I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride.
On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other hand, it revives the sense of wonder that I haven't felt since I learned to treat games as something to win rather than something to get lost in.
Also, the controls are quite bad - it suffers from the "Rockstar Claw" just like all their other releases. Overall, I want to enjoy this game, and I love the characters and the immersiveness of the world they've crafted, but the game containing the world is hard to play.
I really prefer single player games with a nice story and an action that's not too hectic that I can enjoy at my own pace.
I find this shocking because it's incredibly in line with discussions and articles that claim that a large portion of younger men had been deprived by society from getting a sense of belonging and accomplishment and is now using video games as a bandaid for that.
Games with stories and narratives feel like chores and are restrictive.
i played red dead redemption for hundreds of hours, both in single player and in the online multiplayer, which was a blast. i haven't even finished red dead redemption 2, and have found myself very bored with the story and side missions. it's the same formula rockstar has used for years, and the AI is as superficial as ever. it can be a real slog riding around between missions. even though the guns look great, they and the aiming system is not as fun as red dead redemption.
There have been times where I’ve done all the work I need to do to get some unbroken alone time, spent 40 minutes playing and gotten absolute nothing accomplished which really sucks given that it might be the only time I could play that week.
I get that it’s atmospheric but as a dad game it just sucks.
I’d like to be able to load the game and play through a couple of missions quickly without all the faffing about brushing my horse and crafting and hunting and what not.
Basically my life is full of enough chores that I don’t need games that simulate doing more chores.
Whereas GTA4 was genuine satire (Republican space rangers anyone?) the sequel had poor characters and I honestly have never gone back to it since finishing the main storyline, the first time this was true in the series.
Anyway RDR2 Looks amazing. I bought an Xbox just to play it. Who knows how long it'll take to get to PC but I'll buy it again when it does.
GTA V’s PC port was also financially an enormous success, it cemented a place in Steams top seller list for years thanks to the success of GTA Online.
Couple this with the leaked RDR 2 PC developer job titles that have been discovered via oversharing Rockstar employees on LinkedIn, I think there is a good chance RDR2 follows the GTA V release model and a PC version hits 12-18 months after console release.
I bet a significant number of gamers ended up buying GTA V twice at full price thanks to the staggered release schedule last time (I and many friends certainly did), I’d not be surprised at all if this factors in their decisions.
Don't try and get on your horse if someone is standing near it because triangle is also "get into a fight with that person". You can back out of the fight, but not with the circle button (which is so often the "go back" button) - this time circle is the punch button!
Basically the core game loop is: move a bit, look in the bottom right to see if you can press some buttons to do a thing, do a thing or move a bit more.
I imagine the pacing, realism, and atmosphere is not for everyone, but if it is your cup of tea this is (so far) a masterpiece in single player gaming.
why?
Personally, I've never seen a game with this focus and this level of scope and quality.
The network was trained with https://nanonets.com, if anyone is interested. Interesting stuff, given the knowledge came from synthesized horses.
I did not train or segment any other entities other than Arthur and his horse. Labels were 'horse' and 'human'.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2e4mYbwSTbbiX2uwspn0...
There are two main criticisms to me.
(1) the dialogue is very cheesy and superficial too often when it would be better to just not have it at all. More segments of deep sparsity, even when other characters are around you (think Shadow of the Collossus) would make it even more desolate and impactful.
(2) The mechanics of the controls and indicated special instructions are sometimes clunky to the point that you fail missions or miss out on things accidentally just due to the control system. I know this will never be perfect, but it is frequently so bad in RDR2 that you are very aware of it and frustrated by it as you complete tasks.
Despite this, it’s easily one of the best games I’ve ever played on multiple dimensions.
It makes me very excited for Death Stranding as well, which I think will be something of a sci-fi / dystopian variation of what RDR2 is.
Because they generally have this permadeath mechanic, every step in the game is meaningful to not losing, and the game developers are also kind of forced to make every part of the game fun and not too tedious or superfluous, as you'll generally replay them many times.
I currently quite enjoy Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which you will need a free afternoon to get into, but after that, you can even have meaningful episodes of 5 minutes. You're not gonna complete a run in 5 minutes, that's rather gonna take 8 hours (though the world record is at less than 30 minutes), but you can load up the game, play a few hundred turns and then save and quit easily in that time.
The scale of technical achievement is by far more impressive than anything that came before. Metal Gear Solid 5 might be the closest thing in terms of open world technology, but RDR2 is far superior to it.
The anti-game aspects create a very different dramatic experience than most games. Sometimes you just ride along with another character and do nothing but observe what happens. Other times your plans get derailed in an Inception sort of way and you end up halfway acrosd the map doing something you never intended, none of which has anything to do with the story. This happens in ways that are much more organic and natural than previous similar mechanisms in e.g. GTA games.
The story deals with a lot of themes that have more impact because of coming across them in an open world (stumbling into KKK meetings, seeing lynched bodies hanging in swamplands, tracking down a gang that tortures animals, finding evidence of families split by slave trade, and many more).
