Red Dead Redemption 2 - now available on PC

[Falksi]

So I decided to give it one last go last night. Put it on, started a mission, set off on my horse to the mission location......on my horse on the way to the mission.......still on my horse on the way to the mission.........5 min later still on my horse on the way to the mission............

Fuck this shit, games are meant to be stimulating & fun, be it either intellectually via tactical interaction, or by getting the adrenals going with some great action. RDR2 is another game in a long line of ones which hype up chores as "fun".

Awful game, truly awful.

What's wrong with being required to travel to the destination target? Travel time has always been a staple in rpgs. Just look at new vegas, or fallout 2.

It aint what's being done, it's how it's being done & how often.

Much like the Witcher 3, the treks to the destinations are absolutely boring as fuck. Unlike TW3 at least sometimes there's some dialogue, but even that just sends me to sleep because all you're doing is tapping X and not interacting with anything.

Compare that to say Vicy City where you can be pulling all kinds of stunts off on route, or an action RPG like Divinity 2 where you discover all types of treasures, side-quests & enemies.

It's poor, poor, dull game design and I'm amazed folk enjoy it. The player may as well not even be there. At times I'd leave my girlfriend playing it to get me to the mission whilst I got a brew or went for a piss it was so dull & pointless.

Have you considered listening to a podcast whilst in-transit? Also, considering your examples of finding lost treasure on the wayside, or "performing sick stunts on the way there", perhaps games with a slower burn or travel exploration are not your thing, and something like the new black ops with instant gratification would be more to your liking?

sullynathan offers a lot of counterpoints which I would mate, and I agree with him wholeheartedly on most of them too.

As for podcasts etc. the reason I was playing RDR2 was to be entertained by that, not some other form of media.

Fair play to folk who enjoy it, but to me it embodies modern decline. Want to see beautiful scenery, watch rabbits run & soak it all up? Getting out into real nature. I'm all for slower burners if they engage me, but RDR doesn't. It forgets that it's a game and fills the time with hours worth of mundane stuff for "realities" sake, and reality is the boring painful drdge I'm trying to escape from.

If games were a sexy disease-free woman, RDR2 be the one which sends you to the shop mid-fun to make you buy & faff about wearing a condom.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

So I decided to give it one last go last night. Put it on, started a mission, set off on my horse to the mission location......on my horse on the way to the mission.......still on my horse on the way to the mission.........5 min later still on my horse on the way to the mission............

Fuck this shit, games are meant to be stimulating & fun, be it either intellectually via tactical interaction, or by getting the adrenals going with some great action. RDR2 is another game in a long line of ones which hype up chores as "fun".

Awful game, truly awful.

What's wrong with being required to travel to the destination target? Travel time has always been a staple in rpgs. Just look at new vegas, or fallout 2.

It aint what's being done, it's how it's being done & how often.

Much like the Witcher 3, the treks to the destinations are absolutely boring as fuck. Unlike TW3 at least sometimes there's some dialogue, but even that just sends me to sleep because all you're doing is tapping X and not interacting with anything.

Compare that to say Vicy City where you can be pulling all kinds of stunts off on route, or an action RPG like Divinity 2 where you discover all types of treasures, side-quests & enemies.

It's poor, poor, dull game design and I'm amazed folk enjoy it. The player may as well not even be there. At times I'd leave my girlfriend playing it to get me to the mission whilst I got a brew or went for a piss it was so dull & pointless.

Have you considered listening to a podcast whilst in-transit? Also, considering your examples of finding lost treasure on the wayside, or "performing sick stunts on the way there", perhaps games with a slower burn or travel exploration are not your thing, and something like the new black ops with instant gratification would be more to your liking?

sullynathan offers a lot of counterpoints which I would mate, and I agree with him wholeheartedly on most of them too.

As for podcasts etc. the reason I was playing RDR2 was to be entertained by that, not some other form of media.

Fair play to folk who enjoy it, but to me it embodies modern decline. Want to see beautiful scenery, watch rabbits run & soak it all up? Getting out into real nature. I'm all for slower burners if they engage me, but RDR doesn't. It forgets that it's a game and fills the time with hours worth of mundane stuff for "realities" sake, and reality is the boring painful drdge I'm trying to escape from.

If games were a sexy disease-free woman, RDR2 be the one which sends you to the shop mid-fun to make you buy & faff about wearing a condom.

Then lets agree to disagree, as I doubt either of us will be swayed in this regard.

