General Gaming Red Dead Redemption II | Official Thread of Shrinking Equine Testicles

[Firewithin]

is there a way to switch between the types of dead eye?  i did the mission where you can click it and shoot once but i cant figure out how to do multiple shots again

[skillzdadirecta]

49 minutes ago, Firewithin said:

is there a way to switch between the types of dead eye?  i did the mission where you can click it and shoot once but i cant figure out how to do multiple shots again

You can upgrade it to do multiple shots.

[Bacon]

2 hours ago, legend said:

Well, I'm pretty sure I have a game breaking bug. The main quest in chapter 6 "good by dead friend" won't advance for me. I've now retried it about 4 times. It always results in Dutch stopping to "wait" and then nothing happens. It won't trigger the next scene no matter what I do. I even tried playing some other quests and coming back to it. It still won't work. I've watched videos online and its supposed to trigger immediately. It doesn't.

 

Worse, I can't find any comments about this bug online so its just my game that's broken.

Could you make a video up to where you get stuck? And have you tired reloading from the last check point when you get stuck? Um, if you fail a check point too many times you can also skip a check point. So maybe you can skip that part. 

[AndyD]

 

16 hours ago, Firewithin said:

is there a way to switch between the types of dead eye?  i did the mission where you can click it and shoot once but i cant figure out how to do multiple shots again

Are you hitting R1? I rarely ever used this myself but started to recently.

[legend]

15 hours ago, Bacon said:

Could you make a video up to where you get stuck? And have you tired reloading from the last check point when you get stuck? Um, if you fail a check point too many times you can also skip a check point. So maybe you can skip that part. 

 

I ultimately got it working by playing one more story question such that there was literally nothing else on the map to do. My fingers were deeply crossed on that final try  No idea why it was bugging out. But there it is.

 

Didn't know about the skipping checkpoint thing. That might have worked since I did find that by literally running into the public crowd that would eventually get people pissed off enough to get the checkpoint to fail and I was hoping that would fix it (it didn't). So maybe that ultimately would have worked by getting the skip option.

[Firewithin]

27 minutes ago, AndyD said:

 

Are you hitting R1? I rarely ever used this myself but started to recently.

No this was my mistake.  Not sure if the game said or I just missed that part

[skillzdadirecta]

1 hour ago, Firewithin said:

No this was my mistake.  Not sure if the game said or I just missed that part

 

It does say it.

 

I'm progressing through the story... holy shit this game is good.

[Mercury33]

1 hour ago, skillzdadirecta said:

 

It does say it.

 

I'm progressing through the story... holy shit this story is good.

 

Fixed. 

[legend]

I finished it today. I have never played a game for which my feelings were so bipolar. What this game does well, it does really well. And what it does bad... well, it does really bad.

 

Ultimately, Arthur Morgan is a fantastic character with a really great story arc that ends satisfyingly. The epilogue will be divisive, much like the game on the whole, but I think was the best "chapter" in the whole game (and it *is* a whole chapter's worth of content, if not more so). It adds significance to pre-epilogue ending, and it blends things into the first game nicely, making the first game's story itself more meaningful.

 

All that said, the greatest tragedy in the game's story is (end game spoilers)

Spoiler

The loss of Mr. Tibbles. The cheapest scrappy horse you can buy in the beginning of the game's "buy a horse" mission. He was small, but loyal to a fault and served me faithfully through the whole game, through the worst of encounters.

 

RIP Mr. Tibbles.

 

 

It is a deep shame that R* didn't put more effort into the core mechanics. If this game has merely competent shooting mechanics, it would rank as one of my GOAT. But as it stands, it really hurt, often making consider quitting. In the end, I'm glad I didn't, and I think on the whole it's a good game despite serious flaws. But they really tried to convince me otherwise.

[Bacon]

12 minutes ago, legend said:

It is a deep shame that R* didn't put more effort into the core mechanics. If this game has merely competent shooting mechanics, it would rank as one of my GOAT. But as it stands, it really hurt, often making consider quitting. In the end, I'm glad I didn't, and I think on the whole it's a good game despite serious flaws. But they really tried to convince me otherwise.

And that is why it is 7/10. 

[Mercury33]

24 minutes ago, Bacon said:

And that is why it is 7/10. 

