I'm on chapter 2 I think... haven't really felt any itch to get back to it, either. Maybe some day
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Red Dead Redemption 2 has a 97 Metacritic and plays like absolute dog doo doo
- Thread starter Bruceleeroy
- Start date
I think you think this is a gotcha moment.
But considering this is a thread about RDR´s shortcomings I´m not sure it is.
After all the discussion the OP kicked off is kept alive by people (like you) who disagree with the OP and spend a lot of time "trying to convince others on their interpretation of the quality of RDR2s gameplay and systems".
Feel free to review my post history and share one single comment where I've attempted to convince anyone of anything. I'll wait.
How many times have you, OTOH, spent stating your anecdotal case?
It's cool if you don't like the game. Nobody should suggest you do otherwise.
OTOH, this title has eclipsed 17 million in sales, won GOTY awards, has a near perfect critic review score and set the standard for generational open world storytelling and gameplay (see previous facts supporting this conclusion).
If you're not on board with that, no problem. Just don't pretend everyone else is blind/ignorant and reviewers are dishonest and awards are given aimlessly. That's a lot of fact twisting in order to support a very unique and frankly minority-driven opinion.
"Indoctrinate"? He's just sharing an opinion, and then you're gonna attack the dude's weight over it? Come on.
Yeah, this is what you bring to this thread:
Good shit.
Anyway
Yeah. The arguments in favor of RDR2´s gameplay range all the way from "check out the Metascore" to "look at these sales numbers".
Same here but not for the gameplay itself but for the fantastic animation provided by the euphoria engine.
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Look - if you have to hand-wave away sales, reviews and GOTY awards in order to critique a title, you're probably doing it wrong.
Any reputable metric used to argue a game's success is irrelevant if Glam doesn't like said title.
Thumbs up!
I don't think the OP is even calling the game doo doo. It's just that it's a friggin 97 on metacritic that's surprising. Given how poor the gameplay has been received by some folks.
I remember when this gen started, there was this view that game journos were being a bit more harsh when it came to reviews for games. That's why whenever a 90plus score came out on meta it was a big surprise. I think this adds to the shock that this game, the highest reviewed game of the gen (or one of I'm not sure you get the point), has the score that it has, even when there's pretty obvious flaws with the game.
So it's not a question of the game is doo doo but how did it score as high as it did, with doo doo aspects. I remember reading the OT early on and a poster put it best. It's a 10/10 game and a 2/10 game at the same time. That's why this is puzzling.
I remember when this gen started, there was this view that game journos were being a bit more harsh when it came to reviews for games. That's why whenever a 90plus score came out on meta it was a big surprise. I think this adds to the shock that this game, the highest reviewed game of the gen (or one of I'm not sure you get the point), has the score that it has, even when there's pretty obvious flaws with the game.
So it's not a question of the game is doo doo but how did it score as high as it did, with doo doo aspects. I remember reading the OT early on and a poster put it best. It's a 10/10 game and a 2/10 game at the same time. That's why this is puzzling.
Yeah, it is divisive.
More importantly, you seemed to skip over the bit of the post directed at you...
2/10? Honestly? :D
Tbh It was never a solid argument in a game where you can change an entire outfit on the fly in a micro-second on the horse menu or when people\law recognize you during a train robbing in the middle of nowhere with a mask in your face...
Totally agree. That NakeyJakey video totally puts what I felt into words much better than I could. The problem with the game is it doesn't fully commit to either realism or non-realism for the sake fun, and becomes frustrating if you lean to far in either direction. I just feel they should have fully committed to the role playing/realistic aspects or just remove a lot of those elements altogether.
Ok, so I was on my phone before when I posted my sarcastic "The Godfather has a 100/100 metacritic but unlike AVENGERS INFINITY WAR it lacks a mega battle in outer space... how can francis ford copola keep getting away with this?!" ... And I wanted to come back and give a longer argument, but haven't had the time.
So, anyway.
