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Bunny Tracks said:
  1. The witness, wanted, and bounty systems are all broken af, and I really hate them.
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This damn near ruins the game unless you just play it for the outdoors stuff (we're at complete opposites when it comes to that). Other games have managed it a lot better.

Can't get away with shit because the Old West is apparently crawling with people (somebody will always come across your path while you're dealing with a problem). Making it easier to get away with stuff would have improved it. But, what's really messed up is that there's no way to reduce your bounty that's reasonable. Here's my three-point system for fixing this shittiness:

1. You need to be able to reduce your bounty. Old Assassin's Creed games did a good job with this by giving you tasks you could do. Tearing down wanted posters in towns, shooting specific officials/intimidating people/etc., and probably killing bounty hunters ought to reduce the bounty. You can think of this as maybe not being that you're bounty is actually going down, but that people are so scared of you that the government has to pay a higher bounty just to get the same amount of people after you.

2. You need to be able to kill everybody in a skirmish and have time to retreat. The worst part of both missions and free roaming for me was that there's just MAGICALLY huge armies of mounted police ready to intercept you. In GTA and Watch_Dogs and other games it's fine, because you just sort of assume that they're communicating via radio/phones. Here, though, its completely unrealistic and it spoils immersion in addition to being a shitty game mechanic (you can't get away from a horse chase like you can a car chase).

Towns should have a limited number of police with maybe a few rounds of reinforcements of greatly increasing time. If you shoot up Valentine, then they'd call in the posse from around Valentine's surroundings, adding in some people. But, if you wipe out them, then they'd have to call in people from a place like Strawberry or Rhodes, which would take forever.

Bounty hunters need to come less frequently, and it would be better if they worked more like gang ambushes. I like bounty hunters but they're too common at the higher levels.

3. Saint Denis is just going to be broken no matter what unless it's given some sort of social stealth (blend into a crowd) or hiding spots. I'm not asking for Assassin's Creed stealth, but something very basic so you can actually lose the cops. It would also help if police, maybe in all regions, escalate violence more gradually, like the cops in Saint Denis trying to beat you down with clubs until you open fire or beat down a few.

4. Thematically, I think it may have been better if the game had been designed so that the bounty acted like a level-up system which makes regions harder and doesn't go away. I like how the game makes areas instant-wanted-level for a while after shootouts. If it didn't have the bounty system I described in point 1, I think it would have been neat if bounty went up from both crime and missions, and increased the danger to the player, but didn't increase it THAT much. So it makes the game harder and harder over time, makes a region more hostile, but it's something that you can cope with even at high levels. I loved how Roanoke Ridge becomes this hostile area where you're constantly hunted, but by smaller gangs of Pinkertons. I wish that the whole map became like that.

5. This doesn't have much to do with the crime system, but I wish Strawberry had more stuff to do and the Grizzlies were a bit more lively. It took me forever to figure out that there was a trapper, hotel, and other basics in Roanoke Ridge. It'd be nice if you could at least encounter wandering merchant wagons or camps to play games like poker up in the mountains. And not being able to shoot or do anything in the Indian reservation is complete bullshit. They could have just made it a normal town like the others, maybe moving the Roanoke Ridge trapper to it and adding a saloon.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
3. Saint Denis is just going to be broken no matter what unless it's given some sort of social stealth (blend into a crowd) or hiding spots. I'm not asking for Assassin's Creed stealth, but something very basic so you can actually lose the cops. It would also help if police, maybe in all regions, escalate violence more gradually, like the cops in Saint Denis trying to beat you down with clubs until you open fire or beat down a few.
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I don't think they're ever gonna do stealth right. They're Rockstar, these days they're more focused on cinematic experiences with the cutscenes and such rather than the game mechanics. Although, they did bring back proper fist fighting in Red Dead 2, so maybe we just need to wait for their next game to get it right.

