Red Dead Redemption 2

[Art Blade]

something else that I find annoying:

Your weapons degrade by using them. You can wipe them to a perfect state with gun oil, one unit can clean a weapon back to 100 that was down to zero. And there's the gunsmith who can professionally clean them. You go in, choose "customise" and get a list of all your weapons and their stats.

That list doesn't show the state of degradation.

It only shows the other stats of the weapon when you select one. Only when you click on it so you whip it out and place it on the counter, that's when you either see a price tag for cleaning or none. In order to find the ones that need cleaning, I have to go through the entire list of weapons, whip them out and slam them on the counter one by one to check whether or not they need cleaning. And EVERY. TIME. the gunsmith comments on the state but only got like 3 or 4 comments to choose from. So I keep hearing the same comments over and over again until I've gone through all my weapons.

I get perhaps two or three weapons with a price tag for cleaning so I let the gunsmith clean them for a few cents. After I'm done, I leave the shop, happy, perfectly maintained weapons makes me feel good. Then I open the weapons wheel.

And most guns need a little cleaning.

WHAT THE HELL, MAN!

[Art Blade]

something else I came across was really annoying although I have to admit, the chance that it happens is next to zero. It happened exactly once, so far. But it was enough to get me raging

I am in the open, just left a hut I finished looting, and see a bunch of wild horses just close enough that it makes me wonder how close they are without getting spooked. They get spooked easily, like by a snake. Like the one that's chillaxing between the horses and me but closer to the horses. A snake? I want. Horses? I don't want, not now. So I whip out my bow and small game arrows, aim..

..at the horses. What.. again. And again. The game forces my aim towards the closest one of the horses, which is twice as far away as the snake, prompting me to call it to get its attention.

I don't want the horse's attention. I want to kill a perfect snake that's not spooked, just sitting there.. excellent chance for a perfect hit. But the game keeps forcing my aim away from the snake towards the horses. I don't want to spook the horses as that might just as well spook the snake.

The only way out that I found: I walked in a half circle so that I had an eye on the snake while losing sight of the horses and FINALLY I WAS ABLE TO AIM at the bloody snake. Perfect skin. Nice.

What the hell, who programs that nonsense?

[Art Blade]

And why is interacting with the trapper and other shop keepers bound to aiming at them, keep the aim pressed and while doing that with one hand, I need to find the keys with the other hand for "buy" and "sell" or "browse catalogue" or "customise" and then keep pressing one of them until the dialogue opens.

The same type of menu opens automatically when you get close to the camp's ledger or the cook. You don't have to aim at Pearson, the prompt is simply on screen as soon as you approach his table.

Why doesn't this same type of simple and easy interaction w0#k in other shops?

***

While at the camp, go check your tent and the chest with outfits. Try to customise 4 different ones to store on the horse. For one, the list of items is just randomly ordered, actually not ordered at all so you need to go up and down the list of clothes to find what you want to change. Then the outfit isn't saved and may get lost as the warning states down at the screen. So you want to save it. That requires to delete a previous outfit. Then you save it but for some reason one of the outfits is now not stowed on the horse any more so you need to take care of that as well. Then you notice something on another outfit needs changing, so you click on it, it becomes a custom outfit that's not saved, need to delete the one you want to change, then save the one you edited. And check that the outfits are stored on the horse. Every time you change just one outfit changes the order they're stored on the horse.

The game keeps changing bandoliers and holsters and off-hand holsters and satchels. The screenshot I showed about my outfits shows they're all but one using the same but when I created the outfits, all were different.

However. Checking outfits on or close to the horse.

Since the weapon wheel that you need to flip through to get to the horse menu doesn't show which of those four outfits is for hot, average or cold temperatures, you may want to memorise that for instance outfit "3" is for cold temperatures. After changing an outfit at the camp, that "3" may now be one of two outfits for hot temperatures. So you have to find out which outfit is for cold temperatures because right now it's freezing cold and you want to change. The screen isn't big enough to give at least a simple info about the outfit?