There's a key fault with the general complaint about RDR2's meta critic score and your opinion of how the game controls, or plays, or anything else. MetaCritic, GameRatings, or any other review aggregate, is not an objective analytical statistical formulation about the quality of a game: They are aggregates of many people's subjective opinions. When a game has a 97/100 on MetaCritic, it just means that about 99% of the people who played the game thought that it was really excellent, and about 1% of the people who played the game thought that it was just merely very good, with maybe a statistical anomoly through in there to muck things around occasionally.
A 97 on MetaCritic is not a DMG rating for your favorite weapon in Skyrim; It's not a 97/100 speed rating for the fastest player in Madden; It's not a 97/100 three-point rating for Steph Curry in NBA 2k19. It's not an objective measure of something. It's an aggregate of many subjective things.
So, your beef with Red Dead Redemption 2 having a 97 out of 100 on MetaCritic is, basically, "How can this person like this game despite that I don't like how the game controls?" And then multiplying that by however many people like the game. It's a petty, stupid argument, which boils down simply to just yucking someone else's yum. It's childish and stupid.
Getting that out of the way first, you might still quabble with this and say, "How can so many people like this game despite that it has poor controls, when my favorite game (insert whatever you want) has great controls and doesn't have as high a meta critic score?" When I brought up The Godfather ~20+ pages ago, I did so to make a point that not all great movies need to have all things to be considered great. Your favorite movie might be Goodfellas. It's an excellent movie. From minute 0 to minute 120 it's full of intrigue, drama, action, suspense, bravado, and everything else that makes a quintessentially great mobster drama movie. At the same time, you might watch the Godfather and think that it's slow, plodding, overly heavy with dialogue, that the story is difficult to follow, that the characters are difficult to tell apart, that it's not as funny. And yet, the Godfather and Goodfellas are not only both considered excellent, top tier movies, some of the best of all time, but in general, the critics consensus is generally that the Godfather is better than Goodfellas even if both are really excellent movies, because of those things that make you not like it.
Let me reiterate that: Because the Godfather is deliberate, slow, plodding, may be difficult to follow for some people, doesn't beat you over the head with the story, and because it's such a difficult movie to follow if you're also scrolling Instagram and Snapchat, many people consider it a better movie than Goodfellas -- even if they also love Goodfellas and think it's a terrific movie for different reasons.
I'm relating RDR2 to the Godfather for a specific reason, I think that no game has told a better story in a better way than Red Dead Redemption 2, ever. And while many games have had good controls and bad controls, and many games have had great stories, no game has ever had such well articulated characters, legitimate believable and not overdone motivations, does not fall into boring tropes that so many games fall into (Even some of the great games of the last 10 years still overwhelmingly fall into these over-told videogame story tropes either because the writers just aren't very good or because they don't trust most players to really get it; e.g., they can't trust the attention span of their players over 12, 40, or 60 hours).
Nevertheless, the criticism could still be made, "Well, putting aside the story, production value, voice acting, writing, and narrative techniques..." (which I think is ridiculous to put those aside, but you see this a lot with criticism of Rockstar games, and especially RDR2... It's like saying, "Putting aside the Cormac McCarthy's narrative style and dialectical mastery, The Road is a boring story about a guy and a kid wandering around, as opposed to James Patterson's The President is Missing which is about a PRESIDENT going MISSING!!!"), [sorry, ahem] "putting those things aside (...), the game still controls worse than other games so why doesn't Rockstar just fix the controls for once and then it'll be a great game!"
I think it's a legitimate question: Why do Rockstar games traditionally have weak controls, especially now when the control scheme for the open world 3D action adventure have mostly been nailed down by other developers? With GTAIII and VC you could mostly forgive them because it was a novel concept, by GTA:SA the boo-birds were out about lousy shooting mechanics, lousy fighting mechanics, and ho-hum racing/driving mechanics. Other games capitalized on this, for instance, the True Crime: Streets of... series openly called out GTA In its marketing, asking players why they'd want to play a game with worse fighting, worse shooting, worse racing? Likewise, this continued in the next gen with Saints Row and Saints Row 2, and with GTAIV taking a very weighty approach to control, one that I really didn't like and actually feel uncomfortable playing when I go back to it, I wondered the same question. At the time I thought, eh, maybe it's a limitation with their engine? But it's continued, though improved with each iteration of the game.