I can't even tell you how bullshit some of the game mechanics are on Online - despite most of it being pretty bullshit for different reasons - because I don't think there's a word that can actually quantify it. I know Online is a weaker and different beast in comparison to Story Mode, but in the case of stealth they have a mission where it prefers it to be stealthy yet even Rockstar knows their stealth system is garbage and they have no intent on fixing it so they give you the other option of blowing everything up when you inevitably fuck up which isn't as satisfying as doing the job right. Plus their reaction time to spotting you is insane like they're tweakers and then suddenly whole map knows because they did a silent gesture. You can't stop them before they alert anyone and it's nonsense. Even GTA Online affords you that luxury.
 
SiccDicc said:
I don't think they're ever gonna do stealth right. They're Rockstar, these days they're more focused on cinematic experiences with the cutscenes and such rather than the game mechanics. Although, they did bring back proper fist fighting in Red Dead 2, so maybe we just need to wait for their next game to get it right.

I can't even tell you how bullshit some of the game mechanics are on Online - despite most of it being pretty bullshit for different reasons - because I don't think there's a word that can actually quantify it. I know Online is a weaker and different beast in comparison to Story Mode, but in the case of stealth they have a mission where it prefers it to be stealthy yet even Rockstar knows their stealth system is garbage and they have no intent on fixing it so they give you the other option of blowing everything up when you inevitably fuck up which isn't as satisfying as doing the job right. Plus their reaction time to spotting you is insane like they're tweakers and then suddenly whole map knows because they did a silent gesture. You can't stop them before they alert anyone and it's nonsense. Even GTA Online affords you that luxury.
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Online is trash, and half the reason it's trash is honestly more due to culture than anything else. The original RDR multiplayer was my happiest experiences playing a multiplayer game in my life. Had it when I was a kid, and everybody talked to each other. Didn't matter that they were strangers. People - kids and adults alike - just chatted with each other. We'd have these huge running shootouts where people would posse up, split posses over imaginary feuds, realign, and basically just grief each other constantly all over the map. They didn't mind because there was nothing else to do. Land Grab mode made it so you occasionally had an actual objective. When you got tired of that you played Showdown, and it was actually fun, especially with the movie-style standoff in the beginning.

That way of gaming is pretty much dead - nobody talks in multiplayer anymore, except for Blacks, who unlike Whites are outgoing and happy enough to talk to strangers - and I've heard that it's because everybody is so used to partying up with IRL friends.
 
Ughubughughughughughghlug said:
Online is trash, and half the reason it's trash is honestly more due to culture than anything else. The original RDR multiplayer was my happiest experiences playing a multiplayer game in my life. Had it when I was a kid, and everybody talked to each other. Didn't matter that they were strangers. People - kids and adults alike - just chatted with each other. We'd have these huge running shootouts where people would posse up, split posses over imaginary feuds, realign, and basically just grief each other constantly all over the map. They didn't mind because there was nothing else to do. Land Grab mode made it so you occasionally had an actual objective. When you got tired of that you played Showdown, and it was actually fun, especially with the movie-style standoff in the beginning.

That way of gaming is pretty much dead - nobody talks in multiplayer anymore, except for Blacks, who unlike Whites are outgoing and happy enough to talk to strangers - and I've heard that it's because everybody is so used to partying up with IRL friends.
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I keep getting put in lobbies with Brazilians for some reason and they're the most violent assholes I've ever seen. I think it stems from being in a shithole of a country. If Rockstar put out a patch segregating those bastards I'd give them my left kidney in gratitude. Not even the Chinese rival these guys in assholery. That said if they just let us choose a lobby size so we can actually hunt shit that'd be great too. Because they put out an update that killed animal spawn rate based on how many players are in a lobby, despite how much money these fuckers keep making off of gold bars or the game selling at all they refuse to actually put any effort in the game -- which would be fine if they were working on story mode with an expansion or something but they're not. They have no excuse for this bullshit other than being greedy fucks who refuse to fix shit. I shouldn't have to be looking up glitches to get a solo lobby to enjoy the game and that's not even to avoid griefers, that's just so the fucking game works at all.

