Red Dead Redemption 2

DS86DS

Just got around to playing the original Red Dead Redemption there yesterday. The difference in graphics between the 2010 and 2018 games is unreal, even playing Xbox One X enhanced on a 4K TV.

Still I think the original game has a lot of qualities that RDR2 lacks

aaronjumper

I bloody love this game. Got the wander lust in chapter 3 and just went off.
Getting into scrapes, bounty hunting, selling stolen horses/carriages, breaking into homesteads.

I fully upgraded the camp, bought every weapon available, upgraded and customised everything.
Bought the best saddle and put it on a rare horse a friend told me about.

Just maxed out health, stamina and dead eye. Decided to go get the Legend of the East satchel for the craic.
Only one left to make before it unlocks, the kit satchel.
Requirements: 1 perfect deer pelt, 1 perfect elk pelt, 1 perfect panther pelt.
Bloody panthers, when they do spawn they're shite quality.

I might continue the story if this keeps up.

Took me a bloody age to get that panther skin :mad:

Penfailed

Just finished Chapter 6...

I miss My Lovely Horse and Arthur

khaldrogo

Penfailed wrote:

Just finished Chapter 6...

Just finished it tonight myself. Totes emosh

citytillidie

Surprised a certain group has not being up in arms on the name of a debtor :pac:

Dr. Bre

Herbalist 9 what a pain

Dr. Bre

Dr. Bre wrote: »

Herbalist 9 what a pain

Really annoying you don't make progress towards it until you get to it as you would have had most if not all done by then especially if you did the mission for collecting the orchids etc.

khaldrogo

What is the point of the whole SW of the map??? If I didn't explore it myself I never would have seen it

20silkcut

khaldrogo wrote: »

What is the point of the whole SW of the map??? If I didn't explore it myself I never would have seen it

One of life’s mysteries.


Surely has to be something coming in single player dlc to utilize it and Mexico.

Sad Professor

New Austin was added relatively late in development (it wasn't in the leaked map from 2 years ago). I guess it was an extra biome that's significantly different from the others, so easy to justify given that most of the design work was already done several years earlier. It was most likely included for future use in Online as I'd say the chances of single player DLC are slim to none.

wotzgoingon

I thought that myself until I tried a tiny bit of online and where do you start in that area.

It is a massive waste and pointless to the game as there are no missions there and like the above poster said I would not have known it was there until I explored it myself also.

My memory is a bit bad but is that game area from the first game?

The Nal

wotzgoingon wrote: »

My memory is a bit bad but is that game area from the first game?

Yes. I enjoyed going down there. Tumbleweed

is still a town and has a saloon, jail, bar etc and theres lots of points of interest, bone collections etc if youre into that. I dont bother. I just rode around killing everyone basically

but I must have played a 1000 hours of RDR1 so it was nice to go back in time.

johnny_ultimate

So, after several months and dozens of hours (given my pace of play and frequently getting distracted by other games) I finally finished the damn thing last night. I pushed through to the end to see how things played out, and whether the interesting narrative threads / ideas justified the often frustrating experience of playing the thing.

In short, it wasn't worth it.

Rambling thoughts follow.

The positive points have long since been exhausted. This really is the most lavish, convincing open world there has been - a huge technical and artistic accomplishment. The shine from the almost obsessive attention to detail never quite wore off - things like seeing the water in an oil town sparkle with oily residue are a step beyond what we've seen before.

Shame that open world feels so wasted. Sure, there's plenty of 'stuff' to do, from hunting to bounty hunts to simply taking in the sights. But more than ever it was like Rockstar tried to make two games at once: a cinematic action adventure and an open world one. The scale of the world only ever becomes apparent in the ever laborious sessions of riding from an objective to the actual mission. When you reach where you're going, Rockstar more often than not grab your arm and don't let go. A few chase missions aside, this is basically a linear game shoved into a vast map. If you decide to do things your own way in a mission, a 'game over' screen may well be your reward.

It helps little that the missions themselves are more often than not uninspired. So many end with the inevitable confrontation against a couple of dozen anonymous dudes. Given it feels like there's hundreds of main missions (or at least close to breaching the triple-figure mark) this becomes tiring very quickly. The gunplay itself isn't particularly fun, anyway - basically just you coming to grips with the auto-aim system. Worse is when this all starts impacting character - when, towards the end of the story, Arthur was drifting in a very different direction (with a little helping hand from the lite RPG elements), these mounting body counts created friction with what was unfolding in cutscenes.

This is hardly a new criticism for video games, and not even for Rockstar ones - but with this game's enormous length it became even more glaring than usual. What use is the conversation system when it's all basically for show, and you never get to use it in an interesting way? For all the systems Rockstar put in to make it feel like you can interact with the world in other ways, that they ultimately matter little in the core campaign is a massive disappointment.

Which isn't to say there aren't high points. Occasionally - typically in the big climactic missions of the middle chapters of the game - things come together well. The music flares, the art direction soars, and the fragility of Dutch's gang becomes all too apparent as tense gameplay meets bloody narrative momentum. There are other attempts to at least break things up a bit, but these are a mixed bag - some cool tangents (the night out in Valentine being the obvious standout) but others which come across as tutorials for ideas which are swiftly disregarded once the mission complete box pops up.

That latter point is something which irked me throughout. This is a good 60 hour game I reckon, but in its default state the game persistently makes you feel like you're still in the opening stages. The artless tutorial boxes and context sensitive actions add to that impression, never properly letting you explore the systems the game offers you. It's like the anti-Breath of the Wild in that sense. Maybe it's just because those systems aren't particularly dynamic or versatile in the first place.

