Release Date: 26/10/2018
Played On: PS4
Available On: PS4 / XBO
Time Played: 69h 40m
Progress: Completed / 85.6% Overall
Developer: Rockstar Studios
Publisher: Rockstar Games
After the success of Grand Theft Auto V and the previous Red Dead Redemption game, the avalanche of Red Dead Redemption 2 hype was not unexpected. It seems like whenever Rockstar get around to releasing another game, there's reason to be excited. Few publishers manage to carry that kind of reputation, but is the weight of previous success beginning to weigh them down.
NB: At time of writing the online component of Red Dead Redemption 2 was still in beta, so I have not commented on it here - if I do ever write anything about it, I'll put it in its own post.
When a game receives as many perfect scores as Red Redemption 2, I expect something that will blow my mind and transcend all expectations. I know nothing is literally 'perfect', but a ten-out-of-ten game is the kind of game that you'll be talking about in years to come for all the right reasons. It's not the kind of game that delivers everything you'd expect and does very little to iterate on established tropes and systems.
Unfortunately I found Red Dead Redemption 2 to be more of the latter than the former, as it ended up being just another Rockstar open-world game. All of the hype and perfect scores surrounding its release did nothing but frustrate me as I worked my way through what ended up being a relatively undercooked and underwhelming experience.
Don't get me wrong though, this is all within the context of Red Dead 2's hype and expectations. The game itself still has a lot to offer and I would recommend it to any GTA/Red Dead fan. However, this is not the second-coming it has been hyped up to be. There are numerous technical and design issues throughout the game that make the prospect of perfection a distant goal, instead of an implicit accomplishment.
Let's focus on the good for now, as there's a lot to like in Red Dead Redemption 2. Not least of which is the incredible amount of detail we've come to expect from a Rockstar open world game.
The game's story is set before the events of its predecessor, as you fill the shoes of Arthur Morgan, one of Dutch van der Linde's gang members. Remember all those stories we heard about from John Marston talking about Dutch and his old gang? Well we now get to experience those days from the a fresh perspective.
If there's one thing Rockstar can do well, it's write some engaging characterisations for their games. The same is true for RDR2 as each character has their own quirks and personality that are interesting to uncover. Considering that the main story focuses entirely on Arthur's involvement with the gang, this is a welcomed aspect indeed.
From the start, this is a story about family, but with an outlaw western twist. Dutch's gang consists of outlaws and the folk who are along for the ride. It's a nice way to drive the plot, as you spend a lot of time interacting with your fellow gang members in camp, which serves as a hub for most story activities.
Arthur himself is a bit of a mixed bag. For the first half of the game I was scratching my head over why I saw reports about how incredible his character was in the game. Most of the time he seemed like a relatively banal character who was mean to exist as a grey shell for the player to embody. In fact, it was only toward the end of the game that Arthur Morgan showed any kind of unique personality or opinion of his own.
Instead, it seems like Arthur's characterisation has been spread across the social landscape of the times, where outlaws and so-called 'free' men are pushed to the fringes of civilised society. Arthur becomes an allegory for the dying life of the wild west that is being eradicated in the wake of progress. However, even without a strong identity, Arthur works well as a foil for the gregarious characters he continuously encounters.
In true Rockstar fashion, every secondary character has a story to tell and something interesting to say. It's perhaps the strongest element in any of their games, but with good reason as some of the better missions come from random strangers you meet in the middle of nowhere. For what it's worth, it's nice to see that Rockstar have maintained their sense of humour, even under the veil of a gritty western melodrama.
Of course as time goes on the gang get in and out of trouble and end up travelling all over the map and through the many towns and environments available. From snow covered glaciers, to dense and foggy bayous, there's a little bit of everything this time around. In fact, there's even some old locations from the previous game that are fun to explore. Go check out the town of Tumbleweed if you're keen to see how it looked before bandits moved in and took over the place.
Suffice to say that the map is filled with beautifully detailed locations and interesting NPCs to interact with. There's too much to go into detail on, but if you've played GTA V you'll have an idea of what to expect. The sheer density of a Rockstar open world is impressive, even if there are some creases to be ironed out.
