ColonelTeacup Me thinks the point is that the game is really slow and it doesn't have to be. There's an animation for just about everything (from the 3 hours I played) and the game requires you suffer it all.
You have a mission where you have to ride a wagon to your new camp, and 10 seconds into doing so your wheel falls off and the game then asks you to pick it up and fix it in a qte scene, then another cutscene pops up, then you drive the wagon to your camp. Did we need to do this? no. In other places, your character moves really slow in snow, kinda like you would in real life but so far it doesn't really do much in the game except just making you slow. Assassin's Creed 3 had this too, and I didn't like it, but at least there you cna climb trees and shit.
The trick here is that this part of the game and all the journeys are being used to develop characters without being a cutscene but doesn't have the luxury of allowing you to skip it like the cutscenes. Instead, you'll be in the wagon with the old doc in cinematic mode holding x (becuase the game has a built in mechanic that allows the horses to automatically follow paths to their destination).
It's boring and a bit painful to listen or watch the dialogue while holding x for a good 5 - 10 minutes.
Perhaps if I cared that much for Immersion I would appreciate these parts, but right now it is a slog and is being used for every mission. To the games credit, it genuinely has great voice actors, great graphics, and great animation so they sell the illusion very well.
I guess in hindsight it does show that mainstream audience will very much buy, play and enjoy slow meandering games, even if it fits in an unpopular genre (Western) as long as it comes from a really popular developer.