 

Yep I think 7/10 if you’re operating on a true 10 point scale(and not that bullshit IGN uses) then 7/10 is a perfect score for this game. 

[legend]

1 hour ago, Bacon said:

And that is why it is 7/10. 

 

Averaging it all together, yeah that's about right.

[johnny]

how many chapters are there? I feel like I’ve been on Ch 3 forever 

[johnny]

Also, the cinematic view thing won’t automatically keep your horse going when you’re following somebody (since you don’t know where you’re going you can’t set a waypoint), which is annoying because the game knows where we’re going. 

[atom631]

8 hours ago, johnny said:

Also, the cinematic view thing won’t automatically keep your horse going when you’re following somebody (since you don’t know where you’re going you can’t set a waypoint), which is annoying because the game knows where we’re going. 

This is true for story missions. Figured that out when they wandered in the opposite direction of the objective. Lol

[atom631]

8 hours ago, johnny said:

how many chapters are there? I feel like I’ve been on Ch 3 forever 

6 chapters and 2 epilogues 

[Kal-El814]

I went back to playing some Ass Odyssey this weekend on my PC while my TV was otherwise occupied. It felt like Kassandra snorted Ritalin before she started murdering. I understand Rockstar games have a more deliberate pace than AC games, but it felt SO FUCKING GOOD for the analog sticks alone be all I need to use to get the character to move at max speed, holy shit. It’s worth saying until the end of time, whoever at Rockstar decided that holding or mashing a button to run / sprint was a good design choice seriously needs to reconsider things.

[AndyD]

It's been the same for a while now with their games - not sure why they don't put work into controls. It's like they are scared to change them or just delusional because the games sale really well anyway

[Kal-El814]

6 minutes ago, AndyD said:

It's been the same for a while now with their games - not sure why they don't put work into controls. It's like they are scared to change them or just delusional because the games sale really well anyway

It’s gotta be the latter. I’ve gotten used to their shooting controls even though they’re terrible, I just lean into the auto aim and let it wash over me.

 

The on foot and horse controls tho... BARF.

[legend]

1 hour ago, Kal-El814 said:

I went back to playing some Ass Odyssey this weekend on my PC while my TV was otherwise occupied. It felt like Kassandra snorted Ritalin before she started murdering. I understand Rockstar games have a more deliberate pace than AC games, but it felt SO FUCKING GOOD for the analog sticks alone be all I need to use to get the character to move at max speed, holy shit. It’s worth saying until the end of time, whoever at Rockstar decided that holding or mashing a button to run / sprint was a good design choice seriously needs to reconsider things.

 

I just started God of War last night and had a similar reaction.

 

To give an example. In the last mission, RDR2 keeps spawning people behind you, literally out of thin air (I have particular pet peeves with that, but we'll set that aside). I was replaying the checkpoint and *knew* where and when they would spawn, but spinning around, shooting them, and spinning back was was still enormously clumsy.

 

In the very first fight of God of war, I'm fighting one guy and know in my head from the flow of the combat that someone was behind me and moving up. Without any pre-planning I flawlessly executed a perfectly timed spin and attack, in between the attacks I was making on the enemy in front of me, to catch it just before it got me.

 

I'm not using this as example of how great a player I am, because this is the kind of thing millions of gamers do all the time.  Yet in the RDR2 scenario, even knowing well in advance what was going to happen, it was still a chore to pull off what I wanted and not satisfying at all. These are the basics games should have down pat at this point. Yet R* pisses all over them.

[SaysWho?]

I'm still near the beginning of Chapter 2. I've done some missions, and I helped Leopold get some more of his debts, so now I can upgrade the camp.

 

I'm way slower I'm sure than many of us, but I don't mind taking my time and indulging.

[Bloodporne]

I think I've kind of dropped the game for now. While I really enjoy the world in itself, the beautiful graphics, atmosphere, music and so on, my free-roaming/do-random-stuff approach to it really wore off by Friday or so. Granted, I've had many, many hours of addictive fun with it so there's nothing to bitch about, but the bottom line is this:

 

I absolutely loathe the main mission design and can't get myself to engage with that portion any further. 

