One of the worst games ever made. (RDR2 Analysis)

[Tighty-Whitey]

This post is split into two parts due to the length of the initial post. Here we will be analyzing the game with an aim to educate unexperienced with RDR2 people, potential players who are willing to buy the game and raise caution.

Part 1

I’ve played this game for 200 hours after its release on Rockstar Games Launcher and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is well certainly one of the worst games ever made and I’ll delve deeper into the subject to explain core reasons. On this hub we were discussing many problems that this game has and while I’ve presented most obvious flaws that are detrimental to the game as it lacks game design vital to a game that you would consider fun or interesting, there are still people confusing this interactive movie and a videogame that defines what it means to be a game.

Let’s start off by saying that we can easily classify this game as an interactive movie, because that’s what it’s trying to be. The game in its missions has narrow objectives where you cannot avoid the main intended by the developers path. It is clearly an intentional decision that shows that the game puts story first, graphics second and gameplay last. In order to tell the «convincing» (for sensitive individuals) story, the game uses visuals and motion capture animations (many people still can’t figure out that those are not manual animations, this is just the expensive equipment) the game tries to tell the edgy «Wild West» story, from the way the camera is used, the angles set, color and lighting blending into a cinematic movie-like experience where the characters’ mood and phrases directly replicate that «Wild West» edge, such as typical Dutch phrases and monologues, as well as his tone. It’s edgy not in a youthful, typical sense, but rather the edge you expect from an old wild west action movie. The story, (we will be avoiding spoilers) however, has a lot of exposition which creates an illusion that the story has a lot more to it rather than simple «everyday» or criminal life situations, as it contains a lot of dialogue within the camp. In reality, the story is quite simple, it only intentionally creates more and more exposition which results into redundant story, especially near the end of the game. It contains a lot of fillers resulted out of narrative hitting every rock in order to lengthen the story, (to justify high development costs for the game) such as Guarma inclusion which is supposed to show Dutch and the gang life getting out of control, focus and showing the unplanning, self-confident nature of Dutch which is apparent very quickly outside of Guarma section of the game where the plan only consists out of potential end destination and lacks everything else, as he gathers and keeps the gang around due to charisma and false hope in the good outcome. Regardless, time wears cowboys out and may turn skilled gunmen into maniacs. The story entirely focuses on «failure» as its primary aspect in order to set up events for RDR1.

However, when the game wants «a new linear location» outside of the open world (akin to Liberty City in GTA:SA and North Yankton in GTA 5) it hits every rock in order to get it there just to make the game longer with the hopes of diluting events. The story is entirely built on redundant filler events generating multiple uninteresting antagonists as well as a typical high-school bully Micah who lacks motivation to do things he does. (same goes for a bunch, but not all of GTA antagonists) The story has a lot of characters outside of the gang (even inside with forgettable female characters) that are uninteresting to follow. The «fans» of RDR2, many of them are guaranteed to not even remember all the female characters within the gang which tells us a lot about how uninteresting characters are and tells us a lot about the pretentiousness of a certain portion of the community when it comes to this aspect.

Within many story sections, especially in Chapter 5, player nearly completely loses the control over the character. The story quickly turns annoying, it’s meaningless and does not generate or prompt the viewer with anything important to the story. Those are the events that are happening for the sake of happening and they constantly take the control away from the player. If the game tries to kill off characters, it does it yet again by hitting every rock to get it to RDR1’s story. Some deaths can be sudden and imagined «out of thin air» just to get rid of them some way. The writers were sitting and thinking «how do we get rid of every single character» to get the story to the events of the first game and it becomes apparent. The story has a lot of content in terms of dialogues and situations, but nearly all of them are about nothing and tell us almost nothing. They would have been entertaining, had the writers understood the comedy apart from toilet jokes in GTA 5. However, the gang cutscenes in the camp is where the majority of the development time regarding story went. Anything outside of it has nowhere near the same amount of depth, character interactions and dialogues. O’Driscoll gang everywhere has a bunch of «dummy» NPCs that are uninteresting and bland as a rock contrary to the Dutch’s gang. Nothing gets character development outside of the gang characters, only they have personalities, but everything else is either typical absurd derived from GTA or are extremely simple in nature. In reality, the story is simply a restructured narrative from GTA:SA with renamed, redesigned characters and mildly reshaped events to be more dramatic in line with the typical «Wild West».