Open weapon wheel. Flip to items, flip to horse. Mouse down to the outfits. Use keys to choose from outfit 1-4. All the time keep the key pressed that keeps the wheel open. Select outfit "3." Let go of the key that keeps the wheel open. Watch how Arthur uses the wrong outfit.

Rinse and repeat. Up to 4 times to get the right outfit for cold weather. Hands are starting to cramp, patience is wearing out, rage starts to push its way through to open the mouth and start the player to swear like a trooper.

WHO THE F is responsible for that F'in S??? 

[Art Blade]

And one more: fast travel.

In the camp you can unlock a fast travel option that is so hidden people ask where exactly it is. Behind (on the other side of) Arthur's tent, there's a map nailed to the side of a wagon. A MAP.

Now, you open it and it shows you a list of destinations (that only show up at all on the list after visiting those destinations for the first time) which is on the left of the screen. Those destinations don't instantly ring a bell except for towns and your camp. The bigger part to the right of the list shows A MAP that's of NO USE and some irrelevant banners! WHY show a map in the first place IF YOU CAN'T USE IT? And destinations that are almost as useless?!

It doesn't show you ON THE MAP where those fast travel points actually are. You need to guess and to learn them yourself, there's no option to show them. Some are so remote I wonder why I want to fast-travel there, there's nothing of importance nearby. Meaning, most of the time you need to travel anyway once you arrived at your fast travel location. In the wilderness, when you camp, you get the option to fast-travel, too. It only shows the list and the rest of the screen is some blurred background. As if it was too much to ask to bloody show us a map, the whole rest of the screen next to the list could be used for it, and show us where those listed locations are on that map

WHYYYYYyyyyy...  WHO HIRED THOSE QA CLOWNS?

[Art Blade]

While I'm on it: the fence.

Two things. One:

He sells tomahawks. Only they're locked. Once you actually found a tomahawk, you can buy them at the trapper's shop. They're still locked at the fence's shop. What?? I think before I found pamphlets to upgrade tomahawks, the trapper sold me as many as I could pay but after I got the upgrade recipes, it turns out I can only hold 3 tomahawks of each type. So the normal one should have stopped at 3 but the trapper happily kept all the cash while I could only keep ONE at that time and paid for 10! Later it worked properly. But still not at the fence's where it's still locked. Apparently a mission officially unlocks the use of tomahawks and that's probably when the fence unlocks them, too.

Two. Way more annoying.

You may have got used to donating crafting material to Pearson or selling them to the trapper BEFORE you can buy crafted items. I knew the fence could craft something out of a legendary coyote fang. Or it may have been the legendary fox claw one. Whatever. Since you sell the skin to the trapper.. straight from the horse.. the fence doesn't have access to your horse cargo. Well. Hmm. I thought it clever to keep the whole legendary coyote (or fox) carcass and haul it to the fence in person, bloody thing over my shoulder, so I could sell it to him in order to give him access to the fangs. It might have been the fox paw trinket, but either way, it was part of the carcass he needed and I dragged that carcass to him. By the time I did that, I happened to be in St Denis because trapper and fence are almost next door to each other. So I drag that skinned animal carcass to the fence who instantly has a fit seeing me with that carcass in his shop and even threatens me. So no carcass. Well, turns out that for some reason the parts needed were already in my inventory, no carcass needed. Thanks. Kind of funny but still, not logical compared to how the other two guys operate their crafting business.

But it gets really worse. So you need for instance earrings to have the fence craft stuff for you. I got those items and, as the trapper and the cook in the camp do, I expect the fence to buy and keep that stuff until he's got the whole bunch of ingredients so I can then choose to buy them. So I sell those earrings to the fence, get paid, and out of curiosity check his list with items. There it shows ZERO earrings.

Those items can be "sold or used for crafting" as it states and when you go to the trapper or cook, they know which items are needed for crafting and stow them away for later use. Not the fence. He just buys them and you can't access them, not even buy them back. They're gone for good. REALLY annoying when those were RARE items. Time for a reload..

