I’ve started the game but what with work and life and all haven’t made it that far in. I read a pretty interesting piece talking about the control scheme and relative lack of fast travel:
This subversion of player expectations and desires is thematically brilliant. This is a story set in 1899, after all. The world was slower then, before smartphones and app notifications had us looking into the screen in our palms. Rockstar didn’t just create photo-realistic setting and characters, it approximated, as much as video game of this kind ever has, the banality of real life. Less sexy events that other games might speed past—like grilling a piece of meat over a campfire or cleaning a rifle—require a level of attentiveness that one might expect to give to a set-piece gun battle.
Assuming that is indeed what the designers meant to do, I think there’s a delicate balance to be struck here–it’s obviously pretty easy to make the game controls so annoying that people just don’t bother playing. As I said, I haven’t got very far in the game yet, so I don’t know which side of the divide this game falls on for me, but I have to admit just the beauty of the images from the game make me excited to get back to it.