The story is clearly targeted at the majority (which is evident) and the majority obviously rarely cares about actual good, informative stories, because they won’t pay attention to anything of the kind either way, as such stories are not targeted for the majority. RDR2’s story is simple, with a simple protagonist that generates sympathy from certain players only because the player is seeing events from his point of view. If you were to show the life and the events of an unlikable character to generate reasons for why he does the things he does, it may fool the player to think that the character is a good guy. This is one of those cases and players clearly were not able to understand such a simple storytelling technique. It is a simple, narrow cowboy who does unlikable things and gets obvious repercussions the player sees coming but is not able to make him avoid due to a near total lack of player agency. Because the game does not care about the gameplay, it only cares about imposing the story that drags on the player.

Player is not able to carve their own way to play missions, as they fail if they avoid the main path. This is the issue derived from GTA 4 and 5, but it got even more restrictive. The gameplay in games of Rockstar devolved in favor of movie-like experience which is detrimental to player creativity, but since players are usually not creative and do not experiment or do things the way they want, they prefer watching an uninteresting story, this does not seem to be a problem for many players, so they encourage more boring games. It is evident that players who praise RDR2 are either simply not good at videogames or want no gameplay apart from simple relaxation. The game is designed for using gamepad on a couch, performing relaxing, repetitive actions. Every mission is one long cutscene that eventually devolves into a «thing failing or going wrong» (the «failure» concept is the story premise as described earlier) and killing many «bad guys». In some cases it’s extremely unrealistic and main character, as well as his companion may stand in the open in front of many enemies standing above them and yet the main characters still easily survive and kill everyone. Replayability is entirely harmed as a result also.

If we were to skip the cutscenes in RDR2 we’ll see how much gameplay we actually have and that’s not much. Some missions introduce almost no gameplay, many of them are riding a horse, watching many cutscenes and pressing a few buttons in ways that have already been done before by games. (such as first introduction to Colm) The game does not introduce actual gameplay in those missions, gameplay is not this game’s focus. If we were to skip cutscenes in, say, GTA: San Andreas, it wouldn’t hurt the gameplay, as missions there are actually entertaining and don’t resolve around creating a bunch of motion capped animations to tell the movie story without complementing the gameplay. This is why the game is bad, as the story is not the game that you play when you have no direct involvement and agency to it.

If gameplay requires player to avoid the markers and play outside of the story because the missions do not entertain the player with gameplay, then the story is detrimental to gameplay and it always is when it’s «story first, gameplay second». It directly tells you that it prioritizes story, the gameplay is literally bad by design. It doesn’t change what the game is and doesn’t matter if you like the story or you think you like the «game», it won’t change the game aspect of this game being literally bad. The reception to the game is a result of players’ bias due to love to certain characters, not because they loved its sluggish gameplay. Talking about sluggish gameplay, it is designed with an input lag, as there is a fairly long delay between character’s actions. Not only are the actions slow and player is encouraged to see them every time, but it takes time to set them in motion. This results into tedious gameplay. If the story is the reason why you play videogames, why not watch a movie instead? And that’s exactly what RDR2 is, an interactive movie. In terms of choices that the player can make, if they were to kill a certain NPC in the open world, then such an NPC will respawn which ruins immersion. Rockstar does not understand immersion apart from the basic graphical and musical ambience stereotypes.

Even outside of the story, the gameplay is nearly non-existent. If you were to try and commit in-game crimes, there will be hordes of bounty hunters spreading across the map because the game forces the player to play a certain way even in the open-world which is a heavy contradiction to the whole idea. It continuously spams bounties which prevents the player agency even in the open world, as the mechanic is too punishing and witnesses appear inconsistently and can "spot" the player unfairly and artificially. Developers failed to blur the lines between the main story and side missions. (It was the goal to blur the lines, as stated by Rob Nelson) It resolves around finding more cutscenes in side missions or generic «help» random encounters where the player is supposed to help a certain NPC. It is forced and happens quite a lot, they even repeat time and time again. If you help that NPC, then they will spawn in a nearby town and offer you a «free item» in the shop. They do it many times, which is unrealistic and expecting the same outcome every time is repetitive and unrealistic, also extremely lazy on devs' part. The game technically has almost no opportunities apart from typical minigames we’ve seen since GTA 4. It has a more advanced hunting than in GTA 5, also fishing, but hunting involves the player «skinning» an animal, murdering hundreds of in-game animals and leaving them, as they are left rotting in the grass. Hunting in this game is for «completionists» who would run around the open world in games like AC: Odyssey and clear hundreds of outposts while performing same fetch quests. This is who this gameplay mechanic is made for. Any opportunities (barely any) the game offers are all boring and it’s more interesting to rather do nothing or living a real life than playing this game. It’s simply not fun and not intended to be. This whole RDR2’s «good gameplay» fallacy is spread by players who didn’t know any better and bought into this game’s graphics because apart from graphics and a bunch of animals, as well as simple, repetitive random events, the game barely has anything. In terms of exploration, there are a few landmarks that can be interesting, but only few and far between. For the money spent on developing GTA games and RDR2, the world is nowhere near as alive as it should be.