But, because it's continued and especially continued into RDR2, a game that goes into such detail with so many elements of the game and the world, you have to wonder, why can't Rockstar put as much time into developing a really precise, responsive, action-driven control system when they put as much time into animating horses testicles shrinking when it's cold, or day/night animation cycles for deer that the player may not even interact with? If they spend 200 hours developing scampering patterns for rabbits, why can't they spend 100 more hours developing tighter controls?
I think it's a legitimate beef for people who really care about it, but my take is that the control system fits the world. Much like how Assassins Creed introduced this hand-holding control system where you basically "Hold A" and your assassin character scales up the tallest building in Italy, and then after holding A you hold X and he launches himself from the tallest chapel spire and stabs a guy perfectly in the neck, and then you hold A again and he scampers off to avoid detection -- because that fits the character of an expert assassin -- RDR2 has a plodding control scheme that takes effort to use it. It's a gun slinging game, and yet, slinging guns can be difficult to do. It took me at least 5-10 hours to figure out why I was missing most of my shots when the game started. It took me 5-10 hours to figure out why sometimes I'd hit RT but Arthur wouldn't shoot the gun, I'd have to hit it again to shoot, and it felt arbitrary and weird to me, until I understood the system. It took me 10+ hours to figure out how to really control my horse, instead of feeling like the horse was out of my control... Which, with this mechanic, I think it's actually perfect (you're not magically controlling the horse when you climb on top of him... you're still controlling Arthur, who is using reigns to control the horse. You are not the horse). Nearly every control system in the game follows this description, it's feels weird and not natural at first. WHen I use a gun in Doom I am the Gun. When I jump on a horse in Assassins Creed, I am the horse. In Red Dead Redemption 2, you're arthur. Aiming and firing the gun is plodding, it takes patience to get your best shot, you have to cock certain guns to fire them, because you're Arthur, you're not the gun.
Still, even accepting this design decision, I still think the controls system is worth criticism. And I still think many of the systems in the game deserve criticism. Arbitrary decisions like how the wanted/witness/honor/disguise system works, arbitrary decisions like how the game takes guns off of your holster and puts them on your horse sometimes but not othertimes leaving you outgunned in key situations, difficult to understand systems like the Core/Bar system or the shootout system (this one I still truly don't understand, 100+ hours into the game). I think these all deserve critical review.
If these systems all deserve criticism, How can Red Dead Redemption 2 have a 97/100 on MetaCritic, more than my other favorite game that does those systems better?
Because MetaCritic is not an objective rating, it is an aggregate of subjective opinions, and the subjective opinions of those 100+ ratings on MetaCritic is that Red Dead Redemption 2 is better than your favorite game, even despite these systems that are worthy of criticism. Even despite that Bayonetta 2 controls better than Red Dead Redemption 2, RDR2 has some greater elements than Bayonetta 2 that mean that many subjective reviewers like it more. Even despite that Super Mario Odyssey has 1077 Gold Stars and Red Dead Redemption 2 has 0 Gold Stars, there is something about Red Dead Redemption 2's overall parts that means that many reviewers hold subjective opinions that they think it's a better game.
A conventional defense of RDR2 might be that "it's greater than the sum of its parts," meaning, the control system might be mediocre, the horse management system might be contrived and difficult to understand, the looting mechanics are clunky, the wanted system seems arbitrary, but if you put those all together with other great elements, it makes a game that's greater than the sum of those things." But I'd go a step further: Red Dead Redemption 2 is greater than the sum of its parts, but there are things in RDR2 that no major game has ever done before and no major game has ever come close to doing nearly as well: Realistic, believable characters with believable motivations doing things in a believable world in a consistent way to tell a truly endearing, gutwrenching, unique story, without falling into boring videogame storytelling tropes. The story/narrative isn't perfect, there are some things here and there that I think could be improved, but it's so far and away better than any major game that's ever been made before that combined with the sum of its other parts, it is subjectively a better game for those reviewers than your other favorite game.
