This was a replay, the first time I played I loved the story.
This time I spend around 100 hours in chapter 2 exploring the world, which was amazing, before moving on with the story.
The things I found annoying-
- Weird NPC comments - like remarks by gang on how soon Arthur returned to camp or the blood on him, when he has a deer on his shoulder, when Arthur is the only one feeding them. Or NPC saying why is Arthur following him, while walking down stairs.
- Arthur saying he'll look for gang member request item even when he already has it.
- Law system, inconsistent economy.
- No repercussions of Arthur's behavior with gang or Arthur's contribution to camp funds.
This broke immersion for me on several occasions even when I wanted to believe otherwise as I was loving the world and wanted to be deeply immersed regardless.
But these were minor issues and were overshadowed by the beautiful world.
I finally lost it with all the spoon-feeding and the hand-holding during missions, and when daddy rockstar did not like it when I did not play EXACTLY how they wanted me to, standing in the wrong spot - mission failed, try a different strategy - mission failed, jumped directly outside Danbury's window - guess what - mission failed because Danbury just had a divine vision and destroyed the documents in a second. Fuck this shit.
However much I loved the open world this time and the story in the first play-through. RDR2 is definitely overrated and extremely annoying.
End of rant. This is obviously just an opinion, and enjoying game is the only thing that matters, so if you do, lucky you.
Sounds like NakeyJakey's take from 5y ago. Hoping they take some lessons for GTA6.
To be fair, it's not easy to make a big open world that feels immersive and competes with linear games in terms of fidelity (art, rendering, sound, music, etc), even if you know exactly where the player will go and what they'll do. Trying to then account for every possible permutation of game state and player action is an exponential explosion of work. Without some kind of AI figuring out a believable way for the game to respond in any given situation, your only practical option is to make some assumptions, pick a small set of "golden paths" and polish those.
R* devs work their asses off to an ethically questionable degree as it is, I don't think it's fair to imply they're not making the best possible experience at that scale with the technology available.