a mission? The rails of each mission are fixed but, if I don't like them, I can just move on anyway instead of having an actual choice in the gameplay. And the only explanation I can find is that they were so confident in the narrative and so aware of the gameplay shortcomings that this seemed like the better choice? What the hell.
At that point I was actively avoiding story missions for as long as I could, I just travelled around trying to engage with npcs on the road and in the cities, walking around the camp looking for odd jobs, doing menial tasks, trying to balance hunting and wildlife preservation, finding random fun events that weren’t just copy-and-pasted for the gazillionth time. Apparently pointless stuff but, again, I was just trying to have fun by immersing myself into this world, anything but having to do only those obnoxious horse chases and shootouts.
I won’t get too deep into the story, only a couple of things on theming and presentation: pacing issue aside, I like the decadent western setting where there are no heroes, only criminals masquerading their atrocities as a search for freedom and a government that vexes its people with corruption, idiocy and militarism. Both are a most accurate representation of the United States, indeed.
Problem is, the way the story is told is so padded, the important bits relegated to sparse cutscenes or long debates on horse-back riding, which are funny but so overlong yet so overconfident in their delivery.
And all in all, it's just doesn't never hit emotional high, because the stakes are always so undercut by (supposedly) adrenaline pumping action. In the camp (the hub being actually one of the best features in the game) Arthur complains about feeling angry all the time and, by extent, killing a lot of people needlessly, when my playthrough instead was with no civilian death, so is he talking about the dozens of cannon fodder I had to slay with no saying in the matter? Bloody hell, at least Deus Ex or Mass Effect let me get to the ending before telling me, in the face, that every choice I made was equally useless, RDR2 doesn't even wait for the middle act. By that point the game has forced you to kill so many people that you’ve gone numb to it as one of many menial tasks you need to do to progress into the game, but now apparently it matters, even though the game sure as hell won’t stop having you mow down hundreds of mobs from that point onward.
All of this to say, no new ground in the western canon is being explored here (this genre has been used to tell how terrible white America is since, afaik, the 1950s, and it only progressively became more explicit with titles like High Noon, The Searchers, The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy, Heaven's Gate, Unforgiven, Once upon a time in the West, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, etc etc you get the idea) and everything that the game's story actually explores would be good if it wasn’t unceasingly undercut by the worst ludonarrative dissonance.
KIngGlokles
11 months ago