Some people think that the world is «alive» because animals eat animals and birds grab fish from the water. Only what those people don’t realize is that those are simple mini-cutscenes, scripts with «OnLook» trigger that trigger when the player is looking a certain direction. Those things don’t casually happen, if you were to spawn animals arbitrary, then they will perform Skyrim on one another. Those situations are not real animal A.I, just triggers. Devs didn’t even bother and gave Marston the same body as Arthur, just with a different face because they didn’t care that much. Their «care» gets too much credit, in reality the game is made very carelessly, even though it somewhat functions, just had a lot of money thrown at it. If the player does not care about the story, then the player should be able to carve the story his own way by making choices and finishing missions the way they see fit, but since the game is a linear interactive movie, there is no such possibility. This is largely why the game is boring. Open world is boring, lacks dynamic quite a lot and because of how sluggish the gameplay is, it’s a chore to play.

[Tighty-Whitey]

Part 2

This game, structurally is barely different to how GTA 5 approaches random events and content. Random events have the same structure, there are just more interaction options because the game is newer and designed for newer consoles. Underneath it’s just a GTA with horses with constant gunfights in missions, betrayals in the story and typical nonsense of that kind. It’s just another GTA story adapted to look more like a western and the open world made to be slower for a reason due to the game’s setting. It's not a game for «adults», it’s just a different take on GTA and it shows. There is no real split between «GTA» community and «RDR» community for a reason, apart from the one imagined and concocted by diehard RDR fanboys. It’s just another overly expensive game for the mass consumer.

See, I have an individual opinion about the game. I’ve looked into the game and found exact reasons why the game is not interesting to many people. That’s why it is important to look at what the game has to offer, understand it and think for yourself. Again, liking the game (even if it’s the majority of players) or pretending to like the game to be safe and artificially align your own opinion to the one of majority (which is what a significant portion of the community is doing, as well as some livestremers and YouTubers who originally didn't like the game, but were pressured into artificially "liking" it to save reputation) does not make someone «correct». By having an opinion on the game, even if it’s a successful one, if it’s a positive one it doesn’t mean it’s correct, it means you might have liked the game for a specific reason, but it does not make such an opinion a definite answer to everything, it would simply be an opinion. The only answer and the conclusion may become obvious when everything is analyzed to the brim, detailed and non-biased and that’s what we’ve done here.

The reception to this game is related to players «growing to like» certain characters, they have been overshadowed by dramatic events within the story which made players confuse the game and the reasons why the game is popular. Because it’s a game targeted at a mass consumer, a game designed to be a cinematic, movie experience, it is made for the majority and this is the result of the opinion of the majority, this is a result of its popularity, but it’s not gameplay that holds this game. It does not in any way make it a fact that this is a «great» game or anywhere close to being one of the «greatest» games. A game having a poor, sluggish, slow gameplay with input lag, barely any ground for player’s creativity cannot by definition be the greatest game or anything close, this is a fallacy spread by players who confused the story for the actual game. If the player does not care about the soap opera and a «Wild West» theater that it is, then the gameplay falls apart because there is no proper gameplay. You don’t build the «greatest game of all time» out of cutscenes, you build the «parody» of such game which misleads people to the root causes of the game’s success. It’s one of the best interactive movies out there, but one of the poorest games of all time and that is for a good reason, because players who prefer RDR2, even games like «Uncharted», «The Last of Us», don’t value gameplay, as those games put story at its forefront. An analogy, you can make a toilet paper that can be soft, pleasant and the majority will buy it and keep buying it, leaving the majority of the positive reviews because it’s soft and pleasant. Does it make it the best, does it do its job as a toilet paper better than others you can buy, the ones with less sales, lower score? Not necessarily. You can also have the interactive movie with characters and story that tries to artificially pull emotions out of the player and mislead them into thinking that this game is «super great» and the majority will like it and consider it the best game ever. Does it make it such? No, it does not change that the game is just an interactive movie and has described problems.

