I made a thread a few days about how the shooting mechanics are a lot better in first person mode.
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No matter how much I rationalize it, I really disliked RDR2.
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I made a thread a few days about how the shooting mechanics are a lot better in first person mode.
Prejudice much? I don't know how you came to that conclusion but you're proving my point.
I'm not 'upset'; just made an observation in my initial post that this is just another rdr2 hate thread. Judging by the posts in here, I'm not wrong.
I'm also not 'worried' to detail my opinions on the story but I find it futile, for the reasons stated; Haven't even started and here's you jumping to conclusions.
Yeah OP I was surprised how repetitive the "WE NEED more money" beats were. The story really feels like they're stalling especially at chapter 3. Just didn't grab me as much as I thought it would.
I stopped at chapter 5 because the mission design was really wearing on me. Thinking of completing it someday to see how the ending tries it all together. But if I'm this far in and the narrative hasn't gripped me I feel that's an indictment on the story.
I stopped at chapter 5 because the mission design was really wearing on me. Thinking of completing it someday to see how the ending tries it all together. But if I'm this far in and the narrative hasn't gripped me I feel that's an indictment on the story.
I put it down in chapter 2 not because I was hating it but just because other games grabbed my attention more. When does the game really hit its groove? Chapter 4 I'm hearing?
It's a video game, bro. Instead of rationalizing go do something else.
Do your tastes directly align with critical reception for TV, Movies and Music? Do you toss and turn at night because you found Roma boring?
Just move on, my guy.
Do your tastes directly align with critical reception for TV, Movies and Music? Do you toss and turn at night because you found Roma boring?
Just move on, my guy.
Maybe the "reviewers" are gamers who liked this game a lot? Not some huge conspiracy.
It is whatever anyone says it is. I've seen plenty say it's one of their favorite games ever and these threads on the other hand. Games arent just "10/10" games, that's just a bizarre infatuation that this industry has with scores.
I'm also kinda of surprised at the criticism of Dutch talking about one more score. Lol, they are an outlaw gang, robbing people is what they do. That would be like criticizing a coach of sports team who kept saying, "Let's get one more win guys, one more!".
I
absolutely agree. Except that I cba to finish chapter 2 of the game.
Once again you're doing this and no, there hasn't been a thread a day on Red Dead Redemption 2.
RDR2's story stretches far beyond the campaign missions. It's the world building through environmental storytelling and a staggering attention detail. It's all those rich camp interactions and a genuine sense of community that evolves over time. Arthur's journal where he shares his most honest thoughts & feelings about the state of things. It's those quieter, slice of life side missions featuring wonderful characters like Miss Charlotte Balfour. And unpredictable world events, both scripted & emergent.
Personally, Red Dead 2 was an just ok for me. I thought the story ended up being fantastic, but it had sections were really slow. Some chapters were overly long.
The open world was beautiful but it took forever to get anywhere. As someone with limited gaming time, I don't want to spend 15 mins riding fucking horse between missions.
The gameplay itself kind of shooting gallery, most missions in structure were the same thing over and over: Go to A, hide behind rock and shoot people with dead eye and auto aim. Ride horse to get away, repeat. I liked it but I didn't love it.
Overall I would say it is firmly in the 'ok' category but I thought The Witcher 3 was a far better open world game and so was GTA V for that matter.
The open world was beautiful but it took forever to get anywhere. As someone with limited gaming time, I don't want to spend 15 mins riding fucking horse between missions.
The gameplay itself kind of shooting gallery, most missions in structure were the same thing over and over: Go to A, hide behind rock and shoot people with dead eye and auto aim. Ride horse to get away, repeat. I liked it but I didn't love it.
Overall I would say it is firmly in the 'ok' category but I thought The Witcher 3 was a far better open world game and so was GTA V for that matter.
It's another thread with valid opinions on the game.
you even concluded first by assuming anyone opinion that differs from your point is a 'hot take'.
It's okay to hate or love the game.
There's a positive thread also active, you can post your opinions there without it being debated by 'hot takes' if that's what you care about?
If that's truly your opinion then fine. But I think more often than not people feel like they need to have an extreme reaction to games. It's either the best thing ever or it's utter garbage. And often times still it's people developing these opinions as a reaction to other peoples opinions.
For me RDR2 was a good game. Certainly had it's flaws but not enough to make it an bad experience. It wasn't my personal GOAT or a 10/10 like a lot of publications made out, nor was it a boring clunky mess like others have made out. It was a good game that goes in a list of other good games that I enjoyed.