The main story is compelling and well crafted, but the fuller picture from the pastiche of stuff in the world makes it feel effective, and the scenes of blood-thirsty wild west action feel more like uncommon punctuation marks than important aspects of the plot.
"This game allows you to pluck chickens / pay respects / become a porn star, that was never possible in a game before!!!", but it's really just that you can press a button to trigger an animation.
That's fun for a while, but seeing a bunch of games and programming a bit, it kinda becomes transparent and samey, and those little touches of realistic decoration are also reminders that they had time for that $animation, but not for this $mechanic. Some people see redheads and blondes and brunettes, I see committees.
Here's a crazy idea: Replace all models by their hitboxes and all textures single colors, remove all ambient sounds, remove all padding from dialogue and let NPC just name the variables they need to have met, and what variables that will set as a result, and so on. A game or a simulation would of course look and sound terrible, but it would still work, while a interactive movie kind of "experience" will be reduced to next to nothing.
Take chess for example, playing with beautiful weighty pieces is certainly more fun than with, say, pieces of paper with letters on them. But if you're good at chess and longing for a good game of chess, you would rather play against an opponent with a similar elo ranking as you with pieces of paper, than against a child or a random number generator with nice chess pieces.
We can rank sciences by "hardness" all day, but the thought of "hard gaming" seems oddly offensive, why? I also noted that no comments seem to reference the article, which is understandable since it's such a fluff piece. And none of the comments are pointing out any gameplay challenge, clever AI, nothing.
> After a few hours, you can almost feel the ego diminution, the sense of “merging with nature or the universe” that Michael Pollan describes in How to Change Your Mind. (And at $60 for a copy, Red Dead Redemption 2 is cheaper than psychedelic drugs.)
60$, then "a few hours" until that effect kicks in, and you become one with "nature and the universe" on the screen.
Just wow. I would feel insulted by that. That's such a low view of both the universe and the time of a person.
> The soundtrack helps, too. You hear sounds of nature, long ambient notes in the wilderness, or the Irish-influenced strain of an antique banjo from a nearby campfire. “We have 192 interactive mission scores, and we thought about the music constantly from the time we brought in [composer] Woody Jackson in 2015,” says Ivan Pavlovich, Rockstar’s music supervisor. “Sam was always asking early on, ‘What’s the feel [of the game]?’ ”
Oh yeah, telling people how to feel about things, what would a good game be without that, right?
> Rockstar’s goal is to “slip as much art under the hood without players noticing it — but they don’t have to notice it,” says Dan. If you want, you can bypass much of the story with just a tap of the controller. “It can just be mud, blood, and gore.”
Mud, blood and gore with cutscenes, or just mud, blood and gore... what about gameplay? All the immersion on the one hand, then slo-mo and auto-aim on the other, and plenty of chores to keep your stats up. A huge map, a million NPC with a few binary flags each, and hours of voice acting. What did I miss? All I heard on youtube is the same I read in this thread, "you can go fishing or hunting" ("move to location X and press button Y"), how it's so immersive and detailed, etc. etc., but nothing about solid gameplay.
As someone that almost never plays online except some occasional co-op with friends, I don't feel one bit neglected by the current state of the industry.
You had maps like wilderness survival and troll tribes, which, if you've played Don't Starve, feels largely derivative. Footmen Frenzy, Dark Deeds, Sheep Tag, Uther Party (Mario Party ripoff), LAOP, Parasite, Mars Survival, Risk knockoffs, etc. It didn't matter if you sucked at these games, because most people sucked at them; the playerbase for each custom game was pretty small. A good time for novelty - I'm hoping reforged brings back some of that magic from that scene. I played LOL after moving on from Blizzard games (Wow was never my thing), but it wasn't the same. Also, very toxic. Not a great game for casual players.
In part because I have more control over the hardware, but specially because games do not die when a newer console model is released.
I can still play many PC games from 10+ years ago, but I have a box of PS3 discs that I cannot use because the PS4 does not have backwards compatibility. Some of those games have been ported to the PS4, and I'd have to buy them again to play them on the PS4. What will happen with the PS5?
Yep. MGSV has better graphics and far better controls, but the open world in MGSV always felt dead, especially as you got away from enemy bases or outposts. RDR2 does a much better job of always giving you something to do out in the open world that isn't necessarily mission based. MGSV also basically has no friendly or neutral NPCs in the mission areas, which further contributes to breaking the immersion of being in an actual world.
You can also completely ignore these interactions, but you risk missing out on things that will be much harder to do if you wait and come back later, or which might not reappear as options, like helping a stranger or looting a specific enemy camp.
You make a very valid point that sounds entirely different than OP's "tree falling in the forest" argument.
I’d say my tree falling in forest remark goes along two axis of social + challenge against other human brain . Almost same dopamine hit of telling a joke and getting reaction from crowd, feels fun to tell jokes similar to goofing off in multiplayer games etc