 

[Sentinel]

You don't know how ridiculous it is to get into a firefight against 10 - 20 enemies and trying to loot many of them while Dutch is constantly yelling at the player to come on, even though he just asked us to look for loot.

What if the animations are slow to discourage you from looting every body in a scene? I never looted everyone after a firefight (especially because you risk being caught by cop patrols/squads investigating if you linger too long)

 

[sullynathan]

You don't know how ridiculous it is to get into a firefight against 10 - 20 enemies and trying to loot many of them while Dutch is constantly yelling at the player to come on, even though he just asked us to look for loot.

What if the animations are slow to discourage you from looting every body in a scene? I never looted everyone after a firefight (especially because you risk being caught by cop patrols/squads investigating if you linger too long)

I'm sure at a certain point in the game you'll have enough money that you won't need to loot anymore, but within the main missions I played, I doubt the goal was to discourage the player from looting.

 

[Sentinel]

You don't know how ridiculous it is to get into a firefight against 10 - 20 enemies and trying to loot many of them while Dutch is constantly yelling at the player to come on, even though he just asked us to look for loot.

What if the animations are slow to discourage you from looting every body in a scene? I never looted everyone after a firefight (especially because you risk being caught by cop patrols/squads investigating if you linger too long)

I'm sure at a certain point in the game you'll have enough money that you won't need to loot anymore, but within the main missions I played, I doubt the goal was to discourage the player from looting.

One of the first shootouts after the tutorial chapter has the cops show up shortly after the guns go silent and the mission ends. I'm pretty sure it was supposed to give an hint.

 

[sullynathan]

So I played a main mission where you take a wagon into town. I didn't enter a house quickly enough to look for one of my female companions and the game auto-failed the mission. Nice one.

One thing I did after the next mission (where you get into a fist fight with the fat guy) was to break away from the main missions. I did a bounty mission and a gunslinger mission.

I'm not a graphics whore but this game really looks nice, especially in night time. I go meet some guy that the sheriff wants captured and he jumps into a river, so I chase him and tie him up and take im to prison. Simple shit, but it ws definitely better than the few main missions so far.

The more interesting stuff was the gunslinger missions where I'm supposed to find the best gunslingers. I go to a snowy region that probably took 5 real world minutes to get to, but the game has some differences with cold regions and regular areas. Your overall health core keeps dropping for you and your horse. A cool thing is that your horse will get scared if a predator targets them and will run off making you fall. It was "immersive" to kill the wolves that did so and then skin the pelt from their body. I ran into the gunslinger guy and his partners talked to me and unexpectedly shot me to death. I paid them back after reloading a save.

 

[Sentinel]

Spoiler

 

[Barbarian]

Finished it. I must admit I greatly enjoyed the game. Lots of fun gameplay, tons of content, nice writing(mostly) and some memorable characters(Dutch specially). I didn't play the first game, so I had that benefit. I have seem people complaining the plot was "obvious" because they knew beforehand the setup for the end of this "prequel" - that was certainly not my case.

In the age of SJW bullshit, it was also great to play an AAA game that barely had any of that. There was a strong empowered wymmin(Sadie) and there was the fact that John was pretty much a huge cuck(Jack not being his biological son and his wife being a former gang whore who slept with everone), but both were pretty minor and neither rustled my jimmies. You only play the cuck in the epilogue.

 

[Sentinel]

Why do you think Jack wasn't John's son? IIRC he only brings it up as a way to justify his disappearance for one year but it's never given any credence. He grows up to look like John.

 

[Barbarian]

Did you spend some time at camp listening to some of the flavor dialogue? There is a lot of stuff regarding that in game. All the old-timers in the gang treat the kid well because they recognize he could be their own. And she seems to have slept with most or even all of them(even Arthur writes down in his journal that he once thought of taking her for himself and marrying her).

As for the matter of appearance, devs seem to have pulled a number there being that most members of the gang look somewhat alike. Nearly all of them have dark straight hair and similar facial features. I haven't seem adult Jack aside from some screenshots, but if you say he looks like Marston, you could as well say he looks like Javier or Bill.

 

[Sentinel]

Yeah I did spend time in camp. I only heard John talk about how he wish he could kill Abigail. Everyone else treating Jack well I took as simply sympathy because he's a kid. None of the gang members are portrayed as assholes ever other than Micah Bell who's a cunt to the kid.

 

[Barbarian]

No man, there is stuff like Javier saying something to him like "you don't look like a Marston kid, you look like a Escuella or Williamson". You also notice new members of the gang such as Kieran, Sean and the two black guys(lol, convenient) never pay the kid any attention while the others are always spending fatherly time with him. Also Arthur and his aforementioned journal entry.

