The New 'Red Dead Redemption' Reveals the Biggest Problem With Marquee Games Today: They're Boring as Hell. (theoutline.com) 211
An anonymous reader shares a column: Everything about "Red Dead Redemption 2" is big. The latest open-world western, released in October by Rockstar Games, constantly reminds you of this. It takes roughly 15 minutes for its bland everycowboy star, Arthur Morgan, to gallop across the 29-square-mile map. It has 200 species of animals, including grizzly bears, alligators, and a surprising number of birds. It takes about 45.5 hours to play through the main quest, and 150-plus hours to reach 100 percent completion. There are more than 50 weapons to choose from, such as a double-barreled shotgun and a rusty hatchet. It's big, big, big.
[...] On top of all the bigness, "Red Dead Redemption 2" is also incredibly dull. I've been playing it off and on since it was released, and I'm still waiting for it to get fun. I'm not alone in thinking so -- Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit called it "quite boring" and Mashable said it's a "monumental disappointment." There are a glut of Reddit posts from people complaining about how slow the game feels, usually with a tone of extreme self-consciousness. Unless you're a real a**hole, it's not exactly fun to stray from popular consensus. Perhaps the general hesitancy to criticize the game is due to the fact that it's not technically bad. Its graphics and scale really are impressive. It is designed to please.
And yet "RDR2" seems to exemplify a certain kind of hollowness that's now standard among Triple-A titles. It's very big, with only tedium inside. Call it a Real World Game. The main problem with "RDR2" is that it's comprised almost entirely of tedious, mandatory chores. It always feels like it's stalling for time, trying to juke the number of hours it takes to complete it.
[...] On top of all the bigness, "Red Dead Redemption 2" is also incredibly dull. I've been playing it off and on since it was released, and I'm still waiting for it to get fun. I'm not alone in thinking so -- Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit called it "quite boring" and Mashable said it's a "monumental disappointment." There are a glut of Reddit posts from people complaining about how slow the game feels, usually with a tone of extreme self-consciousness. Unless you're a real a**hole, it's not exactly fun to stray from popular consensus. Perhaps the general hesitancy to criticize the game is due to the fact that it's not technically bad. Its graphics and scale really are impressive. It is designed to please.
And yet "RDR2" seems to exemplify a certain kind of hollowness that's now standard among Triple-A titles. It's very big, with only tedium inside. Call it a Real World Game. The main problem with "RDR2" is that it's comprised almost entirely of tedious, mandatory chores. It always feels like it's stalling for time, trying to juke the number of hours it takes to complete it.
Every review of Red Dead I saw (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the problem with "Live Services". Because the game has to go on forever with an endless loop chock full of microtransactions and loot boxes nothing substantial or interesting can happen in the game. Even Destiny 2 with it's instance dungeons fell victim to that.
The consoles still have 2 or 3 decent single player releases a year so there's that. But they're only there to move consoles. If we ever get the "ever-console" that streams the games then we'll lose that too.
What I don't get is these kids who pay real money for crap in game. Guess I'm just too old, but it ruins the experience to have a store front in my face non-stop. Even when I was at the arcades as a kid I didn't have that. Once the quarters dropped the game was a game (Double Dragon 3 not withstanding). Pac-man didn't distract me with a power pellets store and I couldn't buy armor for my flying ostrich in Joust.
Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw (Score:5, Insightful)
"A hundred yards short of your objective, accidentally ride off a cliff and die"
Once I stopped giggling I started to think about older games. Many didn't have any save or password options at all. You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start. We really are spoiled with modern games that let you save after every mission, or even at waypoints during the mission, and give you infinite lives and continues.
The bigger problem for me is the amount of grinding in modern games. I don't mind a challenge that I have to work at and where I feel like I'm improving and making progress, but with GTA a lot of it is just fairly easy missions where you fail mostly due to bad luck or the janky game engine, and there is just so much of it. Seems like RDR2 is the same.
Different design philosophy (Score:5, Insightful)
Good Modern games have a ton of content, so they don't need lives to keep you from blowing through the game. Bad modern games, OTOH, don't have much to do, so they substitute grinding.
