Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018)

Maybe its just me, but I have decided this is not an open world game. I am stuck doing only mainline quests because as soon as I venture out to explore the area, bounty hunters find and kill me. I then lose more money and am further unable to pay off the debt. I was out in the forest in the middle of a skinning animation when the bounty hunters came upon me.

Also infuriating is there is no quicksave/quickload. When I happen to save before a bad event and then reload, I am nowhere near where I last saved. The gameworld has also reset such that any bodies or locations of people have changed making it impossible to pick up where I want to.

What a waste of $60.

I have this strange blind spot for many AAA games when I first start playing where I forget they are just games operating on game rules. With stealth games I worry that I have to be continuously stealthy until I realize enemies that discover me will eventually give up pursuing and go back to their normal routine like nothing happened (ran into this with Sniper Elite 4). With games where you can be good or bad (RDR2's honor for example) there are times when you can literally get away with murder and there are times where somehow the law magically learns about your transgressions no matter how small.

It is the latter in RDR2 that drive me crazy. I understand it is hard to program a game to catch all the circumstances where the player might do something that would be considered criminal, but escalations happen extremely quickly and the boundaries are not entirely clear. I saved a guy being beat up with the O'Driscolls using only my hands to punch them and knock them out. Somehow that constituted murder, so I tried to catch the witness and threaten them only to have that trigger the law men to hunt me down. I got ticked off with the game so I went on a killing spree, indiscriminately offing anyone I could see and eventually was gunned down. The game resets and everything is back to normal with the town (I have a bounty on me but most of the town that I slaughtered doesn't seem to care). I realize it is a game but it takes that kind of encounter to remind me of it.

Anyone else have this issue?

Very mixed on this game. It is absolutely beautiful and the attention to detail with characters, environments, and interactions is really top notch. Gun combat is good, but the melee combat is very "meh".

I have two major complaints. This game just has too many buttons/interactions/systems. It is absolutely overwhelming to understand hunting and crafting and horse bonding and everything else. This means it is very hard to remember how to trigger "that thing I want", and it is far too easy to accidentally escalate a situation just by hitting the wrong button. One example I have is that I pulled my horse alongside a coach and just wanted to dismount but I hit B instead and that instantly was taken as "disturbing the peace". I was reported and then Wanted, and the game then locked all the activities nearby that I had just travelled a long ways to get to. That of course leads to my second problem...

There is no fast travel combined with incredibly long rides to some areas. I get that the game wants immersion and a chance to see all the random encounters, but at the very least they should let you fast travel back to well-known safe spots, such as your camp.

A rough estimate says I have played about 55-60 hours since starting. I only just hit chapter 3 but have almost fully maxed out Arthur's stats and fully bonded with 6 horses or so. It says a lot about which aspects of the game I am focusing on and what I am enjoying the most.

Warning, this is a rant. I'm so sorry.

Y'all, I'm done. The whole time I was playing I was thinking "This is a technical masterpiece, so I SHOULD like it," but frankly, I just don't. Am I alone here? I know it's the golden child of AAA games this year, but I find it extremely rough. Movement is slow and arduous, and 75% of the game to boot. The controls are clunky and incredibly difficult to grasp and execute at times. The game is bug ridden in ways that are entertaining, but often block progress in frustrating ways (I keep getting deadlocked in the epilogue because the cutscene widescreen comes up but the cutscene won't start, so I can't progress).

And on top of all that, I just don't like how the game handles its protagonist. They spend so much time characterizing him. He's so well written. He's lovable, sincere, and compassionate in cutscenes. And then I'm thrown into missions where it's like "Now go kill all these people" and it just feels completely at odds with the character they've shown me. The game also gives you the option of being honorable in some interactions, but still forces you to be the ruthless outlaw in the story. Why have the choice? For the sake of player freedom? I'm getting sick of games where the idea of choice is "You can either kill this person or NOT kill this person!"

I know I'm the odd man out here and all of this is sacrilegious, but I just had so much trouble finding the fun in this. I really liked the slow pace in some places, but in a 100 hour game, that gets old so fast. Always hate feeling like a contrarian, but the meh totally outweighs the good for me here.