That's been my thinking since childhood and it's never changed. When I played Crash or Spyro or MGS1 or whatever I never went into them thinking "this needs to be the best thing ever and totally change my world or else it's going to suck". I just wanted a game that I could play from start to finish and enjoy. And that's what I got with RDR2. I feel that not just in videos but in other entertainment mediums as well people need every TV show, movie, book etc.. they experience to be 10/10 or else for them it's not worth their time.
For me RDR2 was a good game. Certainly had it's flaws but not enough to make it an bad experience. It wasn't my personal GOAT or a 10/10 like a lot of publications made out, nor was it a boring clunky mess like others have made out. It was a good game that goes in a list of other good games that I enjoyed.
That's been my thinking since childhood and it's never changed. When I played Crash or Spyro or MGS1 or whatever I never went into them thinking "this needs to be the best thing ever and totally change my world or else it's going to suck". I just wanted a game that I could play from start to finish and enjoy. And that's what I got with RDR2. I feel that not just in videos but in other entertainment mediums as well people need every TV show, movie, book etc.. they experience to be 10/10 or else for them it's not worth their time.
What a level headed pragmatic post. I agree with your point of view.
I think the epiphany that outside of production values AAAA games are mostly not super good or even as good as lower budget games, is an essential part of maturing as a gamer (I say maturing, but it usually happens past your 30s).
You grow up thinking that these are the game that extend the possibilities and push the boundaries of the design space of videogames, but the fact of the matter is that they are often safe, designed by committee, leading to a derivative structure and the conveyor belt development method across many studios makes iterative development, let alone much needed flipping the tea table, impossible. All of this is anathema to the creative process and it shows in games with a $500M production budget that are generally good, fine even, but still incorporate game design sensibilities of fifteen years ago.
With that epiphany also comes the realization that a lot of the reviewers--the ones who still hand out scores that is, not talking about the Eurogamers and Kotakus and the like--are largely unpaid hobbyists who don't notice their susceptibility for halo effects and biases related to feeling special for playing the most expensive games ever months before anyone else. The kind who's just happy they picked up the theme of people set in their ways who are overtaken by societal change, without realizing it was picked up on because it was already discussed endlessly with respect to RDR1, and that 2 is therefore derivative of its own precursor.
So good on you OP, the sooner people realize it the better.
You grow up thinking that these are the game that extend the possibilities and push the boundaries of the design space of videogames, but the fact of the matter is that they are often safe, designed by committee, leading to a derivative structure and the conveyor belt development method across many studios makes iterative development, let alone much needed flipping the tea table, impossible. All of this is anathema to the creative process and it shows in games with a $500M production budget that are generally good, fine even, but still incorporate game design sensibilities of fifteen years ago.
With that epiphany also comes the realization that a lot of the reviewers--the ones who still hand out scores that is, not talking about the Eurogamers and Kotakus and the like--are largely unpaid hobbyists who don't notice their susceptibility for halo effects and biases related to feeling special for playing the most expensive games ever months before anyone else. The kind who's just happy they picked up the theme of people set in their ways who are overtaken by societal change, without realizing it was picked up on because it was already discussed endlessly with respect to RDR1, and that 2 is therefore derivative of its own precursor.
So good on you OP, the sooner people realize it the better.
Because they're often presented as a storytelling medium, especially JRPGs. And because it's interesting to ask how different mediums compare. Photography and painting were always compared, almost from the start, and the comparisons deepened pretty much everyone's understanding of both mediums. The same has been done with movies and books; why not games and other forms of storytelling too?
Being specific would require an enormous amount of writing - it's easily the subject of a book. But I can mention a few things in passing that I think make visual novels, movies, books, and other (mostly) non-interactive media better vehicles for storytelling than games:
- By virtue of being interactive, games have to make room for player decisions that narratives can't or simply don't accommodate. This is positive and negative, at least potentially. More often that not, the result is either a series of decisions that make no difference (select A, B, or C, but always end up at X) or a series of contradictions that make the decisions themselves seem meaningless. The Mass Effect series is usually trotted out to make this point, but it's much worse than that. If gamers had real choices in most JRPGs (or RPGs generally; even the best ones are guilty of this), they could often decide themselves right out of the drama of their narratives. In any case, my point is that player choice is always a kind of illusion, which destroys the narrative in one way or the other, usually by making it clear that the game is on rails anyway. So this is a double failure. First, the game fails to provide the choice it pretends is unique to itself. Second, it betrays the narrative by making elements of its progress meaningless. It's hard to do both. This is why choose-your-own-adventure books feel so inconsequential. They try to have it every way and end up failing in all of them.