In the old days the goal was to keep the game out of the used bins (and before that to keep your parents from getting made when you asked for a new game in less than a day). Nowadays the goal is "engagement". To keep you playing so they can sell you more crap. That'd be fine if the crap was more gameplay, but these days it's skins and minor stat tweaks.
What I hate about modern games is how the constant nagging for microtransactions reminds me of the real world. I play games to unwind after a long day. It's an escape. Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
Re: (Score:2)
I never had a NES but I have heard that Shinobi was quite a difficult game, so when you say you could get through it in an hour I guess you mean after putting in many many hours of practice.
Modern games have more content, but are more like interactive movies where even poor players get to see it all just by relentless grinding. Open world games are particularly prone to that - if you suck just grind more equipment and weapons until it becomes unbalanced in your favour.
Remember GoldenEye on the the N64? The
Re: (Score:2)
... A few years later and every game had a tutorial, often unskippable....
Every single GD Match 3 game on this good earth, despite being clones of clones of clones of Bejewelled, insist on teaching you the exact same fraking mechanics.
Re: (Score:2)
It's the rule of the 10,000 new people every day. For a decent number of people, any given Match 3 game WILL be their first Match 3 game.
Unskippable, though. To hell with that.
Re: (Score:2)
Try an
Re: (Score:2)
I never had a NES but I have heard that Shinobi was quite a difficult game, so when you say you could get through it in an hour I guess you mean after putting in many many hours of practice.
NES and SMS versions of Shinobi were different games.
The big bad super-hard ninja game on the NES was Ninja Gaiden.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
I don't like to be reminded too much about virtual assets in the virtual world either. Too much grind required to progress. Oh, grind can be fine if it's sort of optional, in longer games sometimes I do like to do something a bit mindless and get sidetracked, as long as I can get out of it when I want to. But take Battlefield 5. Fine shooter. But then they added all these "seasonal" objectives you have to complete in order to unlock new weapons (and more skins, yay). Kill 4 guys with a headshot in 1 r
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, grind can be fine if it's sort of optional...
I totally agree. And it blows my mind that games think it's OK to just hand out grind missions.
That's bullshit. It's so fucking lazy and disrespectful to the players.
Stick some barter tradeposts in the game, and price the items in them in terms of grind. 100 bandit bandanas to avenge my father, and I'll give you his old rifle. Medicine man has ED medicine I need. Get me some of that, and I'll give you this pistol. Medicine man needs 25 sequoia seeds to make the ED medicine, along with a live snake. To get s
Re: (Score:2)
What I hate about modern games is how the constant nagging for microtransactions reminds me of the real world. I play games to unwind after a long day. It's an escape. Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.
This. I've had times in life when money was a real problem - I mean, who has money to spare after just buying a house? When I've dealt with finances for the whole day and the result wasn't making me too happy, throwing a "buy this DLC" into my face was a certain shortcut to the uninstall button.
But game designers don't get that, I fear. Or not enough of us do it.
Re: (Score:2)
Rather on topic here, thanks for Battlemaster. I played that for several years, and had an awesome time every step of the way. Started as a knight, rose to power, started a second knight, founded a kingdom, and then lost it as well.
Real life got busy, and I realized I just didn't have the time and energy for the game that I felt the other players deserved. I still think about it fondly every time I see you post here. If it's still around when I retire, I may get suckered back in. It was one hell of a ride.
Re: (Score:3)
Thanks for the compliments.
I still love the game, but wish it were up-to-date with technology. That's why I made Might & Fealty, but for some reason it didn't catch on quite as much.
I'd very much love to see the concept of BM in an AAA open-world MMORPG. But I guess the business model just isn't there to pay for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, personally I stop reading game reviews when I see "microtransactions" and I do buy quite a few games. (No TV and not missing it one bit.) If they want to screw me over, they can screw themselves instead. I will rather give my money to those that may have worse tech or worse size but actually understand that this is about entertaining people, not about squeezing as much money out of the customer as possible.