 

I've said it before but the more I played them, the more I realized most main missions for some utterly bizarre reason are treated almost like semi-on-rails tutorials when you're not literally holding X while being fed story. I'm somewhere at the end of Chapter 3 story-wise and the main missions still somehow feel like barely interactive tutorials. It's an open world game, how did they not account for/care about that many players may be doing hours worth of free roaming, and therefore learning, in between? Other open games have been getting that right for years now, it's incredibly frustrating when I know there's actually a very entertaining, albeit janky and cumbersome, game below all those layers of idiocy shoveled on top.

 

It's such a jarring juxtaposition to me to the point it feels like there's a version of the game I like and a walking sim shoe-horned into it happening all at once and for all the enjoyment I've gotten out of it, I have zero interest in the walking sim when I've experienced how fun its gameplay can be if you're not being choke-held through its ultra-archaic story missions design.

 

One example that really stuck out and summarized my frustrations is the John Marston oil wagon portion of the train heist mission in Chapter 2. You're sent to the refinery (whatever its actual name is) to steal the oil wagon of which there are two as designated by two yellow wheels on your map. Cool. I arrive there and know through previous exploration that the guards are plenty and highly aggressive so I immediately choose not to go in guns blazing: 

 

My first thought is to wait until night time to see if the guard routines and frequency die down. I hike a short distance away from the place attempting to set up camp to sleep until night time as I've done this successfully for stealth with gang hideouts. A) you can't 'rest with Triangle' during this mission because...story?...B) therefore you can't set up a tent to sleep til night and C) mission failed because I wandered too far away. Ok, so I learned nothing about how to approach this mission again but only learned what the game wants me to NOT do because it would interfere with their script. 

 

I'm re-spawned like 20 feet from the entrance and a guard immediately sees me within seconds, opens fire (because Defuse rarely works) and I fail the mission again because I let myself be killed because what's the point trying to recover from that with a huge bounty and if I move too far away to lose them, I fail anyway. Next time I re-spawn, I immediately bolt the opposite direction and gladly their positioning was different this time so I was good. At this point I'm already frustrated enough because I hate when games refuse to let me play in a 'skilled' manner. I hate winning sloppily.

 

Now on my third attempt, I simply observe the place from several angles to check for holes in its security to simply sneak in and bust a wagon out. Much to my joy, one of the oil wagons is being prepared to leave the compound. Awesome, this is the kind of creativity I was waiting for...he's taking the thing for a route and I bet my patience will be rewarded and I can simply lasso that fool off the wagon and steal the thing at a safe distance without any witnesses. The wagon leaves and embarks on a nearby road with forest to one side so I gallop a good distance away right next to it without being spotted. I ready my lasso and prepare to get near him and fucking BOOM...mission failed. Turns out that was not acceptable, albeit logical with all gameplay elements being present for this to actually be able to happen, due to its future story beats/dialog. At this point I want to just turn the game off because the seams are increasingly glaringly obvious. I take a break, make coffee and return to it. 

 

My fourth attempt now is simply jumping the fence and stealing the wagon and riding it out of the front gate because clearly that's what the game NEEDS me to do to advance a mission that at first seemed refreshingly 'open' and didn't, for once, involved two or more AIs riding with me to dump endless exposition on me while forcing me to do nothing for ten minutes. Anyway, I do that and joylessly realize that yes, this is what I was meant to do all along with yet again no skill, no creativity or fun involved. Go through the motions to advance the story. You can argue that there's a choice of going in guns blazing or this approach but come on...

 

After this odyssey, I'm stranded nowhere near a train station/coach with my horse still at the refinery a country mile away on the map. Five seconds prior, Arthur shooshed all the horses tied to the wagon away because...cutscene. I run into an open field somewhere with no civilization nearby and tame a horse to ride back to the fucking refinery I just robbed to retrieve my horse. I immediately incur a Wanted for theft for taking the horse despite there being no human for seemingly 10 square miles in the Flatlands. People at the refinery great me like nothing happened and a guard tells me to move along. I sit there thoroughly baffled. 

