Red Dead Redemption 2

The Nal · 01-02-2019 09:24AM

Back playing GTA5. If only RDR2 had an invincibility and Skyfall cheat.

Cryan1011 · 01-02-2019 12:08PM

a

karwa88 · 01-02-2019 04:35PM

Just finished the main story, what a game, about 140hours played and absolutely loving it still

Riddle101 · 02-02-2019 03:53AM

New interview by the cast of Red Dead Redemption 2.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/109679/exclusive-interview-campfire-chat-with-the-stars-of-red-dead-redemption-2?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

aaronjumper · 02-02-2019 02:11PM

Got the Legend of the East satchel, can carry 99 of everything now, Arthur just became a hoarder.

Decided to complete chapter 3.

Lots of shooting and fun. I did feel bad for the Braithway woman though.
Breezing in, destroying her businesses, stealing her horses, murdering most if not all of her sons and burning her house to the ground.
Might have been kinder to just shoot her.

Into chapter 4 now but I'll probably go arsing around again as my map has new stuff on it again.

Stats are saying I've 49% of the game complete, I'll try and get it as high as I can before continuing.

The Phantom Pain · 02-02-2019 05:20PM

aaronjumper wrote: »

Got the Legend of the East satchel, can carry 99 of everything now, Arthur just became a hoarder.

Decided to complete chapter 3.
Lots of shooting and fun. I did feel bad for the Braithway woman though.
Breezing in, destroying her businesses, stealing her horses, murdering most if not all of her sons and burning her house to the ground.
Might have been kinder to just shoot her.

Into chapter 4 now but I'll probably go arsing around again as my map has new stuff on it again.

Stats are saying I've 49% of the game complete, I'll try and get it as high as I can before continuing.

That was the moment I started to realise how dumb Dutch's gang was. Why did they think that plan would ever work?

Hate is ugly but, unlike love, it's not blind - the family feud was a 6 at best before they showed up and then suddenly it goes to 10 as soon as they start to get involved?

Dutch is not as smart as he thinks he is.

The Phantom Pain · 02-02-2019 05:24PM

btw something odd happened with my Playstation where I somehow ended up deleting the RDR2 application from my system storage...without actually going to my system storage. Basically, both Destiny 2 and Red Dead had patch updates but they were slowing down my Anthem download so I deleted both their download progresses. In Destiny's case the full application is still there but for some reason with Red Dead this ended up deleting the entire application so I'm currently copying the disk again. So annoying. I suppose it might be because I bought RDR2 on disk and playstation doesn't know how to distinguish between a disc's application and an update file? Although I would have thought that would be the case for downloaded games, not disk.

Riddle101 · 03-02-2019 05:25AM

The Phantom Pain · 03-02-2019 06:24PM

TLDR: Excellent first half but becomes a chore by chapter 4 with only the challenges and the epilogue being any fun. 7/10.

After 121 + hours I’ve FINALLY rolled credits on the single player portion. I don’t usually consider it an "achievement" to complete a game, just standard personally, but for Red Dead Redemption 2 getting to the credits felt like a major milestone because of it's refusal to END. :eek:

Final thoughts: I’ve heard many say the opening hours are poorly paced and that the game picks up later on but I actually feel the complete opposite. At first, I didn’t mind that the missions featured context sensitive actions because I assumed, at the time, that the methodical, linear approach was necessary to condition us for what would become very open mission structures later on. However, like Johnny Ultimate eloquently exclaimed, the game never leaves its opening state, you will be looking at instruction boxes to the bitter end.

The reason for this being that R* is obsessed with animations so the missions are designed in a way that can show them off at every opportunity. Consequently, they don't incorporate much of the main controls learned as one would normally expect. And I have to say… having taken a peak at the third person angle I don’t even think the animations are that good... Uncharted 4 outclasses it by far in that department without feeling clunky.

When the campaign is not an animations showcase it’s just a bunch of wagon journeys with lengthy conversations over them before something inevitably goes wrong and it ends in a massive shootout. Wash, rinse, repeat. From chapter 4 onwards the story begins to drag. They could have shaved off about 20 hours from the main campaign and it would have been much more effective. How many times can a plan go wrong? We get it.

The game is at its best when you’re away from the story just hunting, fishing, shopping, playing mini games but even the thrill of exploration is lost when the puppet strings of the open world start to show. I enjoyed all the back and forth horse riding at first because I liked the stranger encounters but by the back half it became very obvious that these encounters spawned merely to make you lose that perfect game on your horse, and because the risk was too great I began to ignore them. This is in stark contrast to when I got my first legendary pelt and abandoned it to help a stranded lady. Now I wouldn’t think twice to bolt past her. They’re just so scripted time-wise that they lose any believability.