For all its pre-release hype of realism, many of the systems reveal themselves as very shallow and very game-y very quickly - the camp which is basically just a glorified upgrade system; or the eating and sleeping which is just a way of refreshing your health and energy bars down in the corner. This is fine if that's what they are, but all too often the game just temporarily judders to a halt for these sort of things - interesting at first, but less convincing in your 30th or 40th hour. Ultimately, it aims for realism, but its many, many concessions to typical video game logic - whether that's magically reappearing horses or being able to heal a few dozen bullet wounds with a magic potion - limit that goal.

And so we get to the story, the epic western tale that wraps all of these pieces. Truth be told, I liked Arthur Morgan as a character - especially in the latter stretch of the game, his character development is handled with grace (even when he's shooting a few dozen randomers in the head). When the game's good, it's pretty special - whether that's an intense setpiece or a sequence of simple character-driven drama. There’s a sense of things very slowly going to **** which is well realised, where even the moments of happiness come loaded with the hint of bad things to come. It’s a reasonably effective study of a changing society and landscape, with Arthur the one leaving behind the life he no longer can live.

The problem, as with so much of this game, is that everything's so diluted. Individual chapters have compelling self-contained arcs - Rhodes being an obvious highlight in that respect - but for the overarching stuff it's all a mess. This is jarring in particular when you reach the late game - the game having

not one but two overlong, underwhelming epilogues almost feels like a cruel joke after you've finally reached something like a satisfying ending

. For at least the last couple of chapters it felt like I was just trudging through main story mission after main story mission... a seemingly endless supply of those cursed yellow mission markers blocking the path to the next major narrative development. There's no sense of pace or momentum, and that damages the good stuff. What good is a tense conflict or moment of high drama when you can go missions before it's even mentioned again? I adore stories that take their time to allow characters and conflict to percolate over a long running time - this, sadly, takes the piss instead, and the long stretches of tedium simply don't pay off in any rewarding or meaningful way.

Which, I suppose, is ultimately where my overall dislike for the game is. RDR2 has its magnificent moments - those scenes where Rockstar's idiosyncratic design approach feels like a good thing. But they're edited into a mess of content - like the game-makers never stopped to cut out the bad stuff. They wanted everything in there, and for all its incredible extravagance there's a central lack of purpose. It's like the Housers want to make this pacy, dramatic and character-driven cinematic game in the style of an Uncharted... but are also utterly enamoured with making their open worlds ever larger and more indulgent. They're working in opposite directions, and that's never been more apparent than it is in RDR2. The result? Hints of brilliance, but a whole lot of tedious shooting and horseback exposition.

DEFTLEFTHAND

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I thought that myself until I tried a tiny bit of online and where do you start in that area.

It is a massive waste and pointless to the game as there are no missions there and like the above poster said I would not have known it was there until I explored it myself also.

My memory is a bit bad but is that game area from the first game?

You can do Bounty missions for the Tumbleweed Sheriff, he's quite the character, really funny. A gang called Los lobos are terroising the area.

Also I found the cholera ridden Aramadillo interesting. It was hilarious robbing everyone in sight with no law to ruin the fun. It was also great to fck with Herbert Moon once again.

DEFTLEFTHAND

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I thought that myself until I tried a tiny bit of online and where do you start in that area.

It is a massive waste and pointless to the game as there are no missions there and like the above poster said I would not have known it was there until I explored it myself also.

My memory is a bit bad but is that game area from the first game?

You can do Bounty missions for the Tumbleweed Sheriff, he's quite the character, really funny. A gang called Los lobos are terrorising the area.

I found the cholera ridden Aramadillo interesting. It was hilarious robbing everyone in sight with no law to ruin the fun. It was also great to be able to fck with Herbert Moon once again.

martyos121

Finally after finishing it there, at last. Overall, I enjoyed it and it was a highly unique gaming experience, but I’d rather eat crow than play through it again. Way too much of a slog at times. I hope R*’s next major open-world release (whether it’s Bully, GTA or something else) will bring back the fun and chaos, it’s truly what they’re best at.

heebusjeebus

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

What the hell is going on? I'm at the end of chapter 6

trying to crawl away from Micah. It keeps prompting L3 to crawl and yet Arthur won't crawl.

It then gives me the option to retry checkpoint. Is this a troll? Like the game trying to be clever? Talk about killing the momentum.

ETA: Never mind. Turns out you have to hammer L3 rather than push it forward which is counter-intuitive and about sums up how daft the controls are. :rolleyes:

Ah man, I had the exact same issue. Was googling for ages trying to find a way around it

Dr. Bre

Master hunter 9 is a pain . Can’t find any playing possum!

DEFTLEFTHAND

Anyone know the best place to find a skunk?

Need one for a request mission, I'm traipsing up and down Tall Trees searching but all I'm finding are fecking squirrels.

Tacitus Kilgore

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

Anyone know the best place to find a skunk?

Need one for a request mission, I'm traipsing up and down Tall Trees searching but all I'm finding are fecking squirrels.

If it helps I ran over 3 or 4 of them between Emerald Ranch & Van Horn doing horseman 5 last night..

And a 3 star beaver that I wanted

q85dw7osi4lebg

Anyone else have the issue when online whereby someone is transparent and can shoot you but you cant shoot them? Happening me more and more, and it's always someone from a different posse. I've 150mg fiber so can't be a lag issue on my end!

khaldrogo

Cheaters

Doyler92

Anyone any advice on completing “Gambler 9” to win 3 games of dominos in a row?

Dr. Bre

Doyler92 wrote: »

Anyone any advice on completing “Gambler 9” to win 3 games of dominos in a row?

Go to YouTube plenty of tips. Be careful of spoilers tho

Ah here If you got the black jack one then you are golden for the others. FFS had the dealer pull 3 aces in a row on me in black jack while trying for that.