Sadly, I think not many people actually do vote with their money this way. They get drawn in by
even very old rpg had save (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I see people talking abou the good old days of games realize that they're talking about 1995 or 2000 and that they've never actually seen a game that's not on a console that wasn't solitaire or minesweeper.
There are indeed a lot of players who do want a big open world game that isn't over once the short 40 hour main quest is done. A lot of people used to story driven games that don't give you a choice don't get this. A lot of new games are just slightly interactive movies.
Re: (Score:2)
You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start.
But that was designed into the game. The early jump & run games, for example, were all made so that any individual part was not crazy impossible, so you always made progress. But to get to the end with enough lives left to conquer it was hard.
So on your first play, you'd lose one life here and one life there and then be out of lives maybe in the middle of the level. Then by design you start at the beginning again, with full lives, because on your second run you reach the middle with one or two lives lef
Re: (Score:2)
No more than you are "spoiled" by being able to vote without being male and owning property.
Re: (Score:2)
To be honest, I don't even remember that many games that did not let you save anywhere you wanted to, and I've been playing computer games since Adventure and Wizardry 1. When I first saw a game that only let you save at save-points I thought it was crazy.
Re: (Score:2)
Once I stopped giggling I started to think about older games. Many didn't have any save or password options at all. You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start.
On the up side that first hour was actually fun. God forbid you plodded along for 15min doing nothing only to die without a save point.
Re: (Score:2)
Even GTA seems like an improvement though, even though it's older. I haven't played RDR because it's not available for my platform, but I felt the same way with the Mad Max game a few years back. It started out fun but eventually it became clear that it was just a grind across a large map. Kind of the same with the recent LOTR games. I think that what separates those from GTA is that, with all of the games you might have a certain objective to get to across the map. With LOTR or Max Max or (presumably)
Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw (Score:5, Interesting)
I would say that this practice made the games still repetitive. So that's not a good argument here.
Disclaimer: Now I'm talking about myself here in a more subjective manner. Your mileage may differ.
I used to play games. I'd still do if most of them weren't just so terrible. What do I mean by terrible?
When I was first confronted with video games, this new form of media thrived on innovation. Practically all games had their unique angles that required the player to either learn new motor skills or new ways of thinking to solve the problems the game posed. You had to learn to master these new skills in order to beat the game, which then was a reward on its own.
Today however, most of the games have to play pretty much exactly the same, because apparently you can't ask from your consumers to learn and train a new skill, which can lead to frustrating experiences if it doesn't work right away. Therefore pretty much every big first person shooter has to play exactly like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Every 3rd person shooter has to play like Uncharted. Every 3rd person action RPG has to play like Dark Souls. And so forth. Then there's also this competitive-multiplayer craze, which I won't touch here because it'll take too long.
From my perspective the few things that make these games different are their graphics and the stories they try to tell. The one thing that distinguishes games from other forms of media -- interactivity -- appears to become less and less important.
So I came to the realization that I do not need to spend $60 every time a big studio craps out one of these games, just in order to get essentially the same experience that I can get on platforms like youtube or twitch (played by a trusted streamer) for almost no additional costs. There's no more need for an expensive gaming computer or maybe a console as I can watch these things on my phone, while I'm on the go. If I want good stories there are even simpler ways like picking up plain simple book or even audio book if I'm lazy.
Now and then I still pick up some simulation games like ArmA or DCS. The odd low budget indy game can be interesting to me. But all in all I've shifted my focus on other, factually healthier activities for my spare time.
Maybe I'm just getting old and bitter.
Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing that distinguishes games from other forms of media -- interactivity -- appears to become less and less important.
I would agree with that wholeheartedly. As the publishers started to get a hard-on for ham-fisted scripted games, I really started to rage about that shit. The first "fuck it, I'm out" I remember really, really clearly was the first Assassin's Creed. I was supposed to kill a dude. Managed to spend a large amount of time once I found him to stealthily infiltrate the building he was in, navigate above him, and line up my kill-shot. I dropped down and....CUTSCENE! I walk in through the front door, witty banter ensues, and then all the guards come to have a giant fight with me.