This is why it’s important to not confuse the reception of RDR2, it having the positive reception for other factors, the game being made for appeal to draw a certain demographic of console players in and the «greatest game of all time» which it is not, because statement that it is, for a reason is flawed. RDR2 will keep getting more and more sales, it will keep getting positive ratings for other factors apart from gameplay because as soon as the gameplay of this game is mentioned and praised, it becomes a pure fallacy. Animations, graphics and the way the game looks is not gameplay, story is not gameplay. When the gameplay results into the story like in other games, that’s when the game has the ground for its gameplay to be positively mentioned. The game will keep getting sold for «preferable aspects» within the story, elements that aim for mass appeal and reach it. What is made for the mass appeal with an enormously high budget may achieve mass appeal because it’s the task of the game, even if it’s poor, buggy and uninspired with dead open world like «Cyberpunk 2077». To people it doesn’t matter if the game is bad, they just want an expensive, high PR game to play it for the «story», hence the positive ratings to RDR2. People don’t want gameplay, they only want repetition and the story which makes players confuse the actual game with the story. For example:

«I liked the story of this game. This is one of the greatest games ever made for that reason, I just enjoyed the story, the way the characters are, the realistic high budget motion captured by performers animations, the world… The beautiful lighting. Oh and gameplay, of course, you can do hunting, ride a horse and play poker. And many more things like hunting, fishing for example.»

Oh wait… The majority of RDR2’s reviews are like that. What about the game itself? Do you «play» the game, is it fun? If the answer is yes, then I recommend to try new games at your newly established gaming hobby. Perhaps you can also try watching more games. But me, personally, because I know how to play games and do not confuse games with interactive movies, I’d prefer playing Valve’s «Ricochet». That game has even more involvement, engagement and gameplay depth you can get out of the game than RDR2, which is why I prefer it more. I prefer it not because of my personal preference purely, it matters what I prefer and I prefer actual games and won’t create reasons to give a positive rating to RDR2, an interactive movie with game elements out of thin air. (There are games with interactive movie elements, but RDR2 is an interactive movie with game elements. Just like MOBAs with shooter elements and vice versa.)

That’s why it’s not as simple as having an opinion, it’s as simple as to not lie to yourself and break down what you specifically like about a certain game and if it’s not the «game» aspect (RDR2 has nearly none) then the praise, the overwhelming majority would be wrong about where they are looking. Bringing up confused about the game opinion overwhelming majority is not the answer to the opinion of the minority. Opinion of the majority will stay an opinion and it does not make one «correct» about liking a certain game because they like the «game» for specific reasons and the game is sold for specific reasons that are not gameplay. If you are expecting gameplay out of RDR2, then this is not the game you should be after, as this is simply a story based game for impressionable individuals. It is a theater about screaming sounds into the empty air and the game aspect of it is a horse riding simulator. I’ll play other games instead because I enjoy games and so should a gamer, not a mere viewer.

[eoozy]

Aint no one reading allat, you got 5 threads about this already, you can share all these "points" there but we all know why you wont.

[Cksalzy]

Originally posted by Tighty-Whitey:

This post is split into two parts due to the length of the initial post. Here we will be analyzing the game with an aim to educate unexperienced with RDR2 people, potential players who are willing to buy the game and raise caution.

Part 1

I’ve played this game for 200 hours after its release on Rockstar Games Launcher and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is well certainly one of the worst games ever made and I’ll delve deeper into the subject to explain core reasons. On this hub we were discussing many problems that this game has and while I’ve presented most obvious flaws that are detrimental to the game as it lacks game design vital to a game that you would consider fun or interesting, there are still people confusing this interactive movie and a videogame that defines what it means to be a game.

Let’s start off by saying that we can easily classify this game as an interactive movie, because that’s what it’s trying to be. The game in its missions has narrow objectives where you cannot avoid the main intended by the developers path. It is clearly an intentional decision that shows that the game puts story first, graphics second and gameplay last. In order to tell the «convincing» (for sensitive individuals) story, the game uses visuals and motion capture animations (many people still can’t figure out that those are not manual animations, this is just the expensive equipment) the game tries to tell the edgy «Wild West» story, from the way the camera is used, the angles set, color and lighting blending into a cinematic movie-like experience where the characters’ mood and phrases directly replicate that «Wild West» edge, such as typical Dutch phrases and monologues, as well as his tone. It’s edgy not in a youthful, typical sense, but rather the edge you expect from an old wild west action movie. The story, (we will be avoiding spoilers) however, has a lot of exposition which creates an illusion that the story has a lot more to it rather than simple «everyday» or criminal life situations, as it contains a lot of dialogue within the camp. In reality, the story is quite simple, it only intentionally creates more and more exposition which results into redundant story, especially near the end of the game. It contains a lot of fillers resulted out of narrative hitting every rock in order to lengthen the story, (to justify high development costs for the game) such as Guarma inclusion which is supposed to show Dutch and the gang life getting out of control, focus and showing the unplanning, self-confident nature of Dutch which is apparent very quickly outside of Guarma section of the game where the plan only consists out of potential end destination and lacks everything else, as he gathers and keeps the gang around due to charisma and false hope in the good outcome. Regardless, time wears cowboys out and may turn skilled gunmen into maniacs. The story entirely focuses on «failure» as its primary aspect in order to set up events for RDR1.

