Red Dead Redemption 2

20silkcut · 06-01-2019 07:56PM

Herr Strauss was hard done by in my opinion. Arthur lost the rag and fu*ked him out of camp. He was a money lender it’s a nasty business. Then he subsequently dies in custody refusing to talk to the pinkertons

He wasn’t the worst by any means. Real dissonance about his story.

wotzgoingon · 06-01-2019 08:13PM

20silkcut wrote: »

Then he subsequently dies in custody refusing to talk to the pinkertons

How come I cannot remember that part of the story. Memory of a gold fish. :eek:

20silkcut · 06-01-2019 09:03PM

wotzgoingon wrote: »

How come I cannot remember that part of the story. Memory of a gold fish. :eek:

Charles tells John at the prize fight in st Denis in the epilogue

20silkcut · 06-01-2019 10:49PM

I think Arthur got it wrong on that one.
It was one cut scene that just didn’t feel right. But sure I suppose just like in real life you can’t get them all right.

The Phantom Pain · 07-01-2019 04:01AM

The lack of fast travel really wastes the player's time - often you'll be riding to a mission that only takes place at a certain time of day and because the day night cycle is so short often by the time you get there the mission has disappeared causing you to waste money renting a room. Then riding to remote locations to hunt legendary animals only to be told you can't do it because there is "too much activity" in the area...

The quality of life is terrible.

Cina · 07-01-2019 07:50AM

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

The lack of fast travel really wastes the player's time - often you'll be riding to a mission that only takes place at a certain time of day and because the day night cycle is so short often by the time you get there the mission has disappeared causing you to waste money renting a room. Then riding to remote locations to hunt legendary animals only to be told you can't do it because there is "too much activity" in the area...

The quality of life is terrible.

I think the lack of fast travel works really well in the early chapters because it forces you to explore, and in doing so you come across loads of side missions and strangers and random encounters.

The problem from maybe C4 onward (and especially C6) is that these missions tend to run dry and it just becomes a real slog going to each story mission and back.

That said there are ways to get around, the camp fast travel and then using the trains/carts sort of negates it, but still doesn't beat the day/night cycle for missions you talk about above.

07-01-2019 07:55AM

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

The lack of fast travel really wastes the player's time - often you'll be riding to a mission that only takes place at a certain time of day and because the day night cycle is so short often by the time you get there the mission has disappeared causing you to waste money renting a room. Then riding to remote locations to hunt legendary animals only to be told you can't do it because there is "too much activity" in the area...

The quality of life is terrible.

you can camp out anywhere and burn a few hours

07-01-2019 09:05AM

On the camping, I only realised very late in the game that when it tells you that you can't rest / camp due to activity near by you can just pull up the camp from the L1/LB radial menu and it will let you.

Sad Professor · 07-01-2019 09:09AM

[Deleted User] wrote: »

On the camping, I only realised very late in the game that when it tells you that you can't rest / camp due to activity near by you can just pull up the camp from the L1/LB radial menu and it will let you.

That’s the only way I ever camped (there’s another?) and I still sometimes got that message when bounty hunters etc were nearby.

07-01-2019 09:49AM

Sad Professor wrote: »

That’s the only way I ever camped (there’s another?) and I still sometimes got that message when bounty hunters etc were nearby.

Yeah I was holding Y to rest then camp.

The Phantom Pain · 07-01-2019 10:16AM

BrownFinger wrote: »

you can camp out anywhere and burn a few hours

I was referring to missions that take place in the city so if I camped out that means I would have to ride out of town into the wild just to avoid paying for a room and then ride back again which again is a waste of time. I've adjusted the day/night cycle to extend it but it's still too short for my liking.

@Cina, yeah, agreed. The lack of fast travel is good early game when you're still discovering the world but all the random encounters are more or less the same now, and I'm finding that due to the broken bounty system I avoid them now anyway. Even with stagecoaches and trains you need to do a bit of riding to them, plus taking them without putting your horse in the stables first is risky as your horse can die while it's chasing the train or wagon...

I would also say that the puppet strings of the open world are starting to show. R* has gone out of their way to create a realistic, "immersive" world but it feels very scripted, like I'm constantly the center of attention and all the NPCs are acting out their roles as soon as I arrive rather than feeling like a world that exists with or without my presence. The game won't let the player just "be" for a moment which is why every NPC has to say hello to me or get into a fight with me because I stood too close. It's overbearing.

Controls become clunkier and less polished as it goes along with entire animations refusing to play out, and the positioning for them is very pedantic. Also, you wouldn't brush horse hair by constantly putting away the brush after each stroke you'd continue brushing until it's clean.