- I've never seen character development in a game that even comes close to the character development possible in a novel or graphic novel or movie. Why? One reason comes to mind immediately: because it would take far too much time and it would compete with what many people think are central to games: gameplay. All that time hunting things down, grinding, using items, fighting, looking through item shops, etc. - all of that could be thrown out in favor of more dialog, more development, more narrative, but it isn't because games don't really allow for that level of depth by their very nature. There are exceptions of course, but there's no doubt in my mind that such games are the exception, not the rule (and they are often written about in that way). Usually, when I read reviews of them, they are talked about in terms of "movies" or "simulators" of some kind. People naturally sense there is something different about them compared to most other games.
- Narrative and literary art compliment each other by being of the same medium: words. Game developers and writers are still finding ways to marry their storytelling to the gaming aspect of their medium. Some developers have been successful. Dark Souls does a really fantastic job of telling a story through images, environment, and item descriptions, all while leaving room for the player's imagination. Hollow Knight also handles this well. There aren't many like them. Games are just at a disadvantage when it comes to telling a story because they have to try and make so many things work: does the artwork line up with the gameplay? The story? Do the character designs make sense along with the characters themselves? Are they attractive? Do they make sense in the world that we've drawn around them? Are they conducive to on-screen action? The characters have to exist as characters in the story, on the screen, and in the hands of the players. This brings me to the next issue, which is what gets me most.
- Meta-narrative is virtually non-existent in games, and it is rarely discussed at length where possible. Why? I'm partially in the dark here, though I have some ideas. There is a ton of room for good meta-interpretive literature on the subject of games, but most game storylines don't encourage it. They all operate on a number of rather tired and true structures, usually involving a hero and a villain (a good Bildungsroman is satisfying, but its a cliche). This works extremely well if you want to put the player into either role because it gives the designers all kinds of excuses for having you run around the world and fight, but it gets old and once you've seen enough of them, you find that the small details don't make much a difference. In other words, the easiest way to mix narrative and game is to find the most action-oriented narrative frame and stuff the game inside, or vice versa. Find me a game with a narrative structure and a meta-narrative structure as deep and as complicated as Lolita or The Trial and I'll eat my hat. It doesn't exist because how do you game-ify that level of complexity and interest? Works like that are absolutely dedicated to the art of writing, narrative, characterization, drama, development, etc. Their entire being is poured into the art of producing a story that operates on multiple levels. To achieve this in a game... at some point you'd have to guide the player in a way that would feel antithetical to the nature of a game. Undertale comes very close to getting to that level of meta-narrative thinking, but it's predictable and a little one-dimensional compared to its book and movie cousins. This is, in my eyes, why the games best with storylines tend to leave the details of their storytelling light - because then the player can be involved in filling in the details as much as they are involved in exploring, and in fact there is a wonderful parallel between world exploration, world building, and storytelling. What that means in my eyes is that games need to leverage their strengths and milk the interactivity in a way that novels can't. It would certainly be difficult for an author to tell a story like Dark Souls without ruining what makes that game so unique.
Of course, you can disagree with all of this and that's cool. Everyone likes different stuff. I'd only add that games are a young medium and as far as storytelling goes, they have tons of room to grow. Novels and short stories and the like have been around forever, so it's no wonder they're more developed and nuanced. They have a couple thousand year head start, at the very least.
I think it's a very good story but is also quite imperfect.
It's biggest flaw is just how long it is. There are whole chapters I would probably say are superfluous, and I think the stuff that works in the game would shine more if it was edited.
There were also some side quests like the Electric Chair one that were what I'm going to call Rockstar bullshit, which is basic satirical commentary that says very little that is clever, thought provoking or even interesting.
It's biggest flaw is just how long it is. There are whole chapters I would probably say are superfluous, and I think the stuff that works in the game would shine more if it was edited.
There were also some side quests like the Electric Chair one that were what I'm going to call Rockstar bullshit, which is basic satirical commentary that says very little that is clever, thought provoking or even interesting.
Is that for real?! Sounds like ludonarrative dissonance if the story can't acknowledge what you have and is so scripted to the point where your playing of the game doesn't matter to the goals of the story.
the '"money" in question is not measly 5-20k which is what most players manage to get during the peak of the campaign, but $150k+ which is probably close to impossible to get in the game. The blackwater take alone which they had to leave behind was 150k alone.
Thanks for clarifying! So the poster I quoted was leaving out key details to misrepresent?