It's not just the interactivity, it's ripping control of the game out of the hands of the player to force it to go the way the publisher has laid their animated movie out. And the way they laid it out is a linear, inflexible, predictable path, with a couple of sharp bends right where you'd expect to find them. Maybe if we're lucky there's a fork in there somewhere, but more than likely no matter which one you pick you end up back on the same path.
Thinking back to games of yesteryear, a lot of them let you play the damn game, successfully or not. I definitely remember breaking games by dicking around in them. Killing a critical NPC. Making quest-givers mad at me so I couldn't progress. Unintentionally ruining things I needed later. Today, very few publishers are willing to allow stuff like that to happen, because inevitably some entitled twat will go and post a shitty review because the game allowed them to fail.
Lately, I've been playing text based RPGs, because those are all human-driven, and don't have significant issues with a storyline being imposed on the player. I've been a Duke in a doomed kingdom, and a minor criminal in a modern-times crime game. Those are/were tons of fun, and not having a story imposed on me was very liberating.
I also dabble in Dwarf Fortress every now and then. I really need to be in the mood to battle that dumpster fire, however. My current save is a fortress where I have an abundance of dead dwarves, and nobody will engrave memorial slabs or make coffins because they're being haunted, so more ghosts are showing up because the dead are lying around everywhere because nobody is making memorial slabs or coffins. I'm trying to drag the corpses way off to a corpse stockpile on the edge of the map, but nobody seems interested in doing that either, because they're all traumatized due to seeing dead bodies and ghosts.
Maybe I'm just getting old and bitter.
Maybe. Personally, I find battling something like a vicious ghost cycle a hell of a lot more interesting than fetchem quests and heinous railroading to force a game story to unfold in a single, uncompromising way.
Re: (Score:2)
To each their own, I guess... I sorta prefer scripted games because it might be several months(!) between play sessions. As opposed to open world games, where I've forgotten all of the silly sub-quests and sub-characters during the gap.
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno, when I first played video games, other than the arcade ones, you didn't need that much in the way of motor skills for anything except action games. They didn't have the atrocities of "action RPG" or "RTS" games invented yet.
Re: (Score:3)
Those old games in reality took only a few hours to beat if you didn't die once.
Many just take a few minutes. The speedrunning community is amazing.
I'm still torn by which I'm most impressed with: the cubing community with their blindfold cube solving, or the speedrunning community beating Punch Out blindfolded (the final fight requires 1-frame accuracy).
Re: (Score:2)
But there was in-game weapons stores in Black Tiger and Crossed Sword. Granted, it used in-game currency, but still.
Re: (Score:3)
"This is the problem with "Live Services". Because the game has to go on forever with an endless loop chock full of microtransactions and loot boxes nothing substantial or interesting can happen in the game. Even Destiny 2 with it's instance dungeons fell victim to that. "
I'm puzzled. The core Red Dead 2 game play is single player (so much so that multiplayer was still in beta on launch) which has no micro transactions.
"The consoles still have 2 or 3 decent single player releases a year so there's that. But
Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw (Score:5, Insightful)
"Once the quarters dropped the game was a game"
Games had a variety of ways to ensure that the average quarter didn't stretch too far. Sure, Pacman can be played for hours (until you die or the game locks up) on a single quarter, but no one knew how back then- it took years to figure out the patterns, and to this day only a few people can execute them flawlessly. For the most part, the monetization was aggressive and subtle. Heck, by the 90s, that 3D Gauntlet game would start buffing enemies and eventually squeeze you out, and they added these patches in waves, each willingly installed by operators to keep good players paying something.
By contrast, when an arcade game hit your home console, this stuff was mostly taken out, as it was only ever added to fit the actual sales model of the game. And when a home system WAS made available as an arcade- such as the Playchoice 10- the quarters directly paid for time.
I'd say that games have ALWAYS been created around their sales systems, that this has ALWAYS determined how the game is designed, developed, and implemented, and that even the progressive difficulty you find pleasing in old school games was created by the desire to get you to put more quarters in the game, by honest implementation at first, and by harsher tricks as you went on.