Still, because enjoying a videogame is a subjective thing and I'm not playing your videogame for you, you can disagree and prefer some other game more, just like how you might enjoy The President is Missing more than The Road or you might enjoy Goodfellas or Avengers Infinity War more than The Godfather.
So, anyway.
There's a key fault with the general complaint about RDR2's meta critic score and your opinion of how the game controls, or plays, or anything else. MetaCritic, GameRatings, or any other review aggregate, is not an objective analytical statistical formulation about the quality of a game: They are aggregates of many people's subjective opinions. When a game has a 97/100 on MetaCritic, it just means that about 99% of the people who played the game thought that it was really excellent, and about 1% of the people who played the game thought that it was just merely very good, with maybe a statistical anomoly through in there to muck things around occasionally.
A 97 on MetaCritic is not a DMG rating for your favorite weapon in Skyrim; It's not a 97/100 speed rating for the fastest player in Madden; It's not a 97/100 three-point rating for Steph Curry in NBA 2k19. It's not an objective measure of something. It's an aggregate of many subjective things.
So, your beef with Red Dead Redemption 2 having a 97 out of 100 on MetaCritic is, basically, "How can this person like this game despite that I don't like how the game controls?" And then multiplying that by however many people like the game. It's a petty, stupid argument, which boils down simply to just yucking someone else's yum. It's childish and stupid.
Getting that out of the way first, you might still quabble with this and say, "How can so many people like this game despite that it has poor controls, when my favorite game (insert whatever you want) has great controls and doesn't have as high a meta critic score?" When I brought up The Godfather ~20+ pages ago, I did so to make a point that not all great movies need to have all things to be considered great. Your favorite movie might be Goodfellas. It's an excellent movie. From minute 0 to minute 120 it's full of intrigue, drama, action, suspense, bravado, and everything else that makes a quintessentially great mobster drama movie. At the same time, you might watch the Godfather and think that it's slow, plodding, overly heavy with dialogue, that the story is difficult to follow, that the characters are difficult to tell apart, that it's not as funny. And yet, the Godfather and Goodfellas are not only both considered excellent, top tier movies, some of the best of all time, but in general, the critics consensus is generally that the Godfather is better than Goodfellas even if both are really excellent movies, because of those things that make you not like it.
Let me reiterate that: Because the Godfather is deliberate, slow, plodding, may be difficult to follow for some people, doesn't beat you over the head with the story, and because it's such a difficult movie to follow if you're also scrolling Instagram and Snapchat, many people consider it a better movie than Goodfellas -- even if they also love Goodfellas and think it's a terrific movie for different reasons.
I'm relating RDR2 to the Godfather for a specific reason, I think that no game has told a better story in a better way than Red Dead Redemption 2, ever. And while many games have had good controls and bad controls, and many games have had great stories, no game has ever had such well articulated characters, legitimate believable and not overdone motivations, does not fall into boring tropes that so many games fall into (Even some of the great games of the last 10 years still overwhelmingly fall into these over-told videogame story tropes either because the writers just aren't very good or because they don't trust most players to really get it; e.g., they can't trust the attention span of their players over 12, 40, or 60 hours).
Nevertheless, the criticism could still be made, "Well, putting aside the story, production value, voice acting, writing, and narrative techniques..." (which I think is ridiculous to put those aside, but you see this a lot with criticism of Rockstar games, and especially RDR2... It's like saying, "Putting aside the Cormac McCarthy's narrative style and dialectical mastery, The Road is a boring story about a guy and a kid wandering around, as opposed to James Patterson's The President is Missing which is about a PRESIDENT going MISSING!!!"), [sorry, ahem] "putting those things aside (...), the game still controls worse than other games so why doesn't Rockstar just fix the controls for once and then it'll be a great game!"