I'm not even sure if the devs were trying to sell the idea that Arthur is the biological father. The kid has light brown/blonde hair in RDR2, whereas the shots I have seem from RDR1 he has black hair. Both Abigail and John are dark-haired. Arthur is the only gang member fitting the hair color bill(and he didn' exist when the first game was developed). He also seems more hellbent on saving him and Abigail than John himself by the game's end.

 

[sullynathan]

Jack not being his biological son and his wife being a former gang whore who slept with everone

Fucking spoiler.

But this does seem plausible. I always thought jack had a fat face and a very different voice from his father when you played as him as an adult.

He does end up with black hair like John though

 

[Sentinel]

No man, there is stuff like Javier saying something to him like "you don't look like a Marston kid, you look like a Escuella or Williamson". You also notice new members of the gang such as Kieran, Sean and the two black guys(lol, convenient) never pay the kid any attention while the others are always spending fatherly time with him. Also Arthur and his aforementioned journal entry.

I'm not even sure if the devs were trying to sell the idea that Arthur is the biological father. The kid has light brown/blonde hair in RDR2, whereas the shots I have seem from RDR1 he has black hair. Both Abigail and John are dark-haired. Arthur is the only gang member fitting the hair color bill(and he didn' exist when the first game was developed). He also seems more hellbent on saving him and Abigail than John himself by the game's end.

I haven't heard those Javier/Bill comments at all. Didn't even see anyone mention them. Does that happen at camp? I also don't remember seeing anyone interacting with Jack other than John, Arthur, Abigail, Micah and one of the girls. The hair color is irrelevant. A lot of people change hair color in their young years, it's part of growing up. I was born blonde but my hair changed to brown as I grew up and none of my parents have blonde hair.

 

[Barbarian]

It happens at camp. Javier seems to be the one who spends the most time with the kid besides the women.

You are the one who brought up his appearance. You could very well say he looks like Dutch's son.

 

[Sentinel]

I was unable to find any Jack & Javier or Bill scenes in RDR2 on youtube, (found one where Hosea and Abigail teach him to read though, which is kinda cute) but it's an interesting theory. Apparently Javier asks John if Abigail missed him in RDR1, although this could just him mocking him for marrying the camp's whore and not implying he's the father.

Regardless of whose son Jack is, it's nice of Rockstar to leave it up in the air (like other questions in the game). There's enough character developments and interactions that support a multitude of theories, and that to me shows that they cared enough to write it properly.

I asked you why you thought that mainly because I took John's initial comment as just a justification for him being away because of the shock and being immature, I never gave much credence to all the "John is a cuck" theory.

On your pic, if you remove the mustache he doesn't really look like Dutch.

Spoiler

And I believe Arthur tries so hard to save Abigail, John and Jack because he projects onto them the family he could never have with Mary Linton (or his earlier wife), and as the only way of seeking redemption because he's afraid of what's on the other side of death.

 

[Barbarian]

The way I understood the story, he was wounded/bedridden during the time Jack was conceived and couldn't be the father. It seems she announced her pregnancy just after he took her for his woman and they were married only after he returned from his runaway.

Dunno man, the whole thing seems pretty unambigous to me. Was this even mentioned in the first game? The man is not the father and that is why he ran away for a year. It was more storytelling than "sowing the seed of doubt" or whatever.

 

[Sentinel]

They never cast any doubt on Jack's parenthood in the first game beyond Dutch's "We all had her, but he married her." and Javier's "Did Abigail miss me?" IIRC.
I feel like I'm repeating myself but to what "bedridden" event are you referring to? From my memory we only hear of or see John bedridden/wounded after we rescue him from the wolves, and Jack was already 4 by that time.

 

[Barbarian]

Well the whole thing is exposed in bits during the game. At the start Arthur only mentions that he is pissed at John because he "ran off" for a whole year. In his conversations with John and other gangmembers we learn that he ran off because he found out the wymmin was preggo with a child that wasn't his and that these events transpired after he recovered from a robbery gone wrong after he was seriously wounded(much earlier than blackwater, obviously).

There aren't more details beyond this I think. He came back to her because he is a cuck in love.

They never cast any doubt on Jack's parenthood in the first game beyond Dutch's "We all had her, but he married her." and Javier's "Did Abigail miss me?" IIRC.

Well it's CURRENT YEAR after, there had to be at least a bit of cuckoldry. As if him being comandeered by the former whore isn't shameful enough, he raises a kid that isn't his. Honestly, I missed Arthur during the whole epilogue.