While that's true very few were completely cheap (Score:2)
To be fair they had a _lot_ more competition too. There are very few AAA publishers left. Activision, EA, Sony, Capcom, Ubisoft, Bethesday and Square are about it (might include Gearbox in that). That's 8 companies. There were dozens back in the arcade
Re: (Score:2)
Because the game has to go on forever with an endless loop chock full of microtransactions and loot boxes nothing substantial or interesting can happen in the game.
To be honest, I found the entire lack of grandiose world-turning events in RDR2 refreshing. This is not Skyrim where you're the grand savior, you don't have any great hidden powers and you're not a pawn/hero in the great battle between good and evil. You can be a good guy, bad guy, neutral hunter/trapper/fisher guy or whatever but nobody has at any point given the impression that Arthur Morgan would change the world. Sure a few guns are unlocked but you start out a gunslinger, you end a gunslinger. If that
Re: (Score:2)
Even Destiny 2 with it's instance dungeons fell victim to that.
Instance dungeons in Destiny 2? After thousands of hours of playing have I missed something?
Do you mean Lost Sectors? Or the Infinite Forest? I suppose they could be considered "instance dungeons". I agree that Lost Sectors and the Infinite Forest are not terribly exciting. But they are also fortuntely not particularly central to the Destiny 2 gameplay experience.
Re: (Score:2)
I would like to play it, since I like open world games like Fallout, but it's not on PC. I wonder if console users have become so used to games that are tightly on the rails that they're uncertain how to deal with open world games or games with more RPG than action. Having a store in a game is a bad thing, but I gather that this is pretty common in modern games.
Re: (Score:2)
Fallout: New Vegas is pretty much a western in many ways.
The problem is... (Score:2)
... CEO's realized the way to expand the market and recoup development costs was to make movies and not games. This trend towards making the game a movie pushed aside gameplay beginning around 2000 with the jump of PC devs to console as PC games were getting costly to develop due to 3D cards making dev costs explode and greener pastures on a locked down platform with less technically informed population.
Now that the market has expanded to the bottom half of the bell curve we get shit games and mind blowing
Re:The problem is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Dude, have you been playing any games lately? Yes, you have to lay off EA, Ubi and Blizzard like they do developers, but there has NEVER in the history of gaming been a larger, more open market for independent game developers that offer great games without any DRM bull.
Forget about the big studios. They're a lost case and probably won't shit out anything worthwhile anymore. They can't take no risk, they will offer nothing interesting. What they do is to give last year's turd a new shine, slap the current year onto the title so there is actually a noticeable difference to what they sold you last year, sell it to you for 60 bucks, sell you the 0-day DLC for another 30 (that you need to finish the game at all) and milk the rest from you with microtransactions. Forget them, they're a lost case.
But aside of those studios there is a very large amount of small game makers, usually with only a handful of games to their name (if that) that sell you absolute gems for maybe 20 or 30 bucks. Without DRM, microtransactions or any other bullshit.
Of course they have less money at their disposal for advertising. Their money is in the game.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Civ 5 was better than Civ 6? And Civ 5 was a raging dumpster fire.
Independent games are fun and all (Score:2)
Also there's not a lot of AA games left. There's Obsidian, but Microsoft just bought them and who knows what'll happen. Most of the AA Japanese devs are gone (even Konami dropped out except for PES).
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, AAA can give you an incredible amount of nothing, but independent can give you a reasonable amount of actual fun. I know what I prefer.
Re: (Score:2)
You really need a big AAA studio though in order to get your bug count that high.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Independents can not even write enough code to have that many bugs in there.
Re: (Score:2)
Couldn't agree more. The most fun I had last year was with Oxygen Not Included by Klei. And they are still not even out of early access.
