Red Dead Redemption 2 is depressing as all get out

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/11/07/red-dead-redemption-2-is-depre.html

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Can we all agree that not having customizable input at this stage is a non-starter?

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Not the game’s fault you use controllers wrong.

/s… maybe

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Penny Arcade

Also, proper horse management…

That sounds like kind of a parable, but I wonder what for.

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Makes me think of it as the Sam Peckinpah of video games – tearing off the shroud and showing us just how nasty, brutish and ugly life as an outlaw was. “Why the fuck are we glorifying these sociopaths?” Sam seemed to ask with every movie.

I admit, I love his movies for precisely that reason. The Wild Bunch and The Cross of Iron (to name a couple of examples) were all about how violence was to be feared, not glorified by ironically glorifying it.

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What you need is more “Asshat; Odyssey.”

Or…

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I WOULD agree except that you can go into settings and invert the Y axis like nearly every game in the last 10 years.

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Everything you said in this post is true except the bit about not being able to invert the aiming, but I still enjoy it a great deal.

(Also, since I NEVER fast travel in Rockstar GTA and Red Dead games the long horse rides didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, I was majorly disappointed when I took a stagecoach and discovered it DOESN’T let you enjoy it in real time like the previous RDR. You could skip it in that one if you wanted, but RDR II skips the full ride automatically.)

Finally, as depressing as RDR is, I don’t think it’s a tenth as depressing as Requiem for a Dream. While I genuinely enjoyed the movie I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to watch it again.

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Real horses tend to have a default autopilot mode as well. They will tend to stick to the trail, although they do stop when something looks delicious to them.

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I bought it but haven’t found time to play more than an hour and a half or so. I just got to the first town.

I’m enjoying it so far, it’s quite a beautiful game, but for some damned reason I keep confusing my L2 button with my R2 button, which has led to some escalations in encounters that I hadn’t intended.

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Yeah, that’s actually my one complaint about the game. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve threatened, attacked or killed someone when I only MEANT to talk to them.

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I loved RDR it was depressing, if it’s less or more so depressing than RDR2? I guess I’ll find out. I also loved Requiem for a Dream, own it and have watched it some 10-20 times. What’s more depressing? it was the first date for me and an ex (we actually went and saw it in the theater twice together).

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At least the bugs are great!

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My first error was when I had to decide whether to let the guys from the first train robbery, or kill them. I swear, I was just trying to look at the guy like it was telling me to do; next thing I know, bloodbath.

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That’s hilarious. I wonder what’d happen if you touched your horse doing that. Go into LEO?

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I didn’t say I can’t invert it, I said I do.

Red Dead Redemption bugs have always been the best! =oD

That one is so much funnier because it looks like Dutch is just joining in thinking “What is he doing? Well, might as well!”

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I did the exact same thing.

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Ah, I see what you’re saying now.

And yeah, manually aiming is hard. I found Dead-Eye better once I unlocked the ability to manually tag with RB instead of the auto-tag, but otherwise I just use the cheese method of constantly pulling and releasing the left trigger so it will auto lock on each target. Keeping your aim up and moving it yourself is nigh impossible.

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Most of the reviews I’ve seen so far are along the lines of, “This is the most impressively massive, detailed, beautifully-crafted game we’ve ever seen and a high water mark in the art of video game design which we greatly admire, though it isn’t actually, uh, fun a lot of the time.”

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