Board 8 > Red Dead Redemption 2 is the most overrated game I have played

(+) Yeah! (+)

tl;dr It's a great story told over far too many hours of completely trash gameplay.

In all of the games I've played that were consistently reviewed at 9-10/10 scores, this is the worst one.

For anyone who has yet to play it, I highly recommend you stick strictly to the single-player and don't worry too much about side content.

The main story is great, with overall solid characters, a solid plot, great writing (aside from a few lines that are repeated to a mind-numbing degree), and probably the best character development Rockstar has ever done. Of course, the graphics and sound design are top of the line. The environments look about as real as they will on the PS4, while every animal has a sound and the music is very well done.

For a little bit of a mixed point, sometimes the graphics actually get in the way of the game. Lighting and fog effects can make it hard to see anything around you, so if the game's weather decides to be foggy or overly sunny right in your vision, you're slightly screwed. For a game that clearly wants you to look around at everything a lot, this seems counterintuitive. It makes simple things like hunting and riding a horse difficult.

On every piece of the gameplay, I am left thinking, "Who the fuck designed this with a Rockstar budget?" The guns will straight up miss most of the time if you're not standing dead still (so your reticle can be red to indicate you are aimed at an enemy and you will still miss). The poor accuracy forces you to rely a ton on the Dead Eye mechanic. Moving your character around is sluggish and clunky. Your horse is a complete idiot and will run into multiple trees despite you trying to turn them away from the tree. The cover system is nearly useless, as cover usually still leaves you open to multiple angles and often hardly covers you at all. The button you use to focus on someone for conversation is the same button you use to aim your gun, resulting in you accidentally pointing your gun at people you meant to simply talk to. The NPCs are complete idiots, as they will often walk right into the middle of the street where your horse is about to gallop through, and then they'll move out of your way in the same direction you are also trying to swerve in to avoid them. You have to be frequently eating or the game will punish you for not eating (aka make your cores drain faster because you're underweight). You also have to feed your horse or the same thing will happen.

Chief among the gameplay offenses RDR2 commits is the speed and the pacing. This game is intentionally designed to be incredibly slow. When you walk through camp, you can't move faster than a light powerwalk. When you're in a town, your horse can't gallop at full speed. When you ride between missions, you spend at least a couple minutes (sometimes more) on your horse, only to arrive at a mission where you begin by riding your horse at a lesser pace for another few minutes to get to the important part of your mission. The game will commonly try to interrupt your travels by having a stranger encounter happen or by having someone attack you on the trail.

The multiplayer is brutally bad because the savior of the game (the story) is no longer present. It's entirely focused on the gameplay, and PvP matches in particular suck because they are based around the game's horrible gunplay.

I can't ever imagine giving this game a 9 or a 10 like the reviewers have. The gameplay is so flawed that, even if you think the story and presentation is perfect, the game couldn't be better than an 8. I dislike the game a little more than most because I have been going for the platinum trophy, and spending 4-5x the time any normal player would spend beating this game made me despise coming back to it. The collectibles are pointless, and being forced to play the multiplayer for so long is taking a toll on me. Feels like a 6 to me at this point.
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Please tell me if I'm the only one that has this big of an issue with the gameplay in RDR2. I simply think a game with RDR2's budget should never be this much of a hassle to play.
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I feel like forcing yourself to play a game you don't like just for trophies is making you hate it even more and causing a bit of a bias
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There are a few things I had big issues with
-The slow movement in certain areas
-Having to continuously tap the button to run and gallop (probably the worst thing about the game imo)
-In general the long amounts of time it takes to go anywhere
-The general eating system feels unnecessary

But as frustrating as little things like that were, it's still almost a 10/10 for me given how incredible the rest of the game is
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StealThisSheen posted...

I feel like forcing yourself to play a game you don't like just for trophies is making you hate it even more and causing a bit of a bias

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Yeah I didn't like the gameplay at all and gave up after about 15 hours in.

It's just too big and the world is empty.

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Murphiroth posted...

StealThisSheen posted...

I feel like forcing yourself to play a game you don't like just for trophies is making you hate it even more and causing a bit of a bias

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StealThisSheen posted...

I feel like forcing yourself to play a game you don't like just for trophies is making you hate it even more and causing a bit of a bias

I'm not going to say you're wrong because yes, my desire to play has steadily gotten smaller and smaller since I beat the main story.

I thought it was no higher than an 8 before I beat the main story though. The game being highly overrated isn't something that I started thinking when I began focusing on post-game and multiplayer trophies. The more I spent time with the gameplay, of course the more I realized how bad it was (because at that point there was no story to cover it). Replaying the missions showed me how poor the mission structure is, and starting the multiplayer today had me sick of the gunplay (which I already knew was bad) because that's the whole focus in multiplayer.

Also, if I would've stopped playing it because I thought it wasn't fun, wouldn't that mean I still thought it wasn't fun in the first place? I guess what I'm trying to say is that my disdain for the gameplay would've still been there whether or not I had been going for the platinum.
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I like it
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I didnt like it much either after playing a few hours. Im gonna go back to it eventually because I love a good western and the story was hooking me. But I agree with you on the gameplay being very frustrating.