I'm talking infinite loading screens, NPCs not spawning in so you can't do activities, animal spawning is practically extinct, they do nothing about griefers - never mind they put up a system that encourages it - and I hear the PC is even fucking worse in this regard since it's so fucking easy to hack that shit. They actually had people using mods to sap money from everyone else in the lobby, roughly a dollar a second and no one is making vids about it -- especially supposed consumer rights advocates like Sterling and his Asian counterpart who were so eager to go after Fallout 76 about a similar fucking hack.

And the fact everyone lets them get away with all of this when they're no better than Bethesda really chaps my ass.

Kamov Ka-52 said:
Have they fixed the PC performance issues?
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At this point I think it's a matter of how much you're willing to sacrifice graphics to play the game. I don't know what fucking computers they're running compatibility tests on, if they're doing that at all, but they must be fucking Quadros or some shit.
 
SiccDicc said:
At this point I think it's a matter of how much you're willing to sacrifice graphics to play the game. I don't know what fucking computers they're running compatibility tests on, if they're doing that at all, but they must be fucking Quadros or some shit.
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Guess I'll keep waiting for it to be cracked then.
 
Kamov Ka-52 said:
Guess I'll keep waiting for it to be cracked then.
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Probably for the best, did a check on it and it looks like they're still crashing and bugs galore for most people. A Japanese fellow said that in order to stop your game from crashing you need to remove your controller from your PC, but the game still crashes for people who don't even have a controller plugged in. I dunno, Rockstar is shit.
 
Love the game, but ever since the pc version got on steam red dead online has been flooded with script kiddies. For some reason keeps pairing me with chinese/japs.

No idea why Rockstar doesn't have proper anti cheat on their most popular/money making games, but should've known they wouldn't since they never fixed the issue on gta online.
 
Kamov Ka-52 said:
Have they fixed the PC performance issues?
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Performance is okay. I have an older GPU and quad-core CPU and it runs decently at a mix of medium-high settings.

Stability, on the other hand, is awful. It's basically a coin-toss whether the game will crash at launch for me. If it does, I have to delete some Vulkan shader cache file and try again. When it finally loads in-game, it's common to see bizarre graphical glitches. Random crashes are frequent while playing.

But occasionally, when all the stars are aligned, I can play for hours without any issues.
 
Bunny Tracks said:
They killed Lenny like that? I knew he died, it was spoiled for me, but he goes out like that? He doesn't get a cutscene, or dramatic close-up, or any last words? No. He just falls over dead, because cops shot him on the roof. The gameplay doesn't even stop. He just keels over. At first, I thought it was a glitch, but no. He really dies like that. What the fuck, man? Lenny deserved better than that. I mean, Sean got shot in the face mid-sentence, but at least it during a cutscene. Lenny gets nothing.
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This is a complaint? Why would someone die in a nice way in this game? Outside of Sean dying in a cutscene, it was exactly the same. A few seconds for everyone to react, and then they're shooting people. That's realistic.
 
HeyYou said:
This is a complaint? Why would someone die in a nice way in this game? Outside of Sean dying in a cutscene, it was exactly the same. A few seconds for everyone to react, and then they're shooting people. That's realistic.
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All I'm saying is that it's really weird that literally everyone else besides Lenny got cutscene. It's jarring, makes no sense when compared to everyone else's deaths , and is another example of how inconsistent the narrative of the first five chapters is.

And honestly who gives a fuck about realism? I am so sick at people lobbing this defense against any criticism for this game. "Muh realism", "muh immersion", fuck off with that shit. It's a video game. Don't act like you felt like a real cowboy when you cleaned your gun by pressing the square button while you sat on your couch in your pajamas. Don't mention realism when this game contains a sentient robot, and time-travel in 1899. "Realism", and "immersion" are not an excuse for frustrating, inconvenient gameplay, dumb, inconsistent characters, and an even dumber plot.