However, when the game wants «a new linear location» outside of the open world (akin to Liberty City in GTA:SA and North Yankton in GTA 5) it hits every rock in order to get it there just to make the game longer with the hopes of diluting events. The story is entirely built on redundant filler events generating multiple uninteresting antagonists as well as a typical high-school bully Micah who lacks motivation to do things he does. (same goes for a bunch, but not all of GTA antagonists) The story has a lot of characters outside of the gang (even inside with forgettable female characters) that are uninteresting to follow. The «fans» of RDR2, many of them are guaranteed to not even remember all the female characters within the gang which tells us a lot about how uninteresting characters are and tells us a lot about the pretentiousness of a certain portion of the community when it comes to this aspect.

Within many story sections, especially in Chapter 5, player nearly completely loses the control over the character. The story quickly turns annoying, it’s meaningless and does not generate or prompt the viewer with anything important to the story. Those are the events that are happening for the sake of happening and they constantly take the control away from the player. If the game tries to kill off characters, it does it yet again by hitting every rock to get it to RDR1’s story. Some deaths can be sudden and imagined «out of thin air» just to get rid of them some way. The writers were sitting and thinking «how do we get rid of every single character» to get the story to the events of the first game and it becomes apparent. The story has a lot of content in terms of dialogues and situations, but nearly all of them are about nothing and tell us almost nothing. They would have been entertaining, had the writers understood the comedy apart from toilet jokes in GTA 5. However, the gang cutscenes in the camp is where the majority of the development time regarding story went. Anything outside of it has nowhere near the same amount of depth, character interactions and dialogues. O’Driscoll gang everywhere has a bunch of «dummy» NPCs that are uninteresting and bland as a rock contrary to the Dutch’s gang. Nothing gets character development outside of the gang characters, only they have personalities, but everything else is either typical absurd derived from GTA or are extremely simple in nature. In reality, the story is simply a restructured narrative from GTA:SA with renamed, redesigned characters and mildly reshaped events to be more dramatic in line with the typical «Wild West».

The story is clearly targeted at the majority (which is evident) and the majority obviously rarely cares about actual good, informative stories, because they won’t pay attention to anything of the kind either way, as such stories are not targeted for the majority. RDR2’s story is simple, with a simple protagonist that generates sympathy from certain players only because the player is seeing events from his point of view. If you were to show the life and the events of an unlikable character to generate reasons for why he does the things he does, it may fool the player to think that the character is a good guy. This is one of those cases and players clearly were not able to understand such a simple storytelling technique. It is a simple, narrow cowboy who does unlikable things and gets obvious repercussions the player sees coming but is not able to make him avoid due to a near total lack of player agency. Because the game does not care about the gameplay, it only cares about imposing the story that drags on the player.

Player is not able to carve their own way to play missions, as they fail if they avoid the main path. This is the issue derived from GTA 4 and 5, but it got even more restrictive. The gameplay in games of Rockstar devolved in favor of movie-like experience which is detrimental to player creativity, but since players are usually not creative and do not experiment or do things the way they want, they prefer watching an uninteresting story, this does not seem to be a problem for many players, so they encourage more boring games. It is evident that players who praise RDR2 are either simply not good at videogames or want no gameplay apart from simple relaxation. The game is designed for using gamepad on a couch, performing relaxing, repetitive actions. Every mission is one long cutscene that eventually devolves into a «thing failing or going wrong» (the «failure» concept is the story premise as described earlier) and killing many «bad guys». In some cases it’s extremely unrealistic and main character, as well as his companion may stand in the open in front of many enemies standing above them and yet the main characters still easily survive and kill everyone. Replayability is entirely harmed as a result also.

If we were to skip the cutscenes in RDR2 we’ll see how much gameplay we actually have and that’s not much. Some missions introduce almost no gameplay, many of them are riding a horse, watching many cutscenes and pressing a few buttons in ways that have already been done before by games. (such as first introduction to Colm) The game does not introduce actual gameplay in those missions, gameplay is not this game’s focus. If we were to skip cutscenes in, say, GTA: San Andreas, it wouldn’t hurt the gameplay, as missions there are actually entertaining and don’t resolve around creating a bunch of motion capped animations to tell the movie story without complementing the gameplay. This is why the game is bad, as the story is not the game that you play when you have no direct involvement and agency to it.