Regarding all the various systems, they aren’t problematic in themselves but they tend to cannibalise each other. For instance, I have no problem with the fact that horses move in real time or with being bucked off my horse. However, the main missions are incredibly time-tight so there’s no room to indulge in such errors - you have to do it perfectly or face the fail screen. R* games have always featured linear mission structures but not like this. RDR2 is a bit too ready to hand out the auto-fails which I suspect, once again, is a symptom of the devs' obsession with making everything look realistic/cinematic. "Do it as we envision or start again."

Additionally, whilst immersion breaking, it doesn’t bother me that so much of the game’s content is locked behind story progression despite the fact that you can view these things before you’re allowed to interact with them fully. However, the limited fast travel system means time spent travelling to an area that technically is off-limits until you progress through the story is a waste.

In the epilogue, Blackwater is basically on lockdown until you’ve dealt with the stuff on the first farm for no apparent reason...

Regarding the ending, the Internet managed to spoil that for me -

I knew Arthur would succumb to his TB and that we’d play as John again. However, I hesitate to say having that knowledge ruined it given how predictable it all was. Being diagnosed with TB in those days was a death sentence and R* used the “first character dies, long live someone we don’t care about” stunt in RDR1. That said, it was nice playing as John again and seeing what became of the other gang members (even though I was forced to sit through a seemingly endless credits sequence to find out).

What was not so nice was losing all the ingredients and provisions in Arthur’s satchel upon his death. I’m doing the special miracle tonic challenge at the moment for Herbalist and that set me back big time. Some are saying, “Oh, it’s to make you feel like you’re starting again given the context of the narrative.” Yes, but in gameplay terms you are not starting again. It may be a different character but it’s the same player and one that has invested over 100 hours at this point. There was simply no reason why John couldn’t retain all of the stuff from Arthur’s satchel, especially as I spent hours hunting to get that Legends of the East satchel just so I could hoard it all.

Oh, and people kept going on about the white Arabian when it isn’t even the best horse in the game... It’s just one you can get pretty early on. There’s actually a far better horse you can purchase in Saint Denis which, unfortunately, the game decided to kill along with all the horses I had stabled so what a colossal waste of the time I spent bonding with them. :rolleyes:

That said, my annoyance was offset by the fact that the entire epilogue was quite enjoyable and in general much better paced than the main story. There was no fat, every mission you undertook constantly propelled the narrative and character development forward. Yes, it suffers from the same rigid, tutorial box driven linearity that all the other missions do but the actual narrative was well told. Also, due to where much of it is set it made me nostalgic for RDR1 and I smiled when I saw the McFarlane ranch.

Despite my moaning, I’m not going to say that I don’t enjoy the game because that would be a lie. The adventures off the beaten path are fun enough for me to platinum it and I’ve still got online to look forward to but Red Dead Redemption 2 is so very, very flawed that it’s a 7/10 game at best and one I will probably never play again outside of online mode.

Potential-Monke · 05-02-2019 03:37PM

aaronjumper wrote: »

Decided to complete chapter 3.
Lots of shooting and fun. I did feel bad for the Braithway woman though.
Breezing in, destroying her businesses, stealing her horses, murdering most if not all of her sons and burning her house to the ground.
Might have been kinder to just shoot her.
.

Go find an outhouse at the back of the estate and then feel sorry for her...

The Nal · 05-02-2019 05:23PM

Potential-Monke wrote: »

Go find an outhouse at the back of the estate and then feel sorry for her...

Go find an outhouse at the back of the estate and then

set it on fire

DEFTLEFTHAND · 05-02-2019 05:24PM

Some of the conversations on the farm are interesting after you've finished the game.

Arthur gets up brought up a few times, the awkward relationship between John and Jack is explored further, We learn more about Abigail.

However my favorite thing to do out on the farm is abuse Uncle.
''Do you ever think of moving on old man?''

''How long do you think you've got left, 2 yrs, 3yrs?''
''I won't rise to it John.''

''It's just that I wanted get started on planning your goodbye party.'' :pac:

In fairness it must seriously piss John off to have this old alcoholic leech living off him.

wotzgoingon · 05-02-2019 08:58PM

Potential-Monke wrote: »

Go find an outhouse at the back of the estate and then feel sorry for her...

I thought she got burnt alive after you left as I went back later and her scorched body is there?

05-02-2019 11:16PM

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I thought she got burnt alive after you left as I went back later and her scorched body is there?

Her daughter is locked in an outhouse on the estate. She's still alive when the house burns down but John can find her remains in the epilogue.

wotzgoingon · 06-02-2019 12:50AM

I went back as Arthur to get the gold bar and her scorched remains were there in the burnt house near the front door.

This is well before the Epilogue.

keano25 · 06-02-2019 08:58AM

There must be something in store for the Mexican side of the map.. I went down to the river at Rio Del Robo Rock I think it's called and on the far side of the river there is what looks like a fort.

