I just need to say, this game is blowing my mind.
I've never played a game which felt like it could be a real place before. I just get lost looking at everything. Inspecting every tree just to see how different they are from each other, seeing some building in the distance and heading there just to find a new side story, watching the animals react to me being around, how my horse behaves, talking/responding to people in an organic way, studying the architecture, seeing how npcs go about doing their thing, etc
It's really freaking immersive, to the point I believe it's starting to blur the lines between games and reality in new ways. I'm scared I may have been creating new memories of places I've been to that aren't even real.
I've played many open world games (even previous rockstar games) and while they're cool, I always went directly to the missions because everything in between I found boring and a waste of my time. Not this game, this one is a joy just to walk around and discover new places.
Yes the controls still are clunky as hell and the UI is fucking shit, but the attention to detail in every other area is just nuts it'll make it really hard for me to go back to other open world games in the future.