I REALLY WANT TO PUNISH THOSE DEVS

[Art Blade]

NO RANT

I found out something new about horses..

D_B, you'll LOVE this.

You need a temp horse? Get any horse in town. No wanted level.

Call me the Horse Master.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Well, I'll watch that video later, it will be useful I'm sure.

Pretty much all the annoying things you're describing are from one cause: console-itis, this game was developed for a console, to be played with a controller, viewed on a TV screen from across the room. So everything in it is geared towards a console, the controls, the menus, the UI layout. Most games are that way now, they aren't made for a PC with the screen size, viewing distance and the fact you have a mouse and 100 buttons on a keyboard to access. So when they get ported, all that gets crammed the easiest way possible from the console version to the PC version. Since there's almost no money to be made making a PC port actually PC friendly, they don't bother, and just map the controller output to a couple keyboard keys and the mouse and that's it.

That's why I had to make my own mods for Fallout 4, to make the keyboard actually usable. It's not so bad in RDR2, but then I really haven't played it enough to make critical decisions on stuff like that.

[Art Blade]

OK, I see. No money to be made.. so no service granted.. great.

But I get it. Thanks for that comment.. makes me feel less angry about the devs. But not about those greedy bosses

[Dweller_Benthos]

OK, so for the horse video, you just saddle it and it's yours and no repercussions? I take it this is a bug and not how it's meant to be?

[Art Blade]

I suppose nobody was crazy enough to do that so they never found out it worked. And then came the horse master Yep, no repercussions, just a dent in your honour (you hear that sound and see that red icon) but that can be fixed by greeting a couple of people to regain honour

[Dweller_Benthos]

I'll try it then, easy way to get my second horse out of the stable finally.

Update:

Got a second horse even easier. First off I headed out to find the place where the UFO shows up and met up with a guy who was having trouble with his horse, which promptly kicked him dead. So, after there was no one around, I looted his body and off I went. Met a woman who's horse fell on her and died. I got it off her and offered her a ride home, but had to take the fox carcass off the horse first. Apparently, that took too long and she headed off walking by herself. OK, fine lady, have a fun hike back to Valentine by yourself, I'm off to find a shack where UFOs congregate. Anyway, after finding the shack (see the screenshots thread) I headed into town and wandered into the sheriff's office by accident. Got the mission to hunt down the guy selling fake medicine, went and did that, and while doing it, kept his horse as my temp horse. Too bad for you, buddy, have fun in that jail cell.

After heading back to camp and figuring out how to make the horse follow me, I did some camp chores, went back to town and finally sold that pronghorn pelt I've been carting around since day one. Plus a bunch of other skins and half rotted carcasses to the butcher.

[LowPolyOWG]

Agree with your rants, Art. While it's definitely a beautiful looking game, there are some design decisions they could have left out. I do like how you can interact more with NPCs/gun customization. It's cool to browse goods in a store. Nice detail there, but I think they went way overboard in some areas. Funny, Wikipedia claims that R* finally revamped their AI system after 17 years

Rant:

1: The movement. Yes, you need to hold the key to move, gently tapping it does nothing. Due to the fiddly controls, you can bump into people on accident/run them over with a horse. Or, in the case of PZ, have a hard time navigating certain obstacles, with a controller.

I was in a mission where I was told to follow a companion  through a hostile environment, and part of it was to go up a series of stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, there were rails on both sides, but at the top of the first platform where you needed to turn 180 degrees to go up the next run there were no rails, so of course, I promptly fell to the ground necessitating running up the stairs again. In the real world, what kind of idiot would put rails up everywhere except where you have the highest probability of falling off! This is one of the most irritating aspects of any game I have ever played - making the environment unrealistically difficult so you need to repeat it several times in order to progress. This is of course a technique that developers use when they have no realistic obstacles in mind. This is true of many areas.