Before delving too deep into the cracks, I have to highlight that there's no doubt about how impressive and huge this game is. You could spend hours hunting in the wilderness, fishing on a lake, or investigating abandoned buildings. There are trains to rob, stagecoaches to hold up, bounties to claim, and any number of random events that will keep you busy for hours on end. This is a huge game with an incredible scope, which is a great accomplishment and there's no denying it.
However…
I've been purposely avoiding the use of any variation on the word "enjoy", because I'm not sure I actually "enjoyed" playing Red Dead Redemption 2. For every beautiful landscape and well written character, there are a number of little issues that get in the way of any true amount of enjoyment. After all, this is the kind of game that I would happily plunge many hours into and aim for one hundred percent completion, but by the time I was done with the story, it felt so good to be done with all the frustrating aspects in the game, that I didn't bother tying up any loose ends.
I have to admit that a lot of the frustration I felt during the game was brought on by all the critical acclaim it had received. Thanks to the hype, I was expecting a finely crafted enjoyable experience that would leave me hungry for more. Instead I got more of the same kind of Rockstar open world jank that made me wonder if they spent any time doing quality assurance testing or not.
Technically there are a number of bugs and glitches that are at best an entertaining side effect of a game with so many moving parts. At worst it made me want to manually save every five minutes in case an NPC bugged out and soft-locked the game. The first time it happened, I was following an NPC who was apparently distracted as they rode straight into a stagecoach on the road. They fell off their horse, but never got back on. Instead they ran slowly toward the destination, while I diligently followed in hope of hitting the next checkpoint. Except once they arrived, the mission failed because they weren't on their horse, and it reset us to a previous checkpoint, but without the NPC's horse. I had to load a manual save to regain some momentum, or be stuck in this infinite loop forever.
Fair enough though, these things happen and I just had to remember to save often. Thankfully I learned my lesson, because this happened again during a couple of other missions, leaving me with the thought that they really could have fixed such a frequent bug from happening.
All said and done though, I often forgive technical glitches on huge open world games, as there are just too many parts to ever polish each and every one. However, I do expect the game to work properly and fix itself when things go wrong, so having to rely on manual saves is a big mark against its technical proficiency.
Although, I would even have accepted the need to rely on manual saves (at least they gave us the option to manually save), if it weren't for some highly questionable design choices. At least technical problems are unexpected outcomes of a chaotic series of events, but when a problem has been purposely designed into the game, it really stands out.
The most annoying design choice for me is that of how weapon loadouts are handled. You're limited to a couple of sidearms and a couple of larger guns, which is all okay because that's a realistic amount of weaponry for any one man to carry. The rest of your arsenal is stored on your horse, which becomes a magical bag inventory of any number of weapons and items that can all be stored on your favourite mount. This sort of thing is a nice bit of gameplay compromise, as it would be annoying to have a realistic inventory where all you can carry are a few cans of beans, and not a lot else.
Games are always full of warped realism in the interest of balancing authenticity and fun gameplay. Nobody wants to travel all the way back to their camp just to swap out one shotgun for another, so it makes sense that they would all be available on your horse, even if it's not all that realistic.
Why then, would someone choose to lean on authenticity when it comes to choosing your loadout?! Naturally, when you get on your horse, you stow your weapons away so that you don't have to continue carrying them. It makes sense and it's realistic, but when you get off your horse in the game, you have to manually select each weapon you want to take with you again. If you forget, or aren't given the choice, you'll have left your guns on your horse and be unarmed and out of luck if you get stuck in a gunfight.
The compromise would be to set a preferred loadout of guns, so that Arthur automatically grabs the last weapons he's been using when he gets off his horse. Throughout the game you're continually mounting and dismounting your horse, so having to stop and select weapons every single time gets very tedious, very quickly.
Not to mention that on a number of occasions, I rode to a location and was immediately thrust into a cut scene. In the cut scene Arthur would get off the horse and end up in a fight with someone. When I eventually regained control, I was stuck with a default sidearm and nothing else to defend myself with. All because all the good guns where left on the horse, which is now down the street and out of reach.
Maybe this wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the wildly unbalanced difficulty during firefights. I don't remember there being a selectable difficulty at any point, so most of the time you're facing enemies who are simple enough to pick off and blast through. The challenge in a game like this has little to do with gunplay, as the auto-aim and generic enemies pose little threat.