I think it's a legitimate question: Why do Rockstar games traditionally have weak controls, especially now when the control scheme for the open world 3D action adventure have mostly been nailed down by other developers? With GTAIII and VC you could mostly forgive them because it was a novel concept, by GTA:SA the boo-birds were out about lousy shooting mechanics, lousy fighting mechanics, and ho-hum racing/driving mechanics. Other games capitalized on this, for instance, the True Crime: Streets of... series openly called out GTA In its marketing, asking players why they'd want to play a game with worse fighting, worse shooting, worse racing? Likewise, this continued in the next gen with Saints Row and Saints Row 2, and with GTAIV taking a very weighty approach to control, one that I really didn't like and actually feel uncomfortable playing when I go back to it, I wondered the same question. At the time I thought, eh, maybe it's a limitation with their engine? But it's continued, though improved with each iteration of the game.
But, because it's continued and especially continued into RDR2, a game that goes into such detail with so many elements of the game and the world, you have to wonder, why can't Rockstar put as much time into developing a really precise, responsive, action-driven control system when they put as much time into animating horses testicles shrinking when it's cold, or day/night animation cycles for deer that the player may not even interact with? If they spend 200 hours developing scampering patterns for rabbits, why can't they spend 100 more hours developing tighter controls?
I think it's a legitimate beef for people who really care about it, but my take is that the control system fits the world. Much like how Assassins Creed introduced this hand-holding control system where you basically "Hold A" and your assassin character scales up the tallest building in Italy, and then after holding A you hold X and he launches himself from the tallest chapel spire and stabs a guy perfectly in the neck, and then you hold A again and he scampers off to avoid detection -- because that fits the character of an expert assassin -- RDR2 has a plodding control scheme that takes effort to use it. It's a gun slinging game, and yet, slinging guns can be difficult to do. It took me at least 5-10 hours to figure out why I was missing most of my shots when the game started. It took me 5-10 hours to figure out why sometimes I'd hit RT but Arthur wouldn't shoot the gun, I'd have to hit it again to shoot, and it felt arbitrary and weird to me, until I understood the system. It took me 10+ hours to figure out how to really control my horse, instead of feeling like the horse was out of my control... Which, with this mechanic, I think it's actually perfect (you're not magically controlling the horse when you climb on top of him... you're still controlling Arthur, who is using reigns to control the horse. You are not the horse). Nearly every control system in the game follows this description, it's feels weird and not natural at first. WHen I use a gun in Doom I am the Gun. When I jump on a horse in Assassins Creed, I am the horse. In Red Dead Redemption 2, you're arthur. Aiming and firing the gun is plodding, it takes patience to get your best shot, you have to cock certain guns to fire them, because you're Arthur, you're not the gun.
Still, even accepting this design decision, I still think the controls system is worth criticism. And I still think many of the systems in the game deserve criticism. Arbitrary decisions like how the wanted/witness/honor/disguise system works, arbitrary decisions like how the game takes guns off of your holster and puts them on your horse sometimes but not othertimes leaving you outgunned in key situations, difficult to understand systems like the Core/Bar system or the shootout system (this one I still truly don't understand, 100+ hours into the game). I think these all deserve critical review.
If these systems all deserve criticism, How can Red Dead Redemption 2 have a 97/100 on MetaCritic, more than my other favorite game that does those systems better?
Because MetaCritic is not an objective rating, it is an aggregate of subjective opinions, and the subjective opinions of those 100+ ratings on MetaCritic is that Red Dead Redemption 2 is better than your favorite game, even despite these systems that are worthy of criticism. Even despite that Bayonetta 2 controls better than Red Dead Redemption 2, RDR2 has some greater elements than Bayonetta 2 that mean that many subjective reviewers like it more. Even despite that Super Mario Odyssey has 1077 Gold Stars and Red Dead Redemption 2 has 0 Gold Stars, there is something about Red Dead Redemption 2's overall parts that means that many reviewers hold subjective opinions that they think it's a better game.
