Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

I hate Dutch.

Dutch can be killed off for all I care. I was wary of him in the beginning, but now I just straight up hate him.

I just got to the part where fuckin' Hosea and Lenny died!! Two of the characters I genuinely liked in this game shot John finally came around to me, I like him and Arthur is still mah boy. I just got washed up on the Caribbean Island and well this game took a strange turn? I just didn't see that location coming. I am on Chapter 5, and I'm genuinely curious to see what the rest of this game will have, because it genuinely seemed like it would end at Chapter 4, but of course shit went wrong. It feels like they're dragging the game out? I'm not sure.

Don't get me wrong, I am definitely enjoying myself. I still find it wonderfully peaceful and I really like the game play. Just...fuck Dutch.

Played nothing but this game for a week while I recovered from surgery, and I find it oddly soothing. I'm not sure if others feel this way, but RDR2 is a really calm game to me. Sure there are spats of battles and what not, but I feel like most of my time is spent on my horse, which I actually don't mind that much. The scenery is SO GORGEOUS. I also enjoy that they throw tiny interactions while on your horse journey to make the ride seem not as tenuous. Some of the riding feels a little tedious to a point, but now that I've unlocked more places to fast travel to, it doesn't feel as bad.

Ya'll were right about the stamina, definitely gets better.

I had the weirdest glitch at one point - I had my horse, we're doing fine, and then I hop on a stage coach to go to Valentine, try to call my horse and RDR2 is like "Your horse is dead." ???? What?? When?? Noooo!!!! I loved my horse!!!! :(

I love Arthur Morgan. I think I like him more than John Marston in the first game. He's such a softie and he acts so tough. I want to give him a hug

Few things I'm liking so far:

• Arthur as a character
• The fact that I'm not playing as John Marsten
• The fact you can build a relationship with your horse
• The dead eye mechanic and overall shooting mechanics have been vastly improved since the first Red Dead
• TRAINS!!
• Mission failure consequences are not nearly as bad as they were in the first.

Things I'm not liking so far:

• Stamina. Why is it there? If they're gonna put stamina in, then they need to make my average walk not 1 mph. I don't want to run for 6 seconds and then travel a small distance, but it takes me like 20 minutes because HE WALKS SO DAMN SLOW
• Arthur's voice. Is the voice actor ok? Is his throat shredded? I'm worried.
• Going along with the walking, the other characters are telling me to hurry it up, but I already did hurry and now I have no stamina and I'm just trying to get to this train and I'm being shot at and GOSH DANGIT I DON'T HAVE TIME TO EAT WHILE IM BEING SHOT AT

It starts pretty slow, but I'm keeping an open mind. I've heard a lot about how there is almost too much to do in the game, so I'm curious to see how I, who loves having too many side quests to do, will think of it.

I finished the main story and I don't have the stamina for the extras at the end. I am torn whether the experience was overall good or not. I enjoyed aspects of it. The characters, dialogue, and story were extraordinary and I loved going back to camp to interact.

But most of the story mission gameplay seemed to devolve into long rides to a place, a firefight, and then a chase sequence. Very dull. The optional side quests got away from this formula, which was refreshing.

The lack of fast travel was the killer for me because there were times I just wanted to get to the location. Near the end the story missions seemed to be on opposite sides of the earth with the stage coaches locked for story reasons. Very painful when I just wanted to see the story.

I usually enjoy exploring an open world but this one deterred me from doing so. It took very long to get places and I didn't know if I would find anything interesting there. This meant the cost of exploring was high since I had to manually travel back. You were limited in how many pelts you could carry and if you got killed on your way back you would lose that stuff. I stopped pursuing that stuff early on because of it.

Well, that’s rdr2 in the can. I’m of two minds on this game, it’s an impressive game and has a ton of really enjoyable moments, but the main campaign started to drag for me to the point where it felt like I was clocking in each time I started playing. Critically I started doing the thing where I would avoid non story missions just to advance to main campaign so that I could go back and do them at a more relaxed pace later on (fully realizing that some would likely be unavailable).

But that said, I think there’s a really interesting tonal shift once the epilogue begins and even just being able to leisurely visit old stomping grounds was incredibly relaxing. I don’t know that it would have played that way if the main campaign had been different, but i think it speaks to the contrast between rdr1 and rdr2: the first is really about asserting yourself and being responsible to an abstract notion of some family being held by pinkertons. The second is really this story where your actions are driven heavily by the immediate responsibilities of your actual family. because this responsibility is foisted on you rather than being something you have to internalize or even elect to care about, it’s very easy to naturally resent Dutch rather than coming to your own conclusions about what sort of leader he is. The game positions some sort of notion of conflicted protagonist but the limitations of your own character’s involvement prevent that relationship from developing naturally, instead it is very much forced on you changing the experience from emergent to prescriptive.

The odd thing is that the epilogue posits a situation very different than the first and explores a mode of storytelling that challenges the protagonists’s relationship with their environment in a more nuanced way. So often the game presents moral choices without giving an indication that they’ll actually change anything other than the alignment of a meter, but the epilogue shows that even an on the rails story can drive a nuanced narrative simply by allowing your character to behave consistently in an unfamiliar environment. Could that have been effective if we hadn’t already had 40+ hours of prior gameplay? It’s not clear to me, but simply reducing the scope of the protagonist’s responsibility gives more nuance to their progression as the story advances at natural points that make your choices unintentionally map with their unexpected consequences.

A fun game with lots to think about, but also a very challenging game because it seems to lose its own narrative and conceptual thread. I agree with the take that there’s easily two or three very tight campaigns hidden in the all of rdr2. That sort of game would have been massively resonant with me but I understand it would have likely played very differently.

Curious to see if they release any dlc.