Thing is, this opinion isn't exactly rare. This game is far more disliked than you'd expect for a Rockstar game.
I can understand how some people could be put off by the game-play and pacing, it's not for everyone. For me personally, its the best game I've played in the generation though.
I do strongly disagree with people saying that the story is weak though, I can't think of many better stories in games that cause you to get so invested. TLOU1 and The Walking Dead are the only other contenders from my list.
I do strongly disagree with people saying that the story is weak though, I can't think of many better stories in games that cause you to get so invested. TLOU1 and The Walking Dead are the only other contenders from my list.
Put it this way. I'm enjoying AC Odyssey way more than this. I'd give that game a 9/10. I'm not even a big AC fan (didn't think Origins was more than a 7/10).
RDR2 is an absolute complete chore and just not fun? Whenever I play it I just feel like I wanna be playing something else instead in my library. I ditched it about 15 hours in. I kinda felt like that with the first game but managed to finish but again I wasn't blown away by that either. I think it's a Rockstar thing. I'm just not that impressed by their games from a gameplay point of view. I've finished all their games but this will be the first one I can't be bothered to play through. It just didn't grab me. The game world is amazing in terms of detail and graphics but that doesn't make a game as we all know (except reviewers).
The attention to detail is amazing. But everything else is just dull. This takes it to the extreme in terms of convoluted mechanics, controls and just general slog.
This is a prime example of how out of touch reviewers are and just think Rockstar can do no wrong because they create these cinematic highly realistic worlds. The gameplay? It's normally pretty boring.
RDR2 is an absolute complete chore and just not fun? Whenever I play it I just feel like I wanna be playing something else instead in my library. I ditched it about 15 hours in. I kinda felt like that with the first game but managed to finish but again I wasn't blown away by that either. I think it's a Rockstar thing. I'm just not that impressed by their games from a gameplay point of view. I've finished all their games but this will be the first one I can't be bothered to play through. It just didn't grab me. The game world is amazing in terms of detail and graphics but that doesn't make a game as we all know (except reviewers).
The attention to detail is amazing. But everything else is just dull. This takes it to the extreme in terms of convoluted mechanics, controls and just general slog.
This is a prime example of how out of touch reviewers are and just think Rockstar can do no wrong because they create these cinematic highly realistic worlds. The gameplay? It's normally pretty boring.
Never finished it so I can't pass judgement on the story, but I thought it was a beautiful looking bad video game when I put it down after 12 hours or so.
It severely dissapointed me after the incredible rdr1. Rockstar of today sacrifices Fun Gameplay for a better cinematic Experience. And it suckssssss ballsssssssssss.
I recently went back to San Andreas and couldn't believe how much more Fun that game was compared to GTA V.
I recently went back to San Andreas and couldn't believe how much more Fun that game was compared to GTA V.
Spider-man got a nomination for story which was basically a children's book, so that invalidates all of the nominations.
That's a shame. I think it was fantastic.
Stop speaking for everyone.
I adored RDR1 and thus I was very hyped for RDR2, but yeah, a lot of the gripes people have with the game also apply to me. I loved the story, I loved the characters, Arthur is god-damn amazing, the audiovisual aspect and the design of the world are outright phenomenal and I cried at the final scene before the epilogue starts.
That said, I also thought it was overlong, traversal became a chore after a while, some of the side missions are boring as hell, the railroading in the main missions is outright insulting and ruined a lot of the fun I had with the game, the borked HDR sucks and near the end you get swarmed with so many shootouts with tons of stormtroopers that any pretense the game had towards being realistic is thrown right out of the window. Near the end I also was ready for it to finally end.
I rarely have play such a mixed bag of a game.
That said, I also thought it was overlong, traversal became a chore after a while, some of the side missions are boring as hell, the railroading in the main missions is outright insulting and ruined a lot of the fun I had with the game, the borked HDR sucks and near the end you get swarmed with so many shootouts with tons of stormtroopers that any pretense the game had towards being realistic is thrown right out of the window. Near the end I also was ready for it to finally end.
I rarely have play such a mixed bag of a game.
This is absolutely true. An average book is about the level of the best videogame stories, certainly those found in AAA games.
I have to assume that the people who praise RDR2's story are judging it by the (low) standards of video game stories? Because it sure as shit isn't a good one without that caveat.
You'll be surprised to find out comic books are generally aimed at younger people.
Clearly people who praise rdr writing, never seen a film or read a book. That's the only possible answer, right? It's not like people would praise in its own right, with context in mind. That would be quite unthinkable.
lmao yikes I take it back, full on ludonarrative dissonance there.