A conventional defense of RDR2 might be that "it's greater than the sum of its parts," meaning, the control system might be mediocre, the horse management system might be contrived and difficult to understand, the looting mechanics are clunky, the wanted system seems arbitrary, but if you put those all together with other great elements, it makes a game that's greater than the sum of those things." But I'd go a step further: Red Dead Redemption 2 is greater than the sum of its parts, but there are things in RDR2 that no major game has ever done before and no major game has ever come close to doing nearly as well: Realistic, believable characters with believable motivations doing things in a believable world in a consistent way to tell a truly endearing, gutwrenching, unique story, without falling into boring videogame storytelling tropes. The story/narrative isn't perfect, there are some things here and there that I think could be improved, but it's so far and away better than any major game that's ever been made before that combined with the sum of its other parts, it is subjectively a better game for those reviewers than your other favorite game.
Still, because enjoying a videogame is a subjective thing and I'm not playing your videogame for you, you can disagree and prefer some other game more, just like how you might enjoy The President is Missing more than The Road or you might enjoy Goodfellas or Avengers Infinity War more than The Godfather.
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The movement is a bit slow but I'll say that I really enjoyed the shooting. I love manually cocking the guns and there's a punchy feeling to them (especially the shotguns) that I enjoy. I'll never critisise a games gunplay when you can blow off limbs, it's too satisfying.
Nice post!
I tried in the first few pages of this thread to point out that it's just an aggregate of mostly self-selected reviewers in a quite homogenized enthusiast press, which explains the homogenized reception in highly anticipated games by well known and well liked developers and that it doesn't require money exchanging hands (although that line of argument has disappeared in this thread) or other daft reasons.
Being critical of how homogenized the enthusiast press is good, but it's also understandable from each publication's perspective to give the game to review to the person that is actually excited to play through them instead of having to play through it. We've had plenty of cases where games were assigned and people botched reviews and with online games were even found out that they didn't play more than 2 hours on their accounts.
People need to keep in mind that reviewing a movie is a 90 minute time investment. Reviewing RDR2 and engaging in the systems on offer is a 40 hour plus situation.
The lesson in all these threads complaining about aggregates is still ever the same: Identify who works in the enthusiast press that most matches your personal feelings in games and follow that person. Drop the perspective of aggregating subjective opinions, applying some formulas and then thinking you have science.
The funny thing is I thought you were talking about Brad's obsession with RDR2.
There's a reason why RDR2's user rating is so low on Metacritic.
Theres also reason no one takes metacritic user scores seriously , unless it serves particular narrative
This. With how often things get review bombed user score I take with a grain of salt.
Is there any other game with such a disparity between critic and user scores? TW3 and God of War are 92 user MC. "Belda" 2017 is at 85.
I suppose it might have got review bombed a bit more than other games for the 100 hour work week fiasco.
RDR2 and "Belda" had specific review bombing incidents- Zelda got review bombed by Horizon fanboys (and vice versa, to be fair), and RDR2 was bombed because of the work week controversy, as well as it not being on PC.
Idk, I never looked. But I bringing metacritic user scores into discussion about why you personally feel said game is bad, it's pretty useless. It's nearly on the same level as being upset about actual reviews scores from publications about particular game when person feel, those scores should align with personal opinion, rather than reviewers personal opinion
That's not what people are upset about. It's when a game has clear issues that aren't a matter of opinion and they are waived away. Wasn't that what the whole IGN meme was about?
Nah, both games have flaws. RDR2 having weak combat encounters and restrictive main mission design and witcher 3 having weak feeling moment to moment combat and just overall lack of feedback in vanilla game and course quest design is pretty basic. There's nothing dogshit about em.
I feel like Giant Bomb has talked a lot about the bad gameplay, the monotonous context sensitive bullshit and such. Both Jeff and Dan bounced off it, and Dan is a huge mark for Rockstar.
People upset about flaws of the game sure, but they are also upset the reviews aren't validating then. Just this thread title alone mentions metascore. Metascore is not fool proof for quality. 70+ people thought it was OK to give this game 9+,who am I to say that they are wrong
It was on the last podcast of their GOTY content. You can check the OP of the Giant Bomb GOTY thread for timestamps.
Edit: the most disappointing game part was on the 2nd podcast
If that's your argument, then how are you going to claim Witcher 3 is overrated when the user rating (9.4) is higher than the critic rating (9.3)? Or is this one of those rules that you get to arbitrarily invoke based on your subjective opinion about a particular product?
