As someone who griped a bit earlier, I’ll add that I actually really enjoy the game overall. It also helps I’m playing in 4K HDR. I think of these kinds of grand games like this: Most games try to do 100 things and if it gets 95 of them right, it’s a great game. This game tries to do 1000 things and gets 900 of them right. So there’s a number of ways you can look at that. There’s 100 things wrong with the game, which is way higher than most games. But there’s also 900 things done right, which is really an awesome achievement. And overall getting 90% of the things right instead of the 95% of other great games doesn’t feel as tight, but the scale and beauty of it really is something to behold.
To answer an earlier question, the bandana didn’t seem to be helping a whole lot, but I’ve gotten a bit better using it and getting mask upgrades from the fence seemed to help a lot, too. I also spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of the game not doing outlaw stuff, so I think I built my health/stamina/dead eye abilities up quite a bit, mostly with hunting, before I started engaging much in gunfights, which seems to have made those a lot easier. Overall, that made the experience a bit of a slog at first, but I seem to be rolling along now.
Like most games of this size, I think you have to find the side stuff you can do until your character progresses enough to tackle the other things. The game doesn’t really give you much guidance on that, though.
The Druidess gave me a PS4 Pro for my birthday last week–some sort of special edition for this game. I’m slowly and clumsily stumbling my way through the opening stages. Did not really care for “Chapter 1”, which seemed to be largely scripted do what you’re told sort of gaming. Just started “Chapter 2”, which appears to be more freestyle. Rode into town, went all Josey Wales on a couple of Driscoll boys on the way, fortunately–i think—did a manual save before riding into town, where I sorta ran over the sheriff with my horse, killed him before getting killed by someone I never saw…and somehow waking up outside of town slumped over my horse? Not real sure what exactly happened, but tonight I plan to load my saved game and try to avoid the whole sheriff killing thing this time…
I’m getting a little more into it myself. I decided that if I couldn’t crack the game straight up, I might as well cheat, so I did the little gold bar glitch and scored about twenty-five grand so I’m just supplying myself willy-nilly and making a hero out of myself back at camp.
I’m into Chapter 3, I think, and I get what I’m supposed to do, for the most part. My problem is that I suck at aiming. I’m not much better when using Dead-Eye. As for all the side crafting stuff, I’m only sort of figuring that stuff out. I hunted me a Legendary Boar, but I think I sold it before I knew I could craft anything from it. Roping horses is a fool’s game for me. I can’t come close - like on a gallop that is. I haven’t even dipped a toe into many other side things, like bounties and I don’t even know what else, to be honest. I’m just trying to figure out how to not die quite so often.
The way hunting the legendary animals works is, after you kill the animal, the only thing you can actually do with it is sell it to the trapper. Once you’ve done so, it’s permanently available to the trapper, who can craft outfits from it, or the fence, who can craft trinkets from parts of certain legendary animals. But if you die before getting a chance to sell it to the trapper, you miss out on the chance to get some money for it, but the game still “counts” it as being in the trapper’s and fence’s inventories for the purposes of crafting. So, as long as you actually killed the legendary boar (there should be a drawing of a boar with a crown, crossed out, on that area of the map) you haven’t missed out on any craftables.
I’m not much of a console gamer, but after hearing umpteen reviews about how this game is a, um, game-changer, I succumbed and got it on PS4. So far, it’s living up to the the hype; it feels halfway between a game and a movie. I’m sorta surprised it’s getting such accolades; it has a sloooow feel to it, and there’s not much overt twitchy game play other than the occasional gunfight.
A smattering of things that have impressed me:
the game begins in an area covered by deep snow. Unlike every other game I’ve ever played, it gets the mechanics of snow right. You don’t run around on top of it; you wade through it like thick mud and it slows you down. By the time I got done with this bit of the game, the snow had truly become annoying - I was just sick of constantly wading!
NPCs are very, very real. Like movie-quality real. I’ve yet to hear one repeat a phrase (see: “I took an arrow to the knee”) and it’s actually kinda entertaining to listen to them. I’ve done a couple missions where I had to hog-tie folks and carry them on my horse to whoever wants to talk to them. During the journey, they try to talk me into letting them go, one woman tried to romance me, one drunk just sang songs and kept calling for his girlfriend to bring him tea.
it’s gorgeous. I haven’t unlocked fast travel yet, but it’s no big deal because riding my horse from place to place is still very fun. The towns seem real to the point where I navigate through them like a real town - “Oh, there’s that half-built building, I know the stable is across from it.” The landscapes are stunning.
And the not-so-good:
the controller is confounding. I’m sure part of this is because I’m a PC gamer, and I’m very unused to controllers. But on top of that I’ve seen hints show up on the screen that are wrong (“Press <x> to hogtie” when you really need to press <y>) and some stuff seems to be entirely too complex.
again, the controller; I’ve multiple times pressed the wrong button at the wrong time and Boom! I’m screwed. Once I accidentally hit the key that makes you mount a horse while walking by someone else’s horse; even though I jumped right off I’m branded a horse-thief and I have a bounty on my head. Another time I accidentally shot someone when trying to help them. Annoying.
