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Re:How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’... by mercer on Saturday December 01, 2018 @11:41AM (#18577478)
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.

Re:How the West Was Digitized: The Making of Rockstar Games’... by fzzzy on Saturday December 01, 2018 @12:06PM (#18577628)
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.