Anyway there was NPC on it you can see with your binoculars. Shooting at them had no effect tho reaction wise.

The Nal · 06-02-2019 09:19AM

keano25 wrote: »

There must be something in store for the Mexican side of the map.. I went down to the river at Rio Del Robo Rock I think it's called and on the far side of the river there is what looks like a fort.

Anyway there was NPC on it you can see with your binoculars. Shooting at them had no effect tho reaction wise.

facehugger99 · 06-02-2019 01:54PM

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

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.
.

Good review.

I'm a couple of missions into Chapter 6 and tbh, I'm ready for the game to be over at this stage.

GTA 5 is probably the only game I ever bought (and finished) twice (PS3 and PS4), whereas I can't imagine wanting to go back and play RD2 again once I finish it.

The main problem, for me are the missions. I loved the way you could plan and execute the heists in GTA5 but there never seemed to be a similar feeling of excitement in any of the RD2 missions.

I certainly don't regret purchasing it and very much enjoyed plaing it (most of the time), but what's left, at the end, is a lingering sense of disappointment - a case of what might have been.

Potential-Monke · 06-02-2019 02:47PM

wotzgoingon wrote: »

I went back as Arthur to get the gold bar and her scorched remains were there in the burnt house near the front door.
This is well before the Epilogue.

At the back of the house there is a toilet hut, she had her daughter locked up in there. When I went back as Arthur, she was still alive even after the fire but you can't do anything.

RedRochey · 07-02-2019 11:40PM

Anyone come across a woman in Annesburg yelling at you for killing her husband? She's dressed in all black, you get the option to give her money but she doesn't take it?

Edit:

Currently playing as John so don't think it's anything to do with Mrs. Downes

The Nal · 08-02-2019 09:15AM

StockTwat29 wrote: »

Anyone come across a woman in Annesburg yelling at you for killing her husband? She's dressed in all black, you get the option to give her money but she doesn't take it?

Yep, killed her.

Tacitus Kilgore · 08-02-2019 09:18AM

StockTwat29 wrote: »

Anyone come across a woman in Annesburg yelling at you for killing her husband? She's dressed in all black, you get the option to give her money but she doesn't take it?

Is it Mrs Downes?

RedRochey · 08-02-2019 10:57AM

Tacitus Kilgore wrote: »

Is it Mrs Downes?

Don't think so, I'm playing as John so this would be a few years later, he said he had no idea what she was talking about, plus it looked like she was just recently at a funeral

Trying to think of any random encounters I did up around there . . .

Tacitus Kilgore · 08-02-2019 11:02AM

StockTwat29 wrote: »

Don't think so, I'm playing as John so this would be a few years later, he said he had no idea what she was talking about, plus it looked like she was just recently at a funeral

Trying to think of any random encounters I did up around there . . .

Interesting, I must head up for a looksee.

Finding the game a bit flat post epilogue - not enough

ambushes or random attacks - apart from maybe down around Tall Trees that is.

nullzero · 08-02-2019 11:02AM

StockTwat29 wrote: »

Anyone come across a woman in Annesburg yelling at you for killing her husband? She's dressed in all black, you get the option to give her money but she doesn't take it?

It's a reasonably important element in the story, most notably in Arthur's redemption as a person.

RedRochey · 08-02-2019 11:16AM

nullzero wrote: »

It's a reasonably important element in the story, most notably in Arthur's redemption as a person.

Playing as John

Not much to do when you finish the epilogue, collected all the cards, bones, carvings, the scenes after the bones and carvings is kinda funny.

Might try to finish the challenges and hunting requests now but can see myself getting bored of them, especially the collect all herbs, break every horse ones

Tacitus Kilgore · 08-02-2019 11:38AM

StockTwat29 wrote: »

Not much to do when you finish the epilogue, collected all the cards, bones, carvings, the scenes after the bones and carvings is kinda funny.

I've been tipping away at all of these including the points of interest etc. my god they take forever! I've only managed 2 sets of cig cards (using rdr2map.com)

The

strange statues

is some mindfcuk, even while reading a guide to it :pac:

08-02-2019 12:10PM

Tacitus Kilgore wrote: »

The
strange statues
is some mindfcuk, even while reading a guide to it :pac:

Honestly, would anyone here have solved that, purposely, without the guidance?

Tacitus Kilgore · 08-02-2019 12:13PM

Deleted User wrote: »

Honestly, would anyone here have solved that, purposely, without the guidance?

I struggled to understand the logic of it with the guide, I don't see how it would be possible to just figure out tbh, especially the

arm on the ground

08-02-2019 12:14PM

Tacitus Kilgore wrote: »

I struggled to understand the logic of it with the guide, I don't see how it would be possible to just figure out tbh, especially the
arm on the ground

Which I could barely see even when looking for it

Red Dead Redemption 2

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