RDR2 is about a man realizing he and his ilk were sent by the American bourgeoisie to colonize land only to then have it stolen again from them in turn. It’s about the remorse from realizing you’ve been wrong your entire life, and desperately wishing to undo it. Arthur is scum, he even vocalizes this - he hates himself. He then realizes he does in fact, have a soul but if only too late.

Most of this isn’t written explicitly which is why I would argue the writing is good, actually.

Also you get to kill Klan members.

Whole bunch of city slickers in here with a bunch of fancy opinions for why a game where you can shoot pinkertons in the face with exploding ammunition is not the best goldurn game of all time, I tell ya what. for all them $5 words I ain't found a single opinion worth rubbing two nickels together for.

Rdr2 is good and you're a lib

Lmao “this museum is so fucking boring”

But you can brutally massacre a congregation of Kkklansmen in that game.

My critiques of the game

• the story is at odds with the gameplay. Arthur belongs in a slow burn Coen Brother's anti-western with very little shooting and a few moment's of shocking violence. The gameplay is gta on horses

• way way too unfocused. Like you said, many parts of the game drag. There's far too much side content and it's easy to lose track of what's even happening in the story. Way too many systems - quasi rpg elements, a huge and mostly irrelevant inventory, fishing.

• what no theory does to a mf'er. Rockstar is clearly flirting with Dutch as an illegalist or egoist anarchist, but they can't or won't commit to actually talking theory and the game loses much of it's potential as social commentary because of that. They could have said a hell of a lot more if they actually explicitly discussed different theories of anarchism and how Dutch's predatory fake Anarchism contrasts with contemporary Anarchist and communist movements, and how his theory fails in the face of encroaching industrial capital

• you can't fucking shoot micah. Dude's such a goddamn albatross and he's out of line with the rest of the gang. I don't think he was needed as a character for the plot and i think he detracts from the gang's charicterization and Dutch and Arthur's dynamic.

I enjoyed it a lot, and also saying that atomic heart has better dialogue made me chuckle, so thanks for that!

If I was some prat who loved the mythology of the "settling of the west", a game with a white dude on a horse on a mountain would get me hard. Why can't more games be like Atomic Heart? I wanna defend the land of Stalin and have cut scenes with good dialogue a talking glove that debates theory and a sexy refrigerator that probably wants to murder me.

When someone drops a take so stupid I’m not even gonna bother defending my favorite game

Woah now.

Easy boy

You okay there?

Heh heh, that's my boy. Yah! Yah!

2long didn't read, but the title is correct which is why I love the game. Yeah I'm gonna spend 5 minutes hunting a deer and then skin it lfg. Yeah I'm gonna ride out into nowhere to have a shootout with a guy I thought I was just gonna talk to lfg. What's that you're collecting rocks and want me to find some? Sure lfg

Lol come on, rdr is like one of the few remnants of quality AAA games.

Games don't need to be constantly exciting, just like movies don't have to be. Bladerunner 2049 is one of my favorites, same with Stalker, and they let their shots run.

Slow media consumption can be nice.

damn, i'm gonna make a mod just for you. it's gonna have subway surfers and minecraft parkour in the bottom half of the screen to liven the game up

OK the main game is definitely boring but it's actually a good game to listen to a podcast in the background. Just vibing and hunting

HOWEVER

The online PVP fighting is the worst, absolute worst game experience in history.

• It has a form of auto aim that makes headshots incredibly easy
• It has 1-shot headshots
• The ONLY penalty for dying is respawning 100 meters away.

It's SO BORING. SO BORING. I call it "Headshot Sysyphus" It's absolutely fucking pointless. I got into multiple extended fights roughly 5v5 and it's literally a contest to see who can get bored first.

Good but the Atomic Heart praise makes it too obvious

"One last score Arthur"

"Cough Cough I'm dead"

"It's so dang hard being a straight white male."

There. Now you don't have to play the game.

Also there's a part of the game where you're forced to beat up a disabled man.

The opening chapter is really slow, I have a save that's right after leaving the snowy area for replays. RD2 is fun and atomic heart is a ass game

i liked it, but i didn't even touch the previous games, so i lacked a lot of context. I wanted to like red dead online a lot better, being able to play as a lady was really cool - the character creator was robust enough that I made someone who looked like a genuine ancestor to me, and that was cool, if only because one side of my family genuinely went west in the 19th century but managed to be as unproblematic in deed as was possible for a white person, and it was cool to larp that experience.

but the main game is like.... "i'm an old man now" subgenre of Thing, like the God of War games - that shit sucks - and it's also like, broadly about the closing of the frontier, which could've been interesting, but because it's such a direct parallel of the "i'm an old man now" subgenre, just for worldbuilding, it's pretty much only cool if you have some kind of ability to relate to that, and are comfortable doing so.

personally i'm a really gay trans woman, so it's hard to wanna pick that shit up and finish it because aside from the janky and micro-transaction-expensive online portion of the game, there's nothing in this game for me.

The dialogue and voice acting are both pretty clearly good... claiming Atomic Heart has better dialogue makes me pretty confused as to where you're come from. Agreed the intro is a punch to the gut to prepare you for how meanderingly slow the game is.

Ultimately though, never play videogames, they are trash, read a book.

series peaked with san andreas

All I did was play as a pretty woman murdering people on isolated trails and taking their hats, or tying up people that were rude and putting them on train tracks. I couldn't get into the story but I enjoyed the wildlife and nature aspect.

I honestly don't know what they were thinking, because I am right with you. The first game was just that, a real tight video game whereas the sequel was trying too hard to be some kinda simulation and stumbled over the line of sim/fun into boring.

It's mid, yeah. Which is horrifying to say due to all the labor that went into it. The ultimate result is mid.

I bounced off it twice and eventually stuck with it by not trying to play it like MGSV. The game doesn't actually give you any freedom. There is no connection between the missions and free-roam in the overworld. Once I stopped trying to struggle out of the shackles and just treated it like an on-rails movie it got a lot better, if you can handle that. But it is just so long.

The best time I had in the game was hunting to get all the camp & pelt upgrades. Being in some beautiful scenery hunting down particular animals is pleasant, even though the long animations and requirement to constantly bring your pelts back to camp irritated the shit out of me (even with fast travel).

The story just fuckin drags. I got to the end of the main story like a year ago and haven't got around to playing the epilogue yet. The fact that you murder 100 random people every mission in the game but the story is about how you are trying to redeem yourself for beating a dude over some debt is just fucking stupid.

I've tried to finish this game at least 4 times. It's not the story that's boring to me, but all of the mechanics designed to make you take your time. Holding a button to interact with EVERYTHING, yeah skinning animals is immersive but you don't really need to sit through that animation EVERY single time???? Also, I don't like the linearity of the missions. You don't really get a lot of freedom to play differently. (That might just be a R* problem at this point). I still believe there's a good game underneath all of this but I refuse to waste time with it anymore.