I don't really see "bad" gameplay. I see a lot of gameplay that isn't probably what GTA5 fans or fans of open world games are expecting in general. It's a very slow, deliberate style of game. It's almost meditative and relaxing, similar to how I feel when playing something like Euro Truck Simulator. Just slowly trotting along with your rifle, looking for that perfect deer to shoot. It's great.
I'm about 30% of the way through the game and have loved the story missions and the side mission stuff. The amount of detail is staggering. I fought the controls for a bit but now that I've got it down it's one of my favorite video game experiences ever.
About the only thing I'm disappointed with is the honor system. Game wants you to be good and doesn't really offer much in the way of indulging in being bad.
when i have to spin around 15 seconds so arthur will pick up his fucking soup bowl, it's bad gameplay.
Witcher 3 might actually be a good game. I just don't like it. Whereas Red Dead is well, not good.
Actually people do take it seriously. Otherwise what's the point of having the website up?
This is it for me. The game is nowhere near technically good enough to pull most of the animations off with the same efficiency as a human being. It makes the game tedious and annoying because it feels significantly harder to do basic things than it does in real life.
Interacting with the horse to get weapons, and putting stuff on the horse is basically torture.
I hated GTAIV and V and even Max Payne 3 to an extent because of how they controlled. Everything about the basic movements systems is fucking tedious and devoid of anything resembling "realism", or whatever the fuck the defense force calls it.
I've sometimes wondered how much of the backlash against RDR2's pacing had to do with a simulation style that many are simply unaccustomed to.
I personally LOVE sim games like ETS2, Farm Sim, etc. As you said, they're meditative & relaxing. I find them really Zen and a great way to unwind after work.
But the majority of the gaming community immediately dismisses the entire genre, pointing to its strengths and interpreting them as faults.
It's not hard to look at genre peers like Spidey & GoW and see the vast gulf in play-style with RDR2. Almost like comparing Euro Truck to Forza.
I think we just live in a world where fast-action and immediacy is more popular. Feels like there's a decided lack of appreciation for slower-paced games. Maybe something like Dark Souls in an exception to the rule? Either way, when I look at RDR2 I think, "What's the problem? Looks like it's doing what it sets out to do just fine."
There are bits in camp where you basically can't actually interact with items. Collecting arrows in Horseshoe Overlook was nearly impossible. They're right there, but for whatever reason the game has determined that the only access point is something where you need to half-crouch on a nearby box. And this isn't some area of the game you might never see, the entirety of Chapter 2 happens there and this is supposed to be your primary source of ammo. In the Chapter 4 camp, certain items on the desk become essentially inaccessible, and attempting to sleep in your bed has about a 50/50 chance of actually opening the wardrobe to change your outfit. They made sleeping a requirement of the game and then made it so that for an entire Chapter you have to fight with your character to get him in bed as though he were a rambunctious toddler.
I'm fine with the interaction bit. I don't mind that it's slow or plodding. But the finnicky nature of having to be in a pixel-perfect location before the animations will work doesn't heighten my engagement of the game. If anything, it just makes me keenly aware that I'm in a simulation that isn't offering me the degree of realism it purports to. You're right on point; the specificity of the animation actually ends up hurting immersion. Can't grab a bowl of stew from that side; gotta walk over here... no, not there, reposition slightly, oh, Karen has just come in and rudely pushed me aside so she could grab some stew because apparently she's too good to wait in line... wait, Tilly's pushing me aside too, ladies first I guess, that's cool. Oh boy, finally got to the exact right spot to grab some stew, I'm gonna enjoy this and, oh, I'm just chugging the entire bowl of STEAMING HOT LIQUID and throwing my bowl on the ground like a damn animal, OK then. But it does wonders for my CORES!
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the game. But it definitely has some impediments to enjoying it that tarnish an otherwise incredible experience. Issues with being able to actually interact with the world in a realistic way is right up there.
The crux of the matter is that in real life we have a far better/smoother control over ourselves than we do of Arthur in RDR 2 so all the talk about realism doesn't really hold weight.
