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.

[XOLiD]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tighty-Whitey:

rockstar and even the fans at this point, no one cares about rdr2 anymore. devs moved on to developing gta 6 which is just a much better investment than something that has no demand and has bad gameplay.

Devs always move on to new story mode games when they're finished, just like they moved on from GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, RDR1, and GTA 4. This one just happens to have sold over 67 million units worldwide due to high demand with over 90% positive reviews of people praising it for being such a good story with many different open world gameplay aspects to encounter.

Glad it's still easy to counter-argue every single one of your misinformative points with facts.

[Maximum Poi]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tighty-Whitey:

I’ve played this game for 200 hours

I'm sorry OP, but this is where I (and I'm sure many many other people) stop reading your wall of text.

"I have 200 hours in the game and it's it's one of the worst games ever made"

You spent 200 hours playing it. Can't be that bad.

[Torva Messor]

remember kids....after nearly 730 hrs put into this game it is the worst game ever made

[Aqua]

КТО ВЗАИМНЫЙ +REP
НАПИШУ ВАМ КТО НАПИШЕТ МНЕ

[SadPlatty©]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Maximum Poi:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tighty-Whitey:

I’ve played this game for 200 hours

I'm sorry OP, but this is where I (and I'm sure many many other people) stop reading your wall of text.

"I have 200 hours in the game and it's it's one of the worst games ever made"

You spent 200 hours playing it. Can't be that bad.

See though - that's essentially the "grift".

Because they claim to have so many hours, they gatekeep an opinion that the game is bad. The only people who in their eyes is allowed to even have an "at bat" at voicing an opinion is then those with even more time in the game. Just look at how they reply once to people then never again for most of us.

Considering anyone with that amount of investment does then quite possibly enjoy the game (enough to spend almost 10 full days of life playing); they too then are more likely to have radical replies vs someone looking in from outside. And I don't necessarily mean "radical" as in whatever OP is droning on about (they actively fought the game for those 200 hours - which is essentially the definition of insanity; doing the same thing expecting a different result); I mean more like people criticizing story pacing for "ramping up over 2 hours to fall flat" like Dragon's Dogma 2 does if you ignore all the side content. Or how some games leave a bunch of open questions (like how in Halo - they have all the technology they do have, but Master Chief needed sniper rifles with night-vision while in ODST the lesser Spartans have it built into the visor; sure ODST released after 3, but they got rebuilt as the "Master Chief Collection"...).

[CyanCatMan]

Stop replying to the bot.
Just report and let support finish locking down the rest of these threads.

[solid steve]

Ursprungligen skrivet av CyanCatMan:

Stop replying to the bot.
Just report and let support finish locking down the rest of these threads.

just the chatgpt usage, everything else is a real nonmythical human being behind the wheel

[lost horizon]

its just a boring horse simulator

[SadPlatty©]

Ursprungligen skrivet av lost horizon:

its just a boring horse simulator

Last year you said it was full of chores though; if it's a horse sim, couldn't you have just had your human do the chores? Or is it like "The Sims" where you can only implicate actions the horse should be doing?

Horses should be out there grazing on grains and soaking in the rays of that prairie sun with a cinematic filter

[Tighty-Whitey]

Ursprungligen skrivet av lost horizon:

its just a boring horse simulator

ha. i agree. it is definitely quite a horse simulator. they could have done a way better job in this game if they just reduced the horse riding and movie aspect and it'd be sooo much better.

[JohnMac]

Very few people, myself included, are going to read something this long just to say you don't like the game. Its a bit weird.

Post your review and move along like everyone else...

Its also so obvious you didn't write the OP, as you cannot even use capital letters in the comments replying to people. Stop attention seeking, its really very sad.

[Tighty-Whitey]

Ursprungligen skrivet av JohnMac:

Very few people, myself included, are going to read something this long just to say you don't like the game. Its a bit weird.

Post your review and move along like everyone else...

Its also so obvious you didn't write the OP, as you cannot even use capital letters in the comments replying to people. Stop attention seeking, its really very sad.

what is absolutely obvious is that you didn't write your own post yourself, otherwise you'd know that the right way to type your "its" is "it's". this is the saddest thing of all. this is not a review, this is an article about impressions from the game and its problematic factors. rdr2 has plenty.

[JohnMac]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tighty-Whitey:

Ursprungligen skrivet av JohnMac:

Very few people, myself included, are going to read something this long just to say you don't like the game. Its a bit weird.

Post your review and move along like everyone else...

Its also so obvious you didn't write the OP, as you cannot even use capital letters in the comments replying to people. Stop attention seeking, its really very sad.

what is absolutely obvious is that you didn't write your own post yourself, otherwise you'd know that the right way to type your "its" is "it's". this is the saddest thing of all. this is not a review, this is an article about impressions from the game and its problematic factors. rdr2 has plenty.

Erm, that shows i DID write my post does it not? Your original post is so different to every other post you make its more than obvious you did not write a single word of it.

As i said, this is nothing but attention seeking. When someone cannot use the shift key, dont expect anyone to believe you wrote that essay...

[Gashlycrumb]

The hell is this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ essay? Lol. Meds are good. You should probably go back to taking them. Just wow... It's like if chatgpt had schizophrenia, and this isn't even HALF as bad as their GTA5 "review"

Don't make the same mistake I did, by the way. It's NOT worth it. Avoid that profile at all costs. Your brain will thank you.

[Tighty-Whitey]

Ursprungligen skrivet av JohnMac:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Tighty-Whitey:

what is absolutely obvious is that you didn't write your own post yourself, otherwise you'd know that the right way to type your "its" is "it's". this is the saddest thing of all. this is not a review, this is an article about impressions from the game and its problematic factors. rdr2 has plenty.

Erm, that shows i DID write my post does it not? Your original post is so different to every other post you make its more than obvious you did not write a single word of it.

As i said, this is nothing but attention seeking. When someone cannot use the shift key, dont expect anyone to believe you wrote that essay...

that's incorrect. your post at the end is so incorrect grammar wise compared to the beginning is that we can safely, as i said, say that you didn't write that post yourself and had someone else do it for you. when you cannot - you cannot. and rdr2 is one of the worst games for a reason, for many that i've described.