 

Now I'm not asking for some fucking miracle of interaction, I realize it's just a video game, but goddamn, all of this is so archaic at its core and has been done so much better in other titles and I seriously rarely play anything open world. The juxtaposition I mentioned is exactly why it feels so insultingly dumb to me. I know for a fact that all the elements mechanic-wise are there to be able to do the shit I wanted to do but the game just creates arbitrary new rules on the fly for the sake of its story beats. It's implemented in such a stifling and consistently infuriating manner that feels like an invisible hand slapping the controller away from me regularly. Main missions keep making me wonder why the fuck they even bothered to include gameplay sections in those at all at points. Take Mary Linton's cult brother mission as another example. At this point you've done several missions explaining dueling to you, several missions of scripted no-control horse chases and yet again, it's a semi-automated horse-trek to an on-rails dialog segment to a semi-automated horse chase to a cutscene to a 10 second snippet of gameplay in the form of a duel that is treated as another tutorial essentially and we're back to semi-automated horse-trek and cutscenes. Just...why...there are so many cool mechanics here once you get used to its baffling control schemes.

 

I'm seriously not trying to shit on the game for people who genuinely love it, I just can't remember playing a game that frustrated me so fucking deeply knowing there is a truly fantastic title hidden underneath. Also, like I said, I HAVE HAD lots of fun free-roaming and just kind of ignoring the main missions but that made this whole thing feel even more frustrating really. It boggles my mind like few video games have managed to do that seemingly none of that 8 year dev cycle seems to have been spent updating the exact same mission formula I've played in GTAIII and upwards (from the titles I did play). I can do without 8,000 species of life-like wild life, please...

 

That concludes my enormous rant and I will say that I'm actually very curious and optimistic about the online component. I do really like the gun fights at this point and searching for, and taking out, huge gang compounds has by far and wide been my favorite aspect of RDR2. I'm hoping RDR2 Online focuses on things of that nature. Unless it's microtransaction Central, then that can go fuck itself. 

 

EDIT: One thing I have to add...this game absolutely loves to eschew its faux-realism to tip the scale in its own favor against you. It constantly spawns hordes of enemies in plain sight, they literally just appear out of thin air without any warning. If you don't have full Dead Eye at EXACTLY THAT TIME, you're basically dead if you're in an area without immediate cover such as rocks/trees. It's yet another infuriatingly transparent way for that invisible dev hand to reach out and slap any control out of your hands. 

 

 

[Bacon]

I didn't even go to the factory. I mean, I headed towards it, but by the time I got there an oil wagon was already on the main road hundreds of feet away from the factory. I just shot the driver and took the wagon and was on my merry way. Oh, and I didn't leave my horse behind cuz I whistled while driving the wagon and if you do that your horse will follow you.  

[Kal-El814]

34 minutes ago, Bloodporne said:

SNIP

This is a great post. I had the same issues with that mission, and I too eventually said fuck it. I murdered everyone in sight and ganked the wagon, and my bounty ended up barely higher than when my horse accidentally runs over someone.

 

To be clear, I do NOT mind when a mission is on rails in the interest of a cinematic experience or a specific story beat. Some of the most engaging missions are structured like that. The game, however, is LOUSY about communicating to you that a mission is “on rails” in ways beyond straight up mission failure (which is often delivered without an explanation as to WHY you failed), or things that are not obvious, like wanted levels/bounties.

 

Sometimes it’s not clear whether or not I fucked up or if a story mission is being a story mission (Wanted: Arthur Morgan even though I’m wearing a new outfit and a fucking burlap sack on my head). There are plenty of times when the game says “GO HERE / DO THIS” and you don’t have to, and it’s fine. There are other times that the game DOES NOT SAY “GO HERE / DO THIS” but it absolutely wants you to, because if you do not, your fail.

 

This is a game where there’s just so much goddamned impressive sizzle... but the steak itself is just... OKAY.

[Bloodporne]

19 minutes ago, Bacon said:

I didn't even go to the factory. I mean, I headed towards it, but by the time I got there an oil wagon was already on the main road hundreds of feet away from the factory. I just shot the driver and took the wagon and was on my merry way. Oh, and I didn't leave my horse behind cuz I whistled while driving the wagon and if you do that your horse will follow you.  

Then I extra don't understand why it would fail me for applying logic and trying to steal the wagon from a driver instead if you did it on your way to the place. There's a consistent lack of internal logic/rules that yields so much frustration for me.

 

The whistling thing is fair and I would've had no issue with it if it hadn't been the icing on the cake at that point. It was just yet another moment of 'cutscene does something totally opposed to what's going on in the game in favor of story'. That's what irritated me after all the other other nonsense that preceded it. 