Tutorials are...not good. I was delighted to find an Arabian white horse just randomly while tracking a legendary animal only to spend about 20 minutes trying to figure out what the hell the tutorial meant by how to tame it because R* thought it would be a good idea to do all tutorials in real-time...

Simple quality of life checks like letting you know what legendary animals you've hunted by scratching them off on the actual mission checklist (rather than making the player scramble around for them on the map) is not there.
Or letting you view the list of cosmetic items to craft for the Trapper/gang camp via your journal or whatever so you can keep an eye out for the relevant animals while out in the wild.

Some of the optional objectives are nonsensical - "Search all rooms before finding xxx". Why would Arthur want to search all rooms when the goal is to find the target as quickly as possible?

I could go on and on... I'm finding it hard to believe that R* tested with non devs/non coders. The flaws here are just way too obvious to not be flagged up by a casual player. It feels very much like an industry show piece made purely purely for self gratification and that they didn't consider whether any of these visually impressive elements would actually be fun to play 50 hours down the line.

I've just reached chapter 5 which I hear it the worst chapter and I'm dreading finding out why. (btw Dutch's gang really are the dumbest bandits ever. It's surprising they've lasted this long lol)

khaldrogo · 07-01-2019 03:25PM

Got this last week. Not overly impressed tbh.

Lack of fast travel is killing me. The aiming and dead eye are crap. There is so much going on at once I can't remember what I'm meant to be doing. It's a bit boring tbh

khaldrogo · 07-01-2019 03:26PM

Got this last week. Not overly impressed tbh.

Lack of fast travel is killing me. The aiming and dead eye are crap. There is so much going on at once I can't remember what I'm meant to be doing. It's a bit boring tbh

Flyer29 · 08-01-2019 12:17AM

Has anyone started the story again having completed it already? Just wandering how it stacks up the second time out

Starting to get a bit bored of roaming around now and thinking about starting a new game

wotzgoingon · 08-01-2019 12:33AM

I re-played a bit to get a achievement I missed by loading a old save. I even had to play through the part I hated first time round which was Chapter 5 wasn't too bad the second time round. It was actually a lot shorter than I remembered.

The Phantom Pain · 08-01-2019 12:53AM

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I re-played a bit to get a achievement I missed by loading a old save. I even had to play through the part I hated first time round which was Chapter 5 wasn't too bad the second time round. It was actually a lot shorter than I remembered.

What achievement was that? (if it's a spoiler don't say

)

wotzgoingon · 08-01-2019 12:56AM

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

What achievement was that? (if it's a spoiler don't say )

I had a save in Chapter 4 and none other till the end of the game so had to play from 4 through 5 and into 6 to get the achievement. As the achievement was in 6. Bit annoying having to replay through a fair chunk of the game just for a achievement. It was only after wards I was like a wouldn't do that again anyway. Things I do for achievements.

The Phantom Pain · 08-01-2019 01:04AM

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I had a save in Chapter 4 and none other till the end of the game so had to play from 4 through 5 and into 6 to get the achievement. As the achievement was in 6. Bit annoying having to replay through a fair chunk of the game just for a achievement. It was only after wards I was like a wouldn't do that again anyway. Things I do for achievements.

Oh, I see. That's annoying! Yeah, i'm saving as often as possible. I have only one missable achievement left and that's Lending a Hand. Social Club says I'm at 40% with that.

wotzgoingon · 08-01-2019 01:06AM

It would have helped alright if I looked up achievement guides but I didn't bother as spoilers it was only after finishing the game I looked them up.

johnny_ultimate · 08-01-2019 01:16AM

The Phantom Pain wrote: »

The lack of fast travel really wastes the player's time

I’m on chapter 6, and I’m fairly confident saying RDR2 is the worst paced game I’ve ever played.

Now I know the concept of pacing is more fluid in an open world game where the player is free to pick and choose what they want to do. But working through the campaign either leisurely or purely focused on the main missions has been, to be frank, a total chore. There’s so much filler, so few interesting gameplay ideas, and endless stopping and starting. There are good missions for sure, but they’re one in a half dozen, maybe even a worse ratio than that. So many end in the same basic, boring-as-all-hell mass shootout, and even the missions that have novel ideas tend to feel like tutorial levels (with the incessant instruction boxes) for more interesting things that never come. Not to mention the tedious horse travel.