If gameplay requires player to avoid the markers and play outside of the story because the missions do not entertain the player with gameplay, then the story is detrimental to gameplay and it always is when it’s «story first, gameplay second». It directly tells you that it prioritizes story, the gameplay is literally bad by design. It doesn’t change what the game is and doesn’t matter if you like the story or you think you like the «game», it won’t change the game aspect of this game being literally bad. The reception to the game is a result of players’ bias due to love to certain characters, not because they loved its sluggish gameplay. Talking about sluggish gameplay, it is designed with an input lag, as there is a fairly long delay between character’s actions. Not only are the actions slow and player is encouraged to see them every time, but it takes time to set them in motion. This results into tedious gameplay. If the story is the reason why you play videogames, why not watch a movie instead? And that’s exactly what RDR2 is, an interactive movie. In terms of choices that the player can make, if they were to kill a certain NPC in the open world, then such an NPC will respawn which ruins immersion. Rockstar does not understand immersion apart from the basic graphical and musical stereotypes.

Even outside of the story, the gameplay is nearly non-existent. If you were to try and commit in-game crimes, there will be hordes of bounty hunters spreading across the map because the game forces the player to play a certain way even in the open-world which is a heavy contradiction to the whole idea. It continuously spams bounties which is prevents the player agency even in the open world, as the mechanic is too punishing and witnesses appear inconsistently and can "spot" the player unfairly and artificially. Developers failed to blur the lines between the main story and side missions. It resolves around finding more cutscenes in side missions or generic «help» random encounters where the player is supposed to help a certain NPC. It is forced and happens quite a lot, they even repeat time and time again. If you help that NPC, then they will spawn in a nearby town and offer you a «free item» in the shop. They do it many times, which is unrealistic and expecting the same outcome every time is repetitive and unrealistic, also extremely lazy on devs' part. The game technically has almost no opportunities apart from typical minigames we’ve seen since GTA 4. It has a more advanced hunting than in GTA 5, also fishing, but hunting involves the player «skinning» an animal, murdering hundreds of in-game animals and leaving them, as they are left rotting in the grass. Hunting in this game is for «completionists» who would run around the open world in games like AC: Odyssey and clear hundreds of outposts while performing same fetch quests. This is who this gameplay mechanic is made for. Any opportunities (barely any) the game offers are all boring and it’s more interesting to rather do nothing or living a real life than playing this game. It’s simply not fun and not intended to be. This whole RDR2’s «good gameplay» fallacy is spread by players who didn’t know any better and bought into this game’s graphics because apart from graphics and a bunch of animals, as well as simple, repetitive random events, the game barely has anything. In terms of exploration, there are a few landmarks that can be interesting, but only few and far between. For the money spent on developing GTA games and RDR2, the world is nowhere near as alive as it should be.

Some people think that the world is «alive» because animals eat animals and birds grab fish from the water. Only what those people don’t realize is that those are simple mini-cutscenes, scripts with «OnLook» trigger that trigger when the player is looking a certain direction. Those things don’t casually happen, if you were to spawn animals arbitrary, then they will perform Skyrim on one another. Those situations are not real animal A.I, just triggers. Devs didn’t even bother and gave Marston the same body as Arthur, just with a different face because they didn’t care that much. Their «care» gets too much credit, in reality the game is made very carelessly, even though it somewhat functions. If the player does not care about the story, then the player should be able to carve the story his own way by making choices and finishing missions the way they see fit, but since the game is a linear interactive movie, there is no such possibility. This is largely why the game is boring. Open world is boring, lacks dynamic quite a lot and because of how sluggish the gameplay is, it’s a chore to play.

im not reading allat. If you have to yap this much to justify hating this game then you are wrong.

[Tighty-Whitey]

Originally posted by eoozy:

Aint no one reading allat, you got 5 threads about this already, you can share all these "points" there but we all know why you wont.

there is another game example i can make. i can see that you are someone who might enjoy rdr2 which is fine. but you also look like someone who would enjoy witcher 3 based on evaluation of some of the stuff you posted earlier. usually witcher 3 is liked by people who want nothing from the game except romance scenes, because the following behind such a game only has direct and significant relation to that specifically rather than the writing or gameplay (both are poor in that game. gameplay and vital necessities behind game design and any kind of design don't exist in witcher 3.) even rdr2 does a better job, as that game is by far much worse. rdr2 can easily outdo such games, but rdr2 is not without its significant flaws. flaws of rdr2 we directly examined here in this discussion and you should try reading them.