[TwinIon]

I finished the epilogue last night and I think it might actually be my favorite chapter of the game. It doesn't really solve any of the gameplay issues, but there's a sense of progression involved that I didn't even realize was missing from the rest of the game. Maybe that's the point, but I'm not feeling very generous in ascribing what gameplay mechanics are purposeful and which aren't.

 

Still, as much as I liked the epilogue, I'd still trade that last dozen hours of content for more consistent, versatile gameplay and better fast travel options.

 

I might go back and play some more, there's an almost reckless abundance of things to do in this game, but at the same time I'm not very excited to seek them out. The travel times remind me of vanilla WoW, but R* doesn't have the subscription incentive to waste my time.

[johnny]

the boring as fuck traveling makes this game drag on and on. feel like this game is taking forever to make any progress and im not even doing any side stuff besides the occasional white dot that pops up while im passing by. 

[eggydoo]

3 hours ago, Bacon said:

I didn't even go to the factory. I mean, I headed towards it, but by the time I got there an oil wagon was already on the main road hundreds of feet away from the factory. I just shot the driver and took the wagon and was on my merry way. Oh, and I didn't leave my horse behind cuz I whistled while driving the wagon and if you do that your horse will follow you.  

I just did this as well and I started a gun fight which somehow spooked the horses with the oil wagon and they started running out the warehouse.  Was awesome.

[AndyD]

It's not great but I'm fine with the mission design except when for some reason you have to ride really damn slow to your destination. I enjoy story but I would rather it be a hands off cuts scene than to riding my horse or a carriage at such a slow pace

 

The bad thing is that likely none of these issues will be addressed in a patch.

[Kal-El814]

16 minutes ago, AndyD said:

It's not great but I'm fine with the mission design except when for some reason you have to ride really damn slow to your destination. I enjoy story but I would rather it be a hands off cuts scene than to riding my horse or a carriage at such a slow pace

 

The bad thing is that likely none of these issues will be addressed in a patch.

It’s weird because on some missions that give you a “Return to camp with X” button, but not on most of them. And on a couple rare missions you more or less warp to where you’re going.

[Bacon]

3 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

And on a couple rare missions you more or less warp to where you’re going.

they didn't have any dialogue for those parts

[TwinIon]

1 hour ago, AndyD said:

It's not great but I'm fine with the mission design except when for some reason you have to ride really damn slow to your destination. I enjoy story but I would rather it be a hands off cuts scene than to riding my horse or a carriage at such a slow pace

 

The bad thing is that likely none of these issues will be addressed in a patch.

 

 

44 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

It’s weird because on some missions that give you a “Return to camp with X” button, but not on most of them. And on a couple rare missions you more or less warp to where you’re going.

 

These kinds of inconsistencies bothered me too.

 

Some missions give you the yellow line to follow, which means you can turn on the cinematic camera and at least have the game ride for you,  others just give you a destination dot.

 

Some missions do play a short cutscene that skips a long ride, others don't.

 

Some missions leave in you the middle of nowhere, miles away from a town or another mission, some give you the option to return to camp. (For some reason this was far better in the epilogue, where the next mission was almost always right next to where you left off).

 

 

It's bizarre to me that there's never an option to fast travel back to camp. The fast travel is a disaster in every way, but not being able to consistently go back to camp is the real killer. The only real sense of progression in the game is camp upgrades. Most of the story happens there. Most of the causal interactions with the cast happen there. Most of the missions start from there. It's the central feature of the game and at no point can you quickly travel there, and in most cases you can't even fast travel close to camp. If one thing killed my desire to explore, it wasn't even the travel time there, it's the travel back. It was the feeling that, if I got bored hunting, or even if I was successful, I'd have a long empty ride back.

 

[Biggie]

2 hours ago, johnny said:

the boring as fuck traveling makes this game drag on and on. feel like this game is taking forever to make any progress and im not even doing any side stuff besides the occasional white dot that pops up while im passing by. 

This. Traveling is horrible. 

[eggydoo]

The Kotaku article says you can unlock fast travel back to camp by upgrading Dutch's tent and then yours.

[TwinIon]

18 minutes ago, eggydoo said:

The Kotaku article says you can unlock fast travel back to camp by upgrading Dutch's tent and then yours.

You can. The fast travel that is unlocked allows you to travel from your tent to a select number of locations. I'm not sure if they're the same as the stagecoach locations or not.