That's my biggest issue with this game. Rockstar sacrificed fun, and freedom at the cost of "realism", and "immersion". They took what I loved so much about first game which was being able to race around the map doing whatever I felt like without a care in the world. I could hunt however I liked, and how much I liked. If I wanted to hunt deer with dynamite, and then carry 99 deer pelts on my person, I could do it, and the game wouldn't punish me for it, nor force me to go back, and forth for each one. If I wanted to kill goats at Critchley's Ranch or pigs at Warthington Ranch, I could do it so long as I killed the inhabitants first, and there wouldn't be twelve hundred cops immediately homing in on me. If I wanted to shoot my horse in the face just for the sake doing so I could do it, and as many times as I wanted so long as I had the deed for it.

The worst part is that I wouldn't have minded the realism, and immersion if it was consistent, and not artificial. I wish the choices you made actually effected more in the overworld. They do to an extent, like when you save a guy from snakebite, and he buys you an item later, or when you give a beggar some money, and he tells you about a secret poker game above the gunsmith shop. I love shit like that, and I wish more of the game was like that, but it's sadly not.

By far the biggest example of what I mean can simply be observed by noticing how many things that you would think would effect the plot/overworld, but don't. The lady you find locked in the outhouse on the Braithwaite Manor? You can't save her. You can't let her out. That cabin full of dead UFO cultists? All you get is a cool Easter egg. The manbearpig thing in that one house? You never find out who made it, or why they made it, and so on, and so forth.

Don't get me wrong. I know Rockstar puts a lot shit like this in their other games, but the sheer amount of extra stuff you find in the game feels incredibly under utilized, and like an attempt to make up for how narratively bad, and railroaded the game actually is. It also clashes heavily with how much the game wants to be "realistic", and "immersive", and makes the game come off as not knowing what it wants to be.

That's the actual problem, really. The game has a huge identity crisis. It can't decide if it's a realistic, serious, immersive, dramatic, cinematic movie, or if it's a wacky, horror/comedy/sci-fi spaghetti western video game. You can tell it desperately wants to be both, but more of the former, but because it can't fully commit to that, its stuck in this bizarre, annoying limbo of not fully being either.

Tl;dr-Video games are not movies, and movies are not video games. Pick one, or the other. You can't claim realism, and immersion as an excuse for intrusive, inconvenient gameplay, an inconsistent overworld, and a bad, railroaded plot, nor can you especially use it when there's ghost trains, vampires, a fucking sentiment robot, and time-travel shenanigans all going around in what's supposed to be 1899 rural America.
 
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Bunny Tracks said:
All I'm saying is that it's really weird that literally everyone else besides Lenny got cutscene. It's jarring, makes no sense when compared to everyone else's deaths , and is another example of how inconsistent the narrative of the first five chapters is.

And honestly who gives a fuck about realism? I am so sick at people lobbing this defense against any criticism for this game. "Muh realism", "muh immersion", fuck off with that shit. It's a video game. Don't act like you felt like a real cowboy when you cleaned your gun by pressing the square button while you sat on your couch in your pajamas. Don't mention realism when this game contains a sentient robot, and time-travel in 1899. "Realism", and "immersion" are not an excuse for frustrating, inconvenient gameplay, dumb, inconsistent characters, and an even dumber plot.

That's my biggest issue with this game. Rockstar sacrificed fun, and freedom at the cost of "realism", and "immersion". They took what I loved so much about first game which was being able to race around the map doing whatever I felt like without a care in the world. I could hunt however I liked, and how much I liked. If I wanted to hunt deer with dynamite, and then carry 99 deer pelts on my person, I could do it, and the game wouldn't punish me for it, nor force me to go back, and forth for each one. If I wanted to kill goats at Critchley's Ranch or pigs at Warthington Ranch, I could do it so long as I killed the inhabitants first, and there wouldn't be twelve hundred cops immediately homing in on me. If I wanted to shoot my horse in the face just for the sake doing so I could do it, and as many times as I wanted so long as I had the deed for it.

