The world is enormous and a huge simulation and really fun to explore. After you do that, you realize missions are repetitive (ride a horse here, we promise there won't be trouble, oops there's trouble, shoot everyone Orthur), the main story is frustratingly dumb (how many times will these morons I'm supposed to empathize with ride into a town, act smarter than everyone, and then get taken advantage of?). I absolutely loved this game for the first three weeks, but after the sheen wore off, it was pretty disappointingly hollow. It was really hard for me to push the story forward in this game, whereas with RDR1 and GTA V and GTA IV, I felt like I beat the game way sooner than I wanted.

And while the character animations are gorgeous and amazing, it makes for a tedious gameplay experience when you have to walk around in circles in front of a can of beans before your character targets the item you want him to pick up.

The last open-world game that I played before RDR2 was Breath of the Wild, and I found the difference in philosophy very interesting.

Where RDR2 is filled to the brim with content, encounters, story and mechanics, it does become apparent after a while that it's all more or less hard-coded. And I felt that a lot of the actual gameplay stuff (UI, controls) suffered from too many of the problems that the previous games suffered from, and that it lacked a degree of innovation.

What made BotW special to me, was the way that the game provided you with a set of mechanics that could be mixed in all sorts of creative ways. While the world itself was less detailed than RDR2's, and the story a bit of a letdown, everything felt like a proper upgrade to the 'sandbox' type of game.

Of course, RDR2's sheer volume and beauty still makes it probably one of my favorite games of the year, but I found the contrast between the two quite interesting.

I totally agree. Creative mechanics that mix together to create emergent gameplay is the future. Rdr2 has a bit of it with the fire simulation, but in the end it’s the same old engine with the same old scripted events. Rdr2 is still amazing and very fun though.

I've finished the game this week and found it thoroughly amazing. It's definitely one of the best games I've played, and lives up to the first one. The first hours were pretty hard since the controls are weird, and the pace of the game is different than the current games, but after that... My god, what an experience! Even the chores, which are designed on purpose to be annoying, are fun to do because it makes you soak in the character, in their lives.

But to me the outdoor experience was the best of all: most of the times I would set the cinematic camera, put my horse on auto mode and just enjoy the trip, and get consistently mesmerized by graphics and the overall ambient. I've played more than the estimated 65 hours and still have stuff to do to complete everything, and there are times where I would just stop to look at the place.

That being said, I think that the story is... good, I like Arthur, but to be fair the last arc was better paced, I think. There are some inconsistencies in overall but nothing major. The first RDR also has a ok-ish story to me too so I think this is fine. There are some flaws on some game mechanics too, like the camp you can build which is a bit useless IMO, and of course the controls which are sometimes hard to grasp.

Nonetheless, a fantastic game

"which are designed on purpose to be annoying"

why?

You get a reward for doing the chores, so they have to slow down how fast you can do them so you don’t buff forever super quickly. The chores are repetitive: chop wood, carry hay, carry water. So they could be perceived as annoying or as peaceful and relaxing, depending on who is playing.

I loved RDRI and was eagerly awaiting the second installment all year. I fully expected to get sucked in.

I played it for at least eight hours and just couldn't get into it. There's nothing driving the narrative. It's an outlaw gang doing mundane robberies and trying to avoid the law. I kept waiting for the story to draw me in and it never did.

The story picks up a lot in the later chapters, it starts out very slow. Chapter 2 is essentially still a tutorial, with some stories woven in. And at 8 hours you're barely out of chapter 1.

I felt the same way. While RDR2's scale and attention to detail is unprecedented, the style of play and mechanics were just too much of the same, I wasn't about to cancel my social life to play more GTA but with horses, I've had enough of that.

I've sunk hundreds of hours into Breath of the Wild.

nope. poor mission structure, boring characters, annoying controls rockstar have not really implemented anything new with this game that was not in the first game. it looks great tho!

To each his own I guess, but it’s being universally acknowledged as GOTY.

its the gaming press lol i wouldn't trust them as far as i could throw them

> being universally acknowledged as GOTY.

... by the gaming press who is well known to sleep with big publishers. RDR2 may be very good but I would anyway focus on what actual gamers say, and stay away from game journalists' recommendations.

I am a gamer, I've played the game and loved it. Different people, different opinions