They prioritized telling the story they want to tell above being a good game or allowing player freedom. Walking next to talking people is not gameplay, and having the player swing from being a god of death when it's not plot relevant to being unable to kill a few guys when the plot demands it is both bad storytelling and bad gameplay. If you can't tell your story without taking away control from the player, then make a movie.

Further, It's like someone told them "Unskippable cutscenes are bad", so instead of removing them, they said "Well, if we make the player hold 'W' to walk during the dialogue, it's not technically a cutscene, problem solved. It's still unskippable though."

I could watch a western movie while holding forward on an unplugged controller and have a similar experience.

The RDR feminist was actually an incredibly entertaining addition to the game. I blew that bitch up, tied her to train tracks, fed her to the croc, wolves, bears, dropped her from the bank roof in San Denis, threw her off the bridge in strawberry.

What irritated me was driving the gaggle of them to the protest march in Rhodes, hearing Arthur tell the white power book salesman that diversity is strength, having him cuck so hard at the Wapiti reserve while all the Indians (who the game won’t allow you to antagonise/rob/assault) treat him like absolute shit and constantly tell him to fuck off.

And then you get to the epilogue which is supposed to be about John Marsten but is REALLY all about Sadie Fuckin’ Adler and what an incredible and amazing bounty huntin’, massive cuntin’ badass she is. Felt like I was playing a Ubisoft game.

I’m playing the RDR1 remaster right now and it is FAR superior. Better writing, better mechanics, less busy work in terms of feeding and cleaning your cowboy constantly (honestly who wants to do that in a video game).

I’ve never really gotten into the GTA games, only ever played Vice City back in the day, and seeing what’s coming our way with the next one, I’m glad. It may do okay financially, but honestly I think Rockstar will be the next big studio to woke mind virus themselves into collapse.

I loved the graphics, the fidelity, and the physicalisation of entities in RDR2, but the combat mechanics are completely broken. And since combat makes up a large portion of the gameplay, having broken combat makes the game a slog.

For instance, you cannot have always-run on when engaged in combat. So if you get ambushed Arthur/John starts to walk slowly away as you attempt to move out of danger, forcing you to have to rapidly tap 'A'/'X' to try to get away. Even if you turn on always-run they still don't run during combat.

You also get stuck on a ton of geometry, and unlike GTA IV or GTA V, the characters for some reason do not climb over objects using systematic inverse kinematics, so you can sometimes find yourself fighting guys in a forest and then trying to move to cover and getting stuck on branches or debris. It's amateurish that they somehow didn't consider this.

The aiming and hip-firing is also very clunky, so the shootouts neither feel cinematic nor fluid. And they also reduced the AI reactions, so they do not dynamically react the way they do in GTA IV. So it's not like you can shoot a guy in the knee and then he falls on the ground, tries to crawl to cover and begs for his life like in GTA IV (which is still one of the coolest features in a game that no other game has replicated).

It's amazing to me that they have Max Payne 3 in their developmental repertoire, which has some of the best third-person movements in a third-person shooter, and Max moves extremely fluid and the hip-firing feels really fun in that game, yet RDR2 is the complete opposite of that, with clunky, stiff controls, and horrible combat movements. It just didn't make any sense to me why the combat is the way it is. If it were a horror game or a slow-paced thriller, I could see why they might make it that way (like in LA Noire), but for RDR2 it just made combat encounters a real slog (especially that they wouldn't let you keep axes/hatchets equipped after you kill someone; auto-switching off of the melee weapons means you cannot go on axe killing sprees, which is dumb, too).