The worst part is that I wouldn't have minded the realism, and immersion if it was consistent, and not artificial. I wish the choices you made actually effected more in the overworld. They do to an extent, like when you save a guy from snakebite, and he buys you an item later, or when you give a beggar some money, and he tells you about a secret poker game above the gunsmith shop. I love shit like that, and I wish more of the game was like that, but it's sadly not.

By far the biggest example of what I mean can simply be observed by noticing how many things that you would think would effect the plot/overworld, but don't. The lady you find locked in the outhouse on the Braithwaite Manor? You can't save her. You can't let her out. That cabin full of dead UFO cultists? All you get is a cool Easter egg. The manbearpig thing in that one house? You never find out who made it, or why they made it, and so on, and so forth.

Don't get me wrong. I know Rockstar puts a lot shit like this in their other games, but the sheer amount of extra stuff you find in the game feels incredibly under utilized, and like an attempt to make up for how narratively bad, and railroaded the game actually is. It also clashes heavily with how much the game wants to be "realistic", and "immersive", and makes the game come off as not knowing what it wants to be.

That's the actual problem, really. The game has a huge identity crisis. It can't decide if it's a realistic, serious, immersive, dramatic, cinematic movie, or if it's a wacky, horror/comedy/sci-fi spaghetti western video game. You can tell it desperately wants to be both, but more of the former, but because it can't fully commit to that, its stuck in this bizarre, annoying limbo of not fully being either.

Tl;dr-Video games are not movies, and movies are not video games. Pick one, or the other. You can't claim realism, and immersion as an excuse for intrusive, inconvenient gameplay, an inconsistent overworld, and a bad, railroaded plot, nor can you especially use it when there's ghost trains, vampires, a fucking sentiment robot, and time-travel shenanigans all going around in what's supposed to be 1899 rural America.
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I mean, sure, the game has a lot of dumb stuff. But it's not either/or when it comes to "realism". RDR2 obviously had a tone that it was going for in its main story, and the goofy side-quests don't change that. RDR1 was the same way in that regard. It's not about complete realism, it's about maintaining a consistent theme throughout the game. And that theme is that good people die in awful ways to appease Dutch's ego, and his bloviating about never giving in and ideals doesn't make seeing someone take a bullet through the head less horrifying. The funny thing is that I agree with a lot of your points regarding the gameplay and its tedious aspects, but I absolutely do think you're being harsh on the story in some very odd ways.
 
HeyYou said:
I mean, sure, the game has a lot of dumb stuff. But it's not either/or when it comes to "realism". RDR2 obviously had a tone that it was going for in its main story, and the goofy side-quests don't change that. RDR1 was the same way in that regard. It's not about complete realism, it's about maintaining a consistent theme throughout the game. And that theme is that good people die in awful ways to appease Dutch's ego, and his bloviating about never giving in and ideals doesn't make seeing someone take a bullet through the head less horrifying. The funny thing is that I agree with a lot of your points regarding the gameplay and its tedious aspects, but I absolutely do think you're being harsh on the story in some very odd ways.
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Yeah, I apologize for that. The game's plot isn't that bad, even if it does have a lot of issues. What set me off was people excusing moments that don't make any sense, or the tedious, frustrating gameplay for "realism", or "immersion".

Don't get me wrong. I am having fun with the game, (I'm on my second play through) it's just that there's a lot of problems with it that way too many people are willing disregard for the sake of the game being "realistic".
 
I believe that the reason for Lenny's abrupt death is to further show how badly things are starting to fall apart. Sean died without warning, Dutch was starting to lose his mind, Hosea (the guy who kept Dutch reined in) got shot in front of you, and the bank robbery went FUBAR near instantly. Lenny dying during gameplay was just twisting the knife at that point.
 
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