Re: (Score:2)
The whole 'they want to make movies' thing is kinda ten years out of date. None of the big publishers are interested in linear, narrative focused games anymore. They're mostly trying to convince us all that online only hamster wheels are the way, devoid of both gameplay and narrative
That only happened as mobile phones got to the point to put gambling inside of games. Gacha didn't become predominant until around 2010's. And big single player movie games are still mainstays. Just look at the latest god of war. Titanfall 2 and TF3 will also have a singleplayer "inside the movie campaign". The single player campaign is not dead. It's just companies now have access to easy money because mobile and internet gave them complete control over the game to put mtx inside it. Microtransac
15 minutes to ride across the map? (Score:4, Insightful)
"It takes roughly 15 minutes for its bland everycowboy star, Arthur Morgan, to gallop across the 29-square-mile map."
Apparently the author is new to modern RPGS
A) Relative to other modern RPGs, that's not very much at all
B) The game has fast travel
Everything else in the review just makes me think "Well, maybe you need to accept that big open world RPGs are not for you".
Re: (Score:2)
People want more variety in these games. They all have limited mission types, boring play mechanics for things like, fetch water/chop wood/gather plants/etc.
Re:15 minutes to ride across the map? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a western-based game that has a western-based environment and western-based tasks to accomplish.
Maybe the author doesn't like westerns.
Re: (Score:2)
Yea for a game that has several simulationist pieces and tries to put you in a virtual wild west, I don't exactly know what is expected. You can make a straight full action fps with a cowboy skin, or some kind of vaguely interactive movie with a western plot, but for an open world game, why all the complaints?
Re: (Score:2)
Agh, I'm not on any rails! What do I do now? Please Mister Developer, give me more cut-scenes and Quick Time Events!
Re: (Score:2)
This. It's a western game. What was expected?
Re: (Score:2)
Probably train robberies whenever they want, lots of shootouts, etc. They wanted the best scenes from westerns, not the middle part where they rode across the desert over a month.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean maximum of 15 minutes until they hit the end of the map?
Re: (Score:3)
"People want more variety in these games."
Which is why these games sell so well?
Re: (Score:2)
I think this game sold well based on rep, I know most people stopped playing it by their own metrics before the first 1/3rd of the game is completed. They made it too slow for the audience. I haven't gotten on RD2, but loved RD1 and would play it at a slower pace. Going on lots of diversions, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
I should add, the low play will effect the next release from Rockstar unless they make online play better/cheaper.
Re: (Score:2)
It will? You just said you loved Red Dead 1's slow pace. That game's slow pace certainly didnt hurt Red Dead 2's sales.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course most big games like this are never finished so your anecdotal evidence matches up with all big games like this https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com] . Shit, in the article's major example just 6.4% of players finished Pillars of Eternity.
People not finishing big games has been a well known trend in gaming for at least a decade.
"They made it too slow for the audience. "
It's fairly certain that if you dont like a game with scores like these https://www.metacritic.com/gam... [metacritic.com] it's not a problem wi
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe the "audience" that found it dull wasn't the intended audience? Sure, any genre of games that I dislike I tend to end up disliking, that's to be expected. Maybe the fault is with releasing the game for consoles where it's a completely different class of players who are unused to open world, sandbox, or RPGs that don't have a J in front?
Re:15 minutes to ride across the map? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides fast travel, you also have "Cinematic Travel"... it is basically auto-steer... set a waypoint, and you can set the controller down and enjoy the (very well done) scenery as it takes you to your destination. I've not seen that in a game before, but I don't play a ton of games, so it has probably been done before.
Re: (Score:2)
I haven't played RDR2, but the description KINDA sounds like flight masters in WoW although that's between hard set travel points. An evolution of an idea, perhaps?
Re: (Score:2)
Most MMOs have something similar to this. It's "fast" travel though as travel faster than you normally can.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My understanding that you have to unlock fast travel which at the minimum requires you to have visited that location before and completed enough of the campaign.
Most games only let you fast travel to places you've visited before, but most games also put new objectives near to old ones. It's much less common to make you unlock fast travel at all, but it's not unheard of.
Re: (Score:2)
Seems like it should be pretty exciting to travel on a horse at 120mph.
Re: (Score:2)
"Well, maybe you need to accept that big open world RPGs are not for you".
