@gfantini: My issue isn't patience, I was expecting a slow burn with RDR 2 and that's exactly what I got. I actually enjoyed how slow and deliberate everything was. What I didn't enjoy was the passive nature of the gameplay systems. What you call "deliberately light", I call "bad game design", because the devs have essentially wasted resources putting in features that not many would be compelled to use, because according to you, they are not being compelled at all to use them. Designing a video game is not a casual half-arsed affair, especially for a big budget production where everything is super expensive. If you're going to implement something in your game, then do it right, or don't do it at all.
Hunting, fishing, robbing, whatever, it all needs to serve a purpose towards the grand scheme of things, and not end up as random activities the player may or may not take part in because it amounts to almost nothing in this game. What is even the point of having money play any role in this game when it's such a meaningless commodity? The game gives you everything you need via the main story and nothing needs to be "earned".
RDR 2 isn't a movie, it's a video game, and a video game is something you PLAY, not watch. The interactivity and "gamification" systems suck in RDR 2. My guess is the devs ran out of time to properly balance the systems in place, or they simply stopped caring after a while. As it stands, the gameplay is subpar and doesn't evolve much from previous R* games, in fact, it has actually regressed from GTA V's fun multi-protagonist system.
For me, the only parts of the gameplay they got right was the horse mechanics (superb) and open world exploration. Everything else is barely passable and ultimately meaningless.
@gfantini: Yeah no, BOTW redefined "open world". RDR 2 merely continued trends already established. In terms of its world, it's greatest achievement is the emergent choices it allows the player to make in side missions and random stranger occurrences, since those were really good at building the world and improving immersion. In terms of technical achievement, I think AC Odyssey has it beat, since it's a far more populated world with more side missions and interactivity with the world. In the context of all other open world games out there, RDR 2 isn't that impressive at all.
Sadly, the rest of the game didn't make much sense in that it gives you lots of things to do, but very little incentive to do them. If I was stuck in isolation somewhere, bored as hell, I'd probably be ok with this. But I'm not, and my massive games backlog beckons, and so I have little patience when a game gives me no real reason to hunt, do the challenges or even collect more weapons.
To further explain the above, money, which is a huge part of the narrative, is given to you far too easily, everything is super cheap, and so it becomes a non-factor in this game. Most guns are unnecessary and 99% of enemies in the game can be killed with your starting weapons.
The varmint rifle was the only gun that felt meaningful since it allowed you to hunt certain animals to gain perfect pelts, but even then, hunting itself isn't necessary at all, and you didn't need the upgraded pouches. In regards to the pouches, they weren't necessary because you really didn't need to carry around that many items to survive in the open world as the weather system had little to no effect on you (even when I was under or overweight or it was too "hot" or "cold", I barely felt the effects).
When the game economy becomes irrelevant, a whole of heap of gameplay systems tied to it becomes irrelevant. This was a flaw that needed to be addressed if the devs cared about the polish of the game, but they predicted correctly that none of that matters because the fandom, including the journos would praise the game regardless and it'd sell bonkers. It's a rather sad state of affairs.
I'm really sick of R* achieving unwarranted praise, it's made them "fat" and lazy. RDR 2 ultimately ended up as AAA pretentiousness.
@mistervulpes: If you have a sound rebuttal to my theory, you're free to express it. This is how it feels like for me. RDR 2 is simply the biggest release of they year, and given R*'s reputation and influence, most journalists would either praise it to high heavens by default, or be too afraid to speak up if they think otherwise.
RDR 2 has many major flaws, and along with IGN, GS has decided those flaws aren't important enough to warrant consideration.
@texasgoldrush: To be fair, TW3 and BOTW were also GS GOTYs in their respective years, and I recall BOTW had plenty of flaws most reviewers ignored that year. I agreed with TW3 and BOTW getting the GOTY award from GS, but this time RDR 2's flaws are too great for me to ignore.
@dkunit: God Of War was a reinvention of the series and was actually a very risky endeavour by the devs. Yes, it's a AAA blockbuster, but it was a AAA blockbuster not many expected to do as well as it did.
I kind of feel like there is no proper system in place to determine a GOTY at Gamespot. It isn't so much a choice agreed upon by the majority of the staff, rather it's a choice agreed upon by the few but very influential editors at GS and everyone is kind of forced to go along with it.
Objectively speaking, RDR 2 is very trite in terms of gameplay with a lot of features that feel incomplete or uninspired. But since the "big" voices at GS decided it would get GOTY, the process of waxing poetic over what it does right (mostly story and characters) whilst completely glossing over it's many flaws has begun.
RDR 2 has a great narrative, I agree, but in terms of gameplay systems, I find a lot of it outdated and pointless, and for this alone, it cannot be my GOTY. In fact, I would go so far as to rate RDR 2 as the most overrated game of the year, which feels like every R* game ever made, tbh.
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