That is until a super soldier decides to show up and take you out with a single shot, even though you're hunkered down behind cover. On many occasions I'd be mowing down dozens of bad guys with little resistance, only to be picked off by a single shot slung out of the blue with no warning or reason of any kind. This kind of 'challenge' (if you can call it that) is nothing more than frustrating, as there's literally nothing you can do to avoid the magic bullet of an unbalanced enemy.
Unfortunately, the list goes on.
Riding a horse through anything other than open landscape is an exercise in avoidance. Horses have some kind of independent AI applied to them so they will appear to act like a real animal, but no animal is as stupid as the horses I was riding. Essentially if you ride directly at an obstacle, your horse is mean to either try and avoid it, or stop in its tracks. It's so that you don't end up flying a horse off a cliff, because a real horse wouldn't do that anyway.
Instead, I would be riding directly at the space between two trees, but my horse's AI would thing it needed to swerve out the way. Before I knew what was happening, we would have ploughed straight into the tree, sending me flying from the saddle and my horse to the ground. The first few times it was funny, but after losing a bunch of pelts I had skinned and was carrying on the horse, I stopped laughing.
Then there's all the little things, like buttons being mapped in weird and wonderful ways. I didn't actually have too many problems with button mapping, but I think I'll need a new X button on my controller. Riding a horse means either tapping X to speed up, or holding X to maintain speed. For the first time in my gaming life, I had to cut short a few gaming sessions because my thumb was sore from constantly mashing and holding X
These things might not seem like much, but they're just enough to ruing the enjoyment I might have otherwise had in the game. As much as I'm glad that I played it, and I'll continue to be interested in multiplayer and be impressed by the sheer scope of the game, I still wouldn't describe it as "enjoyable". In fact, I'd say that I liked and finished the game in spite of its faults, which is far from a ringing endorsement.
It might not be fair to compare something directly, but these awful design decisions make me think about the mounts and loadouts in another game I played recently, Assassin's Creed: Origins.
In Origins you're riding your mount as often as you are in Red Dead Redemption 2, and you have the same kind of loadout (four main weapons in total), but it never became a problem in Origins. Not only did you retain your chosen loadout when you got on and off your mount, but there were ways that you could have your mount follow a path without any physical controller inputs, which made sense when you want to traverse large distances.
Of course they're different games with different priorities and goals, but I can't help thinking that Origins did horse riding and weapon selection much better than Red Dead Redemption 2. These things never even entered my thought process in Origins, but I was constantly cursing Red Dead Redemption 2 for making me turn around and reselect my guns before blasting into battle.
Again, I know this might sound petty, but these are just some of the bad design elements that made this game unenjoyable for me. There's a long list of other little bits and pieces, but the point is that they all add up to a frustrating gameplay experience. So much so that once the credits had rolled, I closed the game feeling a little relieved that I didn't need to deal with such annoying mechanics anymore.
It's a real shame as well to know that if the game hadn't received so much hype and raised my expectations, I might have had a more forgiving take on all of its problems. Instead I'm left thinking I should be having a great time, but knowing I'm kind of annoyed and frustrated instead.
As I mentioned earlier, there's no doubt that this is a fantastic game and a brilliant accomplishment. It's beautiful, vast, detailed, and entertaining, but this is far from the second-coming it's cracked up to be. I don't really give scores to games, but this is far from being a perfect ten. Even GTA V was more enjoyable and easy to get through without frustrating busy work getting in the way.
I suppose the point is that if you go into Red Dead Redemption 2 looking for a flawless and polished experience of epic proportions, you may well be disappointed. This is a huge game with all the trappings of big budget Rockstar development. It's beautiful to look at, the writing is excellent, the soundtrack is impeccable, and the game is without a doubt a triumph.
However, it also comes with all the other trappings of being a big budget Rockstar open world. There are bugs and glitches galore, NPCs and missions might not always work as intended, and you better get used to fiddling around with inventory items and weapon loadouts. Not to mention the need to eat and dress in appropriate clothing, which is more of a subjective preference than anything else, but even more busy work getting in the way of flat out gameplay fun.
Despite the hype, Red Dead Redemption 2 turns out to be a mixed bag. Some of the best moments I've ever had in gaming have been from Rockstar Games, but these humongous accomplishments are far from perfect. It stands as yet another lesson in the long chain of being reminded not to believe the hype. Temper those expectations well, because there are many potholes along this bumpy road.