[eoozy]

Originally posted by Tighty-Whitey:

Originally posted by eoozy:

Aint no one reading allat, you got 5 threads about this already, you can share all these "points" there but we all know why you wont.

there is another game example i can make. i can see that you are someone who might enjoy rdr2 which is fine. but you also look like someone who would enjoy witcher 3 based on evaluation of some of the stuff you posted earlier. usually witcher 3 is liked by people who want nothing from the game except romance scenes, because the following behind such a game only has direct and significant relation to that specifically rather than the writing or gameplay (which is poor in that game. gameplay and necessities behind game design don't exist in witcher 3.) even rdr2 does a better job, as that game is by far much worse. rdr2 can easily outdo such games, but rdr2 is not without its significant flaws.

What prompt did you use to get this nonsense out of ChatGPT? I wanna try it aswell.

[vikus]

Originally posted by Cksalzy:

Stick to games that hold your hand and don’t ask too much of your brain.

Okay it made some good points but like, RDR 2 is one of the most hand holdy "made for everyone" games there is.

[Tighty-Whitey]

Originally posted by Cksalzy:

Originally posted by Tighty-Whitey:

chatgpt doesn't know the game because it cannot play the game, which is why it cannot provide anything. it only looks at separate paragraphs without being able to connect the full picture and establish the connection between the paragraphs where all of those statements are already disproven on arrival. rdr2 has plenty of explosions, constantly devolving into combat during missions and it is a no-brainer console game.

Actually chatgpt does know what its talking about. It has access to the internet and has knowledge from articles, videos, and pictures about red dead redemption. It has information all the way up to october 2023. I asked chatgpt where it gets its information and heres what it said:

"I get information about video games like Red Dead Redemption 2 from two primary sources:

Preloaded Knowledge: My training includes publicly available data up to October 2023, sourced from books, websites, articles, and forums. This forms my foundational understanding of games, their mechanics, storylines, and general reception.

Web Searches: For anything newer or more specific, I can search the web for updates, community discussions, recent patches, or trending content."

had this been the case, it wouldn't have been so easy to break chatgpt and make it say certain words and make certain claims it tries its best not to make. because it doesn't understand the game that well based on this flaw, because a.i has flaws and chatgpt cannot play the game. chatgpt fails quite a lot if you are asking an a.i that doesn't even know how many R's there are in the word "strawberry".

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1dngbhx/how_many_rs_are_there_in_strawberry/

that's why no, neither chatgpt or you have any close idea as to what you are talking about when it comes to rdr2. chatgpt makes mistakes and it's marketed with such words that it makes mistakes. it makes a mistake based on that even when it comes to such information, that's why it's not reliable in this topic.

[SadPlatty©]

Imagine being trapped in a room with "RDR2" and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial" - and you actively slot E.T. into an Atari console, claiming it to be a much better game

[Tighty-Whitey]

by the way, i might add more things here and there to this article. rdr2 does deserve a lot of criticism based on the player agency part, where it doesn't let the player do a lot of things that he wants during missions which prevents creativity and makes the interactive movie that it is "on rails", as well as everything else i've established. so it makes sense.

[julius]

yappademic is the real pandemic !

[SadPlatty©]

If it's about "what you want to do" - most RPGs are rather lack-luster in my opinion. If I can't choose to be the villain as well as the hero, the game is already losing a lot of agency. This is probably why Morrowind is considered a "GOAT" - you could kill the main story NPCs, and be a villain essentially (plus Vivec knew about the player behind the PC - and the game was self aware enough to approach what it couldn't do; such as Ma'iq explaining the lack of dragons) .

Or other examples - CoD; where is the mode that lets me be the big bad zombie enemy, akin to "Dying Light" or how they approached "Evil Dead"? Clearly that is a popular game loop, and honestly the mode would be a bit refreshing, as it could also be handy for "less-than-amazing" players with regards to accessing the easter egg content or songs (I don't consider them easter eggs as much as collectibles since there is 1 per).

Other games however have a logical error with regard to agency on replay. Max Payne 3 for example has you work with a guy who eventually betrays you - why do I fail missions for killing him on later playthroughs?

Last example to avoid muddying the point up - Cyberpunk 2077. I should 100% be able to pull the SOULKILLER chip out whenever I want and get an immediate "Game Over". I mean - even Nier lets you literally unplug your OS chip and gives you a special ending for it. Granted - games like this and GTA are often inconsistent with player agency :
- Can't fly planes often
- Internet is usually shown as like 3-8 tiles and no agency to type "google" for memes
- No bartering system for shady vendors
- Can't often use the phone to just dial random numbers

The list goes on - honestly, I could likely poke wholes in every single game about things that should be allowed but are not. Even "Pong" could have let you move left or right like tennis, vs just up and down.