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RDR2 was simultaneously my favourite game of 2018 and one of my least favourite games to play of 2018, which doesn't make any sense, but that's how I feel.

The moment to moment gameplay ranged from "solid" to "mildly annoying" for me. None of it felt particularly "fun", although I don't think that's technically a requirement when playing a game. It was slow at the best of times, and doing anything in the world kind of felt like a chore. The biggest offender to me was having to walk at a snails pace through camp. I can understand that Rockstar was going for immersion, and sometimes it did work, but most of the time it just felt like it got in the way.

With all that being said, getting to the next story beat or emotional high was more than worth it. This game contains some of my favourite single moments in gaming altogether through some of the major moments, and I instantly forgot about all the mildly annoying things every time I got to one of those points. I loved the story, loved the character development, and loved the emotion, especially in the late game. The good heavily outweighed the mediocre, for me.

Essentially what I'm saying is I wish the game was an interactive movie.

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yeah, i feel this way about a lot of immersive games

a recent example is the witcher 3. it is a fantastic game, but if i'm in the wrong mood it feels tedious and slow-paced

i have to be prepared to not 'make progress' and rather explore or slowly interrogate witnesses/smell monsters/collect herbs
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Solioxrz362 posted...

I dislike the game a little more than most because I have been going for the platinum trophy

heres the problem, cool guy
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I enjoyed most of the 250 or so hours I spent with it
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Punnyz posted...

Solioxrz362 posted...

I dislike the game a little more than most because I have been going for the platinum trophy

heres the problem, cool guy

Read post #9 - had most of these issues with the game before I started doing the non-story stuff for trophies
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"Overrated" is such an overrated word. All it basically means is "I don't like this as much as everyone else."

Personally, I loved RDR2. My GOTY 2018 by far. I love how alive the world is. Don't know how much time I put into the game, but I'm definitely going to be putting in more. Only thing it really needs is to let you keep your gear/horse when you retry older missions. It wasn't a problem in GTAV, so I'm not sure why it'd be an issue here.
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I had these same issues. The game was so hyped and then I played it and the game play is just atrocious. Story and characters were A+, but it was dragged down by how un-fun the game was to actually play.

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The game badly needs an "Arcade Mode" where you can play without all the core systems, with easy fast travel, fast movement, etc. I don't know why there isn't one.
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not sure if any of this has been patched since I played when the game first came out but the horse selecting shitty guns for you and crafting ammo one at a time was fucking dumb
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Also, I wish this game had companions so I could team up with Black Belle for the whole game. She's awesome.
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Dancedreamer posted...

"Overrated" is such an overrated word. All it basically means is "I don't like this as much as everyone else."

In this case, I used it to mean "how is this getting perfect scores when the gameplay does more to hurt the game than to help it"
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Did you ever try the first-person mode? I picked the game up back at launch and tried to use that mode to make it more immersive, and it was so damn difficult to play with. I would occasionally switch to it when there was no combat but ultimately had to stick with third-person.

Haven't played the game since launch though, biggest backlog game on my shelf.
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Yeah feels like they focused too much on realism, some of that time could have been better spent on improving the gameplay.

Steering your horse is a nightmare but at least his balls shrink in the cold right
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please watch that video i posted
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I don't really like it either, but it feels like the developers did exactly what they set out to do, so I can't in good conscience call it a bad game

also it glitched on me in the weirdest ways, like all of a sudden people who you're supposed to talk to not talking with you, random freezes, items disappearing, etc.

Peridiam posted...

Did you ever try the first-person mode? I picked the game up back at launch and tried to use that mode to make it more immersive, and it was so damn difficult to play with. I would occasionally switch to it when there was no combat but ultimately had to stick with third-person.

I have switched to it, and I have basically never kept it on because it is bad.
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Check it out guys

Multiplayer has an ability where you can get a metal helmet on your head to nullify a headshot, which is literally the only effective way to kill someone in the PvP for this game

That's great game design right there
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Sounds like you need to get one for yourself
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I had a feeling I would hate the game because GTA IV was exactly the same experience to me. Incredibly monotonous gameplay slowed down in an attempt to tell a more meaningful story, at least by GTA standards. Your complaints about the sluggish controls and cover system being bad definitely apply here. I doubt RDR2 is on the same level of tedium, but GTA IV was a steaming pile of trash that I absolutely did not force myself through.
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But

MY COUSIN

BIG AMERICAN TITTIES
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I didn't hate GTA IV per se, but I definitely liked both RDRs and every other console GTA from 3 on far, far more than it.
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I probably do too

Toss up between that and vice city (color palette is to painful on the eyes and it was the glitchiest rockstar game in my experience)
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ninkendo posted...

Sounds like you need to get one for yourself

I think it's locked behind rank and a hefty sum of in-game cash

So I can't
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Better keep playing until you earn it
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