People say he is generic but I loved the guy. He reminds me of Jonah Hex minus the scar.

 

[Mark.L.Joy]

Is this the game where you get raped by hobo?

 

[Barbarian]

Is this the game where you get raped by hobo?

Only if you don't kill the hobo first.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

You deserve it for walking into obvious rapeshack.

There was a strong empowered wymmin(Sadie)

She gets a pass for being entertaining and not perfect, her aggressiveness causes a bunch of problems. Like a friendly Catalina.

 

[ColonelTeacup]

You deserve it for walking into obvious rapeshack.

There was a strong empowered wymmin(Sadie)

She gets a pass for being entertaining and not perfect, her aggressiveness causes a bunch of problems. Like a friendly Catalina.

Sadie is a micah who doesn't get treated like a micah. She pulls a stunt similar to micah in strawberry with cold o'driscall, and what was seen as bad in strawberry is fine because sadie did it, and "she's on your side". Her entire arc is idiotic too. She immediately becomes terminator levels of strong, despite the game never showing her having any competence at fighting at all, whatsoever, especially when you consider she was

Spoiler

overpowered and raped and her husband killed by just 5 o'driscolls

. Her entire arc is an insult to the intelligence, considering how nearly nothing about her makes sense, and she is constantly getting you in trouble by doing reckless, idiotic shit, and even gets innocent people killed

Spoiler

like the hot air balloon guy, as well as the innocents in town when she decides to start a firefight in the middle of the town square

What annoys me most about her isn't even her meteoric rise into John wick, but rather that she never actually receives any kind of backlash or consequences for her actions, or reflected negatively on her. Micah pulls stunts similar to her and he is the biggest bastard in all of west texas, she pulls those kinds of stunts and she is immediately diefied and considered "so hot". The poor writing and hypocrisy is chokingly awful.

 

[Sentinel]

Is it hinted that she was raped? She never mentions it and her clothes don't seem torn either. Pretty sure Dutch interrupted that party.
Her abilities aren't any more idiotic than other companions. Sadie at least was a regular hunter with her husband, so she knew her way around a gun even before you met her. It's not a stretch to imagine she can shoot a guy if needed. What's Javier's excuse? What's Charle's excuse? What's Kieran's excuse? You just assume things about them to justify their abilities, yet the justification Sadie gives is dismissed. Nice double standard. Especially when to comes to Kieran, who is never seen holding a gun and is a fearful coward before he miraculously saves Arthur's life.
Arthur acts the same way towards her as he does to Micah, the only exception is that Sadie doesn't reply with witty insults towards Arthur, so it's pretty understandable that he isn't antagonistic towards her. Moreover, he knows that she only goes ballistic against the O'Driscolls (which Arthur doesn't mind, considering what they did to him), and once they're dealt with she finds her peace. Another important difference is that Sadie doesn't shoot up an entire legion of lawmen in a town for no fucking reason (much like Micah, who, by the way, also murders two inhabitants in cold blood because of a gun).

 

[Beastro]

So I decided to give it one last go last night. Put it on, started a mission, set off on my horse to the mission location......on my horse on the way to the mission.......still on my horse on the way to the mission.........5 min later still on my horse on the way to the mission............

Fuck this shit, games are meant to be stimulating & fun, be it either intellectually via tactical interaction, or by getting the adrenals going with some great action. RDR2 is another game in a long line of ones which hype up chores as "fun".

Awful game, truly awful.

What's wrong with being required to travel to the destination target? Travel time has always been a staple in rpgs. Just look at new vegas, or fallout 2.

It aint what's being done, it's how it's being done & how often.

Much like the Witcher 3, the treks to the destinations are absolutely boring as fuck. Unlike TW3 at least sometimes there's some dialogue, but even that just sends me to sleep because all you're doing is tapping X and not interacting with anything.

Compare that to say Vicy City where you can be pulling all kinds of stunts off on route, or an action RPG like Divinity 2 where you discover all types of treasures, side-quests & enemies.

It's poor, poor, dull game design and I'm amazed folk enjoy it. The player may as well not even be there. At times I'd leave my girlfriend playing it to get me to the mission whilst I got a brew or went for a piss it was so dull & pointless.

There's no emergent stuff that pops up as you go along?

If that isn't a common and integral part of travel in a Western game, I'm shocked. You watch enough Westerns and you'll quickly realize a central plot motif is "Protagonist is in transit for a pressing reason, but runs into something he must deal with right now that is the episodes focus".