[Jade]

Originally posted by SadPlatty©:

If it's about "what you want to do" - most RPGs are rather lack-luster in my opinion. If I can't choose to be the villain as well as the hero, the game is already losing a lot of agency. This is probably why Morrowind is considered a "GOAT" - you could kill the main story NPCs, and be a villain essentially (plus Vivec knew about the player behind the PC - and the game was self aware enough to approach what it couldn't do; such as Ma'iq explaining the lack of dragons) .

Or other examples - CoD; where is the mode that lets me be the big bad zombie enemy, akin to "Dying Light" or how they approached "Evil Dead"? Clearly that is a popular game loop, and honestly the mode would be a bit refreshing, as it could also be handy for "less-than-amazing" players with regards to accessing the easter egg content or songs (I don't consider them easter eggs as much as collectibles since there is 1 per).

Other games however have a logical error with regard to agency on replay. Max Payne 3 for example has you work with a guy who eventually betrays you - why do I fail missions for killing him on later playthroughs?

Last example to avoid muddying the point up - Cyberpunk 2077. I should 100% be able to pull the SOULKILLER chip out whenever I want and get an immediate "Game Over". I mean - even Nier lets you literally unplug your OS chip and gives you a special ending for it. Granted - games like this and GTA are often inconsistent with player agency :
- Can't fly planes often
- Internet is usually shown as like 3-8 tiles and no agency to type "google" for memes
- No bartering system for shady vendors
- Can't often use the phone to just dial random numbers

The list goes on - honestly, I could likely poke wholes in every single game about things that should be allowed but are not. Even "Pong" could have let you move left or right like tennis, vs just up and down.

This dude spams bait posts everywhere on the Steam discussions, you can see he doesn't even own the game so he definitely hasn't played it before. Pretty sure he, at least partially, uses ChatGPT for all this bs.

Don't waste your time on him.

[julius]

Originally posted by Aria:

Originally posted by SadPlatty©:

If it's about "what you want to do" - most RPGs are rather lack-luster in my opinion. If I can't choose to be the villain as well as the hero, the game is already losing a lot of agency. This is probably why Morrowind is considered a "GOAT" - you could kill the main story NPCs, and be a villain essentially (plus Vivec knew about the player behind the PC - and the game was self aware enough to approach what it couldn't do; such as Ma'iq explaining the lack of dragons) .

Or other examples - CoD; where is the mode that lets me be the big bad zombie enemy, akin to "Dying Light" or how they approached "Evil Dead"? Clearly that is a popular game loop, and honestly the mode would be a bit refreshing, as it could also be handy for "less-than-amazing" players with regards to accessing the easter egg content or songs (I don't consider them easter eggs as much as collectibles since there is 1 per).

Other games however have a logical error with regard to agency on replay. Max Payne 3 for example has you work with a guy who eventually betrays you - why do I fail missions for killing him on later playthroughs?

Last example to avoid muddying the point up - Cyberpunk 2077. I should 100% be able to pull the SOULKILLER chip out whenever I want and get an immediate "Game Over". I mean - even Nier lets you literally unplug your OS chip and gives you a special ending for it. Granted - games like this and GTA are often inconsistent with player agency :
- Can't fly planes often
- Internet is usually shown as like 3-8 tiles and no agency to type "google" for memes
- No bartering system for shady vendors
- Can't often use the phone to just dial random numbers

The list goes on - honestly, I could likely poke wholes in every single game about things that should be allowed but are not. Even "Pong" could have let you move left or right like tennis, vs just up and down.

This dude spams bait posts everywhere on the Steam discussions, you can see he doesn't even own the game so he definitely hasn't played it before. Pretty sure he, at least partially, uses ChatGPT for all this bs.

Don't waste your time on him.

It's not a bait, but its a dedication. Dedication of time to provide proofs that this game is actually bad.

[eoozy]

Originally posted by julius:

Originally posted by Aria:

This dude spams bait posts everywhere on the Steam discussions, you can see he doesn't even own the game so he definitely hasn't played it before. Pretty sure he, at least partially, uses ChatGPT for all this bs.

Don't waste your time on him.

It's not a bait, but its a dedication. Dedication of time to provide proofs that this game is actually bad.

Its clearly a bait, he does this with other popular games too, with zero hours on the actual game.

[MiseRawRble.]

yeah, rdr2 is one of the worst games. because of too much of an emphasis on cutscenes