I don’t get the mission mechanics. It seems that you sometimes get put on missions like they’re on rails, and there’s no option to delay them. For example, I came back into camp last night after completing a mission; I wanted to sleep then spend my remaining 20 min or so of play time hunting. I made the mistake of greeting an NPC and next thing I know I’m on another mission. If I try to switch to another mission or goal or whatever it says “currently unavailable.”
I’ve heard talk of a way to “quit” or “abandon” a mission but hell if I can find how to do it, and I haven’t figured out if I quit/abandon if it’ll be there for me to do in the future. I don’t want to skip the damn thing, I want to hunt for 20 minutes and do the mission tomorrow when I have more play time.
It’s impossible to permanently miss out on a main story (i.e., yellow) mission. As soon as you quit it, it will be back on the map, available for you to restart.
^^ that’s the part I haven’t been able to determine. I’d actually found the same thread you linked, but it doesn’t talk about what happens AFTER you quit a mission. I figured there would be a way to restart but didn’t want to find out the hard way that I’d done something wrong.
I think it’s the console-only aspect preventing this thread from staying afloat.
I too was impressed with the knee-deep snow, and irritated by the ‘speak to’ and ‘point gun at’ functions being mapped to the same buttons but am, on balance, loving this game.
I like the contrast between playing a soothing game of dominoes one moment, then being involved in a horrific gun battle the next, with surprisingly gory gunshot wounds inflicted.
And I’m curious about the Online aspect - I’m reluctant to even try this until I’ve finished the campaign so as to avoid spoilers, and it’ll presumably involve the entire map at least, which I haven’t yet explored.
I’ve not said much in this thread, because despite having bought it on release day I haven’t put more than a few hours into it. It didn’t quite catch my attention the way the first one did, and I think it’s going to probably not really get played until work shuts down for Christmas. I also don’t like some of the mapping, with the biggest problem being the aforementioned “speak to” and “point gun at”.
I had a dabble with the Online Beta last night. The character creation is pretty hilarious - essentially a wide range of skin complaints, misshapen features and tombstone teeth. Trying to model myself, I created Eighties Nick Cave on a bad heroin day.
It all seemed quite engaging, with some good introductory story stuff, and an abundance of cosmetic options (mostly locked) - but I stopped before I entered the actual Online arena. As I say, I’d like to discover all the map locations as part of the campaign, rather than visiting first in Online and being shot to death by a tennager while I’m taking in the scenery.
This is a question I have been grappling with, actually.
I am in the epilogue - so completed the main body of the game - so will proceed with caution re: spoilers. Suffice it to say though, that I think that they have told a decent enough story that I cannot see myself ever replaying. It’s quite a downer and having to go through some of the quest lines again seems unlikely for me. I’m looking forward to completing the game and treating the game as a sandbox though - and in this respect, am potentially up for engaging with the online mode more than I did with GTAV, particularly if they can expand the game’s scope/activity set (they should bring back Liar’s Dice, imo). Even then, I played the game as a straight up white hat, and have plenty of stuff I’ve never done (like hold up a citizen, much less a stage coach, train or a bank outside the main missions), so I still have plenty to do for the time being
There are mechanical issues with the game (the button mapping issues already highlighted being one example) but I’ve not found them game breaking. The game itself is really quite pretty - I don’t often find myself stopping and taking photos in game with other titles but have done so frequently for landscape shots in this - and I’ve found just tooling around in between missions and doing side quest stuff pretty good fun. It’s a slow game though, interspersed with bouts of action, so if you’re looking for something that is a mile a minute, probably not what you’re after. It also really doesn’t hold your hand much or provide constant signals that something can be done (at least as much as some other open world titles - such as Assassin’s Creed -do) and you kind of have to work some bits and pieces out for yourself (or look them up online).
Honestly, I think it’s not necessarily for everyone and is worth searching out more opinions on if you’re on the fence on whether to buy (or wait for a discount or similar).
I replayed RDR1 three or four times back in the day and the prevailing emotion I have is that I would like to play that game again, if only because I spent much of the latter half of RDR2 desperate to kill Dutch and finally getting revenge on the bastard would be pretty cathartic, having seen just how much of a shit he is in the prequel.. In point of fact, the one thing the story in RDR2 has done is it’s probably deepened my respect for RDR1 and put a retrospective sheen/justification on that story. Given I would have RDR1 in my personal top 5 games of all time, actually improving its standing in my head is some achievement.
The very best expansion of RDR2 that Rockstar could do, in my view, is to expand the map to Mexico and dump the whole of RDR1 into the new game engine and allow you to play that. Simple to say, doubtless logistically incredibly difficult to do - it won’t happen and now we’re going to get them trying to make the online world take something of the money that GTAV online does.