There’s a good, maybe even great 10-20 hour story in here, but Rockstar wanted to make a 60 hour one (at least) and it destroys any sense of momentum. And I’m not opposed at all to unrushed stories - this just does it badly. I’d highlight Persona 4 as a game where the epic length is an asset to the game - where you settle into a satisfying, rewarding routine, with downtime as interesting as the more fantastical stuff. RDR2 in contrast is a mess of bad ideas dramatically diluting the good ones. I’m pushing through because there’s just about enough things I’m interested in seeing how Rockstar play out... but I’m ever aware that the game has wasted a ****load of my time at this stage and the rewards have only barely made up for it.

That said, the Colin Stetson led music cues in the back half of the game are pretty great :pac:

wildlifeboy · 08-01-2019 09:12AM

Dutch is total narcissist asshole, i am on chapter 5 and i am starting to think the game is a load of ****e GTA5 better imo.

The Nal · 08-01-2019 09:34AM

2nd time playing through now and I figured out why I hated Chapter 6 so much the first time. I

helped Rains Fall. Which leads to a load of crappy missions and a lot of horse riding. Didn't help this time and it cuts out loads of the flab from the chapter.

The Nal · 08-01-2019 01:32PM

You'd want to double check your spoiler tags there bud

jones · 08-01-2019 01:33PM

The Nal wrote: »

You'd want to double check your spoiler tags there bud

Sh*t is it not coming up? it's just (spoiler) insert spoiler here (/spoiler) isnt it?

I deleted oringial post until i figure out the spoiler tag

jones · 08-01-2019 01:35PM

Just on the fast travel thing people do know you can semi fast travel using the map at your base camp? Its obviously only one way and only leads to the big towns but still its something and i havent seen it mentioned here. I didnt really mind all the riding around myself its never took more than a couple of minutes (on a fast horse) to move from snowy mountains to swamp conditions. I think the map size can be a bit overwhelming when you look how far away it is.

On the game itself i love it. When i initally started i did feel like it was almost overwhelming with details and the size of the world plus the amount of tutorials it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realise how to donate kills to the camp i kept walking them over to Pearson and nothing. I'm on chapter 5 now but have done A LOT of roaming around doing my own thing apart from the story. I must check my stats to see the number of hours but has to be around the 50 hours mark. I'm playing on the PS4 pro on 1080p Samsung plasma and the game looks amazing the lighting has to be some of the best seen in any game.

Story is great

but once Arthur gets sick it really annoyed me i kinda felt like this has killed the game a bit and i felt weaker plus everyone keeps commenting on how sick i look ha

Anyway so far i'd give this game 9/10 think God of war would pip it for game of the year for me but really its an amazing game despite the minor quibbles

Skylinehead · 08-01-2019 02:50PM

jones wrote: »

Sh*t is it not coming up? it's just (spoiler) insert spoiler here (/spoiler) isnt it?

I deleted oringial post until i figure out the spoiler tag

It is that, but with square brackets [] instead.

08-01-2019 03:06PM

I think one of the reasons I won't ever replay the game is because of the fast travel issues.

Calltocall · 08-01-2019 03:09PM

So I’ve finished the main story mission game, I see no other side missions (no question marks on map) any suggestions what to do now or any other suggestions on other games? Is online any good?

Notorious · 08-01-2019 07:00PM

Calltocall wrote: »

So I’ve finished the main story mission game, I see no other side missions (no question marks on map) any suggestions what to do now or any other suggestions on other games? Is online any good?

Give the online a try, though it's not for everyone. If you're looking for another RPG I cannot recommend the Witcher 3 enough.

The Phantom Pain · 08-01-2019 08:54PM

Horizon Zero Dawn had a really good system where you had to craft fast travel packs so it still encouraged you to explore the world while at the same time rewarding those who have done the exploring with a means to get around it.

@jones I mentioned a while back how funny it was that fast travel was locked behind hundreds of dollars and that you had to upgrade Dutch's tent first to get it. My issue with fast travel is that there is still a fair amount of riding you have to do just to get to stagecoaches and trains. The entire point of fast travel is that players don't have to manually travel too much if at all to get to their desired destination. Plus you'd need to put your horse in the stables first which is often a fair distance away. Otherwise save and if the horse dies while travelling just reload the save but you shouldn't have to do that really. Forcing the player to experience all the random encounters and side quests so late in the game is not a good idea. I skip most of the random encounters now because their mystique has gone. At this stage they're all the same/non beneficial or I can't risk them lowering my honour or getting me a bounty. R* should trust that people want to uncover their world rather than forcing them to.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Comments