Big open world RPGs and big open world yawn fests are not the same thing. RDR2 is pretty, like really pretty. Unfortunately that's about all it has going for it. Once I stopped being fascinated by graphics I found it to be one of the more boring RPGs I've played.
Re: (Score:2)
(too quick to hit submit) And that's before you consider it's not much of an RPG.
Re: (Score:2)
You set a waypoint, get on your horse, get on the nearest road/path in the vague direction you want to go and switch to cinematic mode. Then, unless you have a very high bounty or are very early or late in the game you can get to where you're going without doing anything.
It is an RPG (Score:2)
And you play the role of a cowboy and everything in the old west just kinda moseyed on. Apparently if you can get into it and move at the game's pace it is a fantastic immersive experience if you can't it is complete shit.
Re: (Score:2)
Why is this news? (Score:2)
Looking at the articles by the author he's not a games 'journalist' (and very few of the people calling themselves game journalists have a clue how to actually be a journalist), so I'm not sure why I should care what he thinks about RDR2 (BTW I have not bought/played the game, so I don't have a dog in the fight myself). If this was an article of cultural or artistic aspects of the game he might be a bit more qualified in his opinion, but to someone who is not specifically interested in this genre of games o
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect says you shouldn't inherently trust anything any journalist says.
Re: (Score:2)
Really? We already know that there are millions of people out there who will dislike your favorite game. Why listen to them? You want someone to say "I've never used a computer before so this computer game thing is pretty weird, and frankly silly so I advise you to just go watch a Jim Carey movie instead"? Do you listen to people who say not to play chess because there's not enough explosions? Do you base your decisions based upon a silly metacritic score?
Essentially you've got someone who doesn't like a
Alternatively, it's just not the game for you (Score:4, Interesting)
If you think riding across the map is boring, don't do it. Use fast travel, or use it as an indicator it's not a game you find enjoyable.
We don't say there's a terrible problem in books today when someone who likes mysteries does not find an autobiography interesting.
An open-world RPG is going to have certain game elements, no matter what the setting. Like repetitive "chores", and a slow pace. If you don't like those elements in your video game, don't play an open-world RPG.
It's not like RDR1 was a frantic experience, so you should know this going in to RDR2.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is those certain elements can be done better and worse. Bully Scholarship Ed is still the best thing they have ever done IMHO. There is repetition, classes you must attend, even chores but never feels tedious. They found the right balance of "a day in the life" and real action.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I went through the same rose-colored-glasses thing when I was younger. Thankfully, things like GoG exist so I could play those titles I remembered as having so much more depth and fun....and figured out that >90% of them lacked substance too now that I was not longer a kid.
Re: (Score:2)
Fast travel takes you out of the game imho.
In these modern 'open world games' it can, even with fast travel take anywhere from 5-20 minutes before you get to the 'action' part and you're doing repetitive tasks until you meet some internal counter.
Even old 'open world' games like Duke 3D, you had various avenues to get to your goal. In modern games, they program a single path and place to victory and straying from that path doesn't get you anything until you get back to it.
Morrowind didn't have that (Score:2)
I think the author's point is that a lot of these open worlds are kind of empty. Saying "Well, the designers meant to invoke the loneliness of the old west" is all well and good, but while that imagery might make for good cinema it makes for dull as paint drying games...
Re: (Score:2)
And the complaints about RDR2 are the opposite of your complaints. On-rails makes for a shorter, more directed game. The "slow" pace is because it's not on rails.
And there's a hell of a lot of people on both sides of that. See: Fallout New Vegas vs Fallout 3/4/76. There's a market for both, but playing a game from the "opposite" side will be significantly less fun.
Re: (Score:2)
When I first hit some of these games that are on rails but which appear to be more open I was disappointed. Ie, Dragon Age Origins, everyone talked about how it was open and you had tons of choices, but it felt so restrictive with plenty of invisible walls and funnels everywhere. Now that's ok with something like the original Tomb Raider because it's obvious you're on the rails, there's only one path and it's not even a maze and you can see all of the walls, and it's a puzzle game and not an exploration ga
The game wasn't slow,, the character is slow (Score:2)
When you judge by numbers, you get numbers (Score:3)
We started judging games by the hours it takes to play through them, is it any kind of wonder that game studios try to maximize the hours it takes to play through them?
