I’m gonna take a couple weeks off of talking about Farsight, so I can talk about some things that have popped up. One thing that popped up for me was Red Dead Redemption 2.

I rarely go on Polygon anymore, but every once in a while, I find that there’s not enough on AV Club to sustain me throughout the day. This happened the other day, so I checked out Polygon. I saw an article about Red Dead Redemption 2, and for some reason, I clicked on it. The title was ambiguous as hell: “Red Dead Redemption 2: 6 months later“. I’m surprised I even checked it out, but out of the several choices in front of me, I was the most curious about this one. The subtitle of the article said it would talk about “the failures, and success, of Rockstar’s latest hit”. I was interested because from what I could tell, only positive things were said about RDR2. After reading several paragraphs, it didn’t take me too long to see that the subtitle was misleading as hell. This was not about the success of RDR2; this was about the failures of RDR2.

Now, I’m not gonna summarize the damn article because holy hell did that writer go all out. The Polygon article is a mammoth. It took a look at Ulysses, and asked itself, “How can I do that but for video game analysis?” I wouldn’t be surprised if it took me one whole hour to read the damn thing. And I even skipped the story chapter to avoid the spoilers! Yes, there are chapters.

Now, before I even get into the article, I’d just like to talk about my experience with the Red Dead Redemption franchise. You can read about my feelings on the first game in the franchise in my review—spoiler alert, it’s my second favorite game ever made. So when its sequel came out last year, I was stoked. I pre-ordered the steelbook edition at a $100 price point. And when it didn’t come on time, I canceled the order, and I drove down the hill to the nearest GameStop to buy it, so I didn’t have to wait to play it. Imagine that: a two hour drive because I didn’t want to wait two days to play it.

When I booted it up, I was really impressed. It looked beautiful, it threw you into a proper storm, and it felt a lot different than the first RDR. Other than that, one thing stuck out immediately. The aiming was hard as hell to use. I’m used to playing super competitive games like Fortnite and PUBG, so the shooting feeling off isn’t on me. In RDR, I always turned off aim assist completely, and I found myself hitting people on moving horses and tiny birds in the sky with no problem. In this one, I couldn’t even hit a damn wolf right in front of me. Something with the default aim settings was terrible. I found some people online who found decent settings, so I settled on those. Even with these changes, my gunslinging never made me feel like John Wayne. I felt like John Wayne’s mentally challenged brother who would sometimes put on his big brother’s hat.

I looked past that though, and I played some more of the game. I got to see more of Rockstar’s phenomenal writing and cutscenes paired together, but even though the cutscenes looked great and sounded great, it wasn’t the same as RDR. They took the biting satire from the first and got rid of it completely. They replaced it with history and drama, which just isn’t as fun as a world driven by how stupid it is. And it’s not like you can’t have satire and drama at the same time. They actually feed off of each other extremely well if done right. This is because drama is soul eating. And movies get away with it because they’re two to three hours long. Games like RDR 2 are about 100 hours long. Not having some hilarious bits in there makes all of those hours one noted and hard to handle.

This is all coming from a sucker for dialogue. In all of the previous Rockstar games, I would get to a location that I needed to be at, but the characters weren’t done having the current conversation. I had gotten to the scene too fast. So I would stop my vehicle right outside of the destination and listen to the rest of the conversation. In RDR 2, I didn’t feel like doing this as much. The writing was smart, but it didn’t have me dying to hear the next few lines.

Out were the hilarious side-characters of the first game. In were two types of characters: respectable characters and foolish characters. There were some funny bits to be had with the foolish characters but no hilarious moments. As for the respectable characters, they all felt the same. The game has two black characters that your character is very found of, but I can barely tell the difference between their characters. It’s nice that the game is displaying black characters in a nice light here because in that day no way would any of the other characters do the same, but they’re pretty dull characters. I want interesting characters. I would’ve loved a scathing critique of the wild west coming from an angry as hell black man.

And lastly, I noticed several minor things. The game added several new systems to make the game feel different than its predecessor. It added a health bar, stamina bar, and dead eye bar. Your horse would also have a stamina and health bar. You could have multiple horses and stable them. You could cook. Regenerating HP and dead eye were gone; instead, you had to eat some food to get those back up.

And then the game took away some stuff from the first game. Things like you could only carry two primary weapons and one pistol instead of just carrying every single weapon on your person. If you wanted to get a different weapon, you had to go back to your horse and change your weapons. And let’s be real: who the hell has the will do that?

Then they did some minor changes. Once you skinned an animal, you had to carry it on your horse and sell it to someone in person. Gone were the days of automatically getting the skin in your inventory. Now you had to manage that you could only carry n amount of these skins on your horse. And of course the skins would go bad if you didn’t sell them in time.

At the time, I saw these things are complications that didn’t add anything to the game. I even mentioned it in my top 10 games of 2018 list. These complications made a game that I wouldn’t enjoy as much. That’s why I’ve only put in like 30 hours into the game. I put a couple hundred hours into RDR. But I understood that these things were added to be realistic, and I couldn’t fault them for that.

Fast forward six months to the Polygon article. During my reading of this article, I was hit with something. Maybe it’s not my fault that I didn’t like the game. I thought that I was just getting diminishing returns on the game because I’ve already played 1000+ hours of Rockstar games, but maybe it wasn’t that. This article made me realize that maybe all of these complications that I noticed ruined my experience. It took me out of the immersion and added some crappy complications to ruin the flow of the game for me.

Maybe I wasn’t having fun because the game kept on adding these realistic barriers to me and the gameplay, and I just got tired from jumping the hurdles. And maybe that’s why I stopped playing the game. This lesson is important because it taught me that while realism is great in games, it needs to have a point. It needs to not take the player out of the moment. And while realism is great, it’s not the be-all and end-all. What comes first is fun. And a lot of the things they changed with the game just aren’t that fun.

Now, I have every intention of going back to the game—at least that’s what I tell myself. It is a very solid game. But man, it’s not making it easy for me to want to finish it. I really hope that Rockstar evaluates this critique from the community because it’s affecting our play in a very negative way. And while I do see a great game with some really cool missions, I just don’t know if I’ll ever get back to it. But at least this is a learning lesson for me. I thought about a lot of these things while playing, but I never connected the dots. In the future, I’ll make sure to connect the dots.