Red Dead Redemption II

/

Structure

  • Maybe it’s just because I never played the previous game, but I have such a hard time telling what name belongs to which voice and which person, I can’t tell who is who to form even the slightest connection to them, it’s just a bunch of faceless voices and the backs of people's’ heads

  • It’s really weird how, it feels like the game is put into a semi-instanced state whenever the player starts any mission. It feels like it really defeats the purpose of being open-world, because it means I’m basically just running back and forth between my camp, instead of doing wide sweeps of the world

  • I would like to know what the “main quests” are, I don’t like feeling like if I want to specifically progress the story, I don’t know what to do

  • This game is super selective about what you are allowed to do when. Sometimes you’re allowed to be wanted, sometimes you’re not, sometimes you’re allowed to go off the beaten path sometimes your not. Basically you can only do what the game tells you

  • One has to wonder if there’s something wrong with a game where you spend half your time waiting for your horse to finish it’s auto-run while you’re looking at your phone

Gameplay

  • I didn’t know it was even possible to walk this slow, I know this isn’t a “gamey” game, but what purpose does it serve to feel like you live in molasses and simple tasks are more complicated than if you were doing it for real

  • I don’t understand why matching a horsebound ally’s pace doesn’t also just match their direction. I really would love to just turn my brain off and listen to the conversation

  • I’ve completed the first chapter and I still don’t know how to melee or reload my gun

  • I have no idea what the rules are as to when I can and cannot take my weapon out, or really do much of anything. Buttons seemingly do random things at random times

  • I have no idea what weapon I’m going to take out when I press L1, it definitely seems like it isn’t just the last weapon I had drawn, which would make sense to me

  • It feels really arbitrary what they tried to gamify and what they did not. Like, it feels like they made literally every wrong choice, things are made needlessly complicated and draw-out to do for seemingly no gain

  • It seems completely arbitrary what weapons are on my weapon wheel, if any, once I get off my horse

  • Why do I need to lock on to everything with L2? This is also the same button that draws my gun. Can I not do anything in this game without holding L2 first?

  • I have basically no idea how the bounty system works

UI/UX

  • Interacting with things in the world is painful, I don’t know what button to press, there are extra steps that feel superfluous

  • Why can I not place a waypoint on top of a map marker? Best I can do is just kind of in the general area

  • Navigating around the menus is kind of painful just because there’s this slow fade out/fade in transition you have to wait for in every transition

  • I feel like the menus aren’t laid out in a way that makes sense physically, like every screen is just an arbitrarily laid out screen that doesn’t feel connected to the previous screen

  • Why is there no indication of which horse is mine. I literally can’t tell sometimes, and it’s important because you stash half your inventory on there

  • I appreciate them showing bodies on the minimap, and then fading them out when they have been looted

  • Holding dpad-Right to open your satchel is so unintuitive

  • The iconography on restorative items is super confusing, and it’s largely because having the “core” and the “bar” elements separate is also kind of awkward, when you have 2 elements that are contained within 1 icon, it’s hard to differentiate them

  • Is there really no dedicated “open the map” button in this open world game?

  • Did markers just randomly disappear from my map? Suddenly in the middle of a mission, it seems like my map has less information than it did before

  • My horse bonding upgraded, but I have no idea how or why or to what end, it just kind of happened, and the player menu doesn’t tell me much

  • The way the item wheels work is really strange, especially the fact that the item wheel is accessed through the weapon wheel, and the fact that you equip stuff in the same interface as the normal weapon wheel

  • The map uses characters’ initials as the “new quest” icon, but they are completely unreadable on the minimap, even at the “enlarged” size

  • I don’t understand how to easily see my cores’ states. Sometimes they appear when I open the weapon wheel, sometimes they don’t

  • The game has this weird dedication to not putting any icons or UI in the middle of the screen, and I feel like it backfires. Sure, it doesn’t “take away from the realism” or anything, it just means you have to constantly look away from the game (to the corners of the screen)

  • The subtitles in this game are basically useless if there are multiple people speaking in an area