The problem is that many modern games have zero replay value. After you've seen the game and its story once, there is very little incentive to do it again. You already know how it unfolds. If you're the achiever type you can try to slaughter a billion (insert animal here) or find all hidden masks of Ujawuja in the cave but for the normal, non-OCD player, being done with the story means being done with the game.
What are you looking for ... (Score:2)
I once played a game that traced 'hours spent logged in' When I hit 1 year I started thinking...
What else could I have done, learned, experienced, read with that time in my life. I quite gaming and have been much happier ever since.
Games are meant to entertain us, so amuse us and to be a way to expend 'free time'.
But what do you have when you are done. Why not write story, a poem , go explore you city for an hour, read any of the many classic books out there , spend time discussing thing on line or even
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
You're going to die either way, people choose what to spend their time on and it doesn't actually matter. Your opinion is that writing a poem is a better use of time, but that is only your opinion.
yawn, boring as hell (Score:2)
Chores (Score:2)
I suspect it has to do with the way these games make money nowadays. There was an article linked on
Farming Sim Of the future (Score:2)
After I beat the game I spent hours working on a ranch as John Marston, building fences, milking cows and shoveling the barn.
The RDR2 story was great outside the mundane tasks in the game. I didn't agree with the death of Arthor Morgan though, I grew to like his character.
common (Score:2)
I find that a common theme in games release in the last decade or so.
I'm a gamer. Not addicted but I've clocked in enough gaming hours and enough different games that it's really hard to surprise me anymore. And somehow, games used to be more fun. For a long while I attributed that to the stupid payment models. Pay2Win, DLCs, subscriptions, whatever, they all require game designers to change the gameplay away from maximum fun to maximum profitability. When you bought a game and that was it, the game could f
Anecdotes are not data, but... (Score:2)
My laughter loves RDR2. The open world tedium immerses her and makes her very happy.
For her, it's an escape from the day to day. She doesn't need or want constant adrenaline from this game. She wants to be in it. When she does want Adrenaline she plays Overwatch.
My favorite game is an excruciatingly tedious open world first person shooter, Arma 3. It's not uncommon for a death in a Zeus match to respawn me on the opposite side of the island, a 20 minute boat ride away from my squad. It makes me much m
Playing should feel like reading a good book. (Score:2)
Re:The real biggest problem (Score:4, Funny)
I see what you did there.
Re: (Score:2)
Was it intentional or occidental?
Re: (Score:2)
I SAID GOOD DAY! - Fez
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's not cost (Score:2)
The cost of putting together a story is no where near a deciding factor. After all RDR2 has a bigger budget than most (all?) Marvel movies. But then it's single player. If it's single player, it's harder to fit microtransactions in (also, if it's too fun to get the items in game, it's hard to fit microtransactions in). It's also impossible to turn off the servers to force upgrades to RDR3 (or GTA6). It's harder to generate a community, which means its harder to show franchise-ness to accountants. Ther
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Huh? I'm actually kind of a regular player of Overwatch, and all I've found is that after an initial feeling I was "underwhelmed", I started getting the hang of it and got sucked in.
The thing with Overwatch is, a lot of the game really hinges on you practicing and getting good at using each character's unique attributes, but always in the context of how they complement other players on your team (or work against the enemy character(s) you're up against in a given match).
You can get really far in the game j
Re: (Score:2)
A lot of newer games have something similar, but you can ignore them. If designed for consoles most developers feel obliged to cater to the teen and pre-teen crowd who just want the interactive movie bits. Ie, the Thief reboot had a lot of stuff to simplify things, including the tell-me-where-to-go options, auto-saves, and such. That game got a lot of flack from Thief series fans, but I give them credit for taking the criticisms to heart and addressing them as best they could before being fired, too bad