Another example, I was told to steal an oil wagon, which required you to turn 90 degrees to go through a gate. Of course, turning toward the gate always resulted in an over-steer meaning that you got stuck on the gate post, another ridiculous old-world gaming programming.

Running up stairs of any kind means that you need to be perfectly aligned or you miss the stairs, meaning of course that the bad guys have plenty of time to gun you down.

I have to say however, that AC:Origins is light years ahead of RDR2 as far as open world programming goes. As much as I love the western theme of RDR2, I still prefer Origins as the most natural open world experience I have had.

2: Hunting. Do I really need to switch/craft a bunch of specific ammo to hunt an animal for that "perfect" skin? Also, all those skinning animations which you need to watch for the sake of watching. At least R* didn't made the skinning a mini-game.

3: Crafting ammunition. Was it too hard to add a craft X amount and let the time skip to simulate you crafting items in an extended period of time? Sorry, you gotta craft it one by one.

4: Forced de-equipping your carried weapons while riding. Right, I need to re-equip my two-handed weapons or be left with a pistol/revolver... Can't wait for GTA VI where I need to open the trunk/boot in my car, open a weapon crate, then be able to equip my guns Realistically, I can see one do that to prevent an accidental suicide if one were to fall off a horse/trip while walking, but this is a game after all. Or, it's some sort of a cowboy simulator dressed as a $60-$99 game with additional megatransactions in the MP mode

/rant

[Art Blade]

 

so true, all that. Crafting ammo one by one is comparatively fast. Ever try to cook the stuff in your inventory? I timed one of those cooking processes. 15 seconds. Meaning, if you don't pause in between and stay focussed all the time on pressing VARIOUS buttons to cook, stow or eat, cook another one or return, you can manage to cook 4 meats in one minute. 25 MINUTES JUST to cook 100 items! That isn't unrealistic, I've got a satchel with 99 units no matter which item and actually hit with 99 big game meat that limit. Am I really to go and cook big game meat for 25 minutes, and I have tons of other meats in my satchel, like a few hours JUST COOKING?

I sold most of the stuff and I do cook but only like 10 or 20 pieces per run, then do something else. But still, in order to have a reliable source of "energy" to fill up the so-called cores for health, stamina and dead eye, cooked food is the best you can get because it doesn't cost more than the ammo you killed the animals with. Other food that you find, so-called provisions, or canned foods and fruit, are by far not as good and if you want to buy them, they cost a fortune considering how many you'd need. Of course you find that stuff eventually here and there but still, cooking is more reliable and more "energy-efficient" when consumed.

In other words, a good chunk of time in this game is wasted on pressing keys and staring at a camp fire while cooking meat. No way to cut that short, it WILL cost your time, 15 seconds every time you cook anything. That amounts to hours, easily.

RAAAAAHHHHH! 

[LowPolyOWG]

 

At least I do not need to worry about cooking considering the trainers I am using

[Art Blade]

cooking is one thing, I wonder what your trainer can do for you (and your horses and your weapons) regarding eating (not counting for the weapons) and cleaning (counting for you, your horses and your weapons)

Without trainer, I have to fight hunger ALL the time. My character Arthur has been underweight ever since I started playing and even stuffing him with like 10 chunks of meat didn't change that. Fortunately, underweight results in better stamina albeit it also results in less health (hit points) so.. I'm doing fine as I'm normally not in harms way and having maxed out (8/8 and yes, later in the game it may get to 10/10) health and stamina, I'm doing alright.

My horses are fit when I get them from the stable but soon they're "thin" even though I feed them (as well as myself) quite frequently: every time the cores started to drain. However, today was the first time I actually had a "malnourished" main horse. WHAT?! It took I think 7 or 8 wild carrots, maybe more, to get it to back to a "fit" state.

That really isn't fun. Of all the stuff that you do, it is essentially a survival game.. survive hunger. Find food, cook it, eat it. Find horse food and feed it. If you've got two horses at the same time like I usually do, you need to feed and care for both horses. The white horse gets dirty extremely fast.. you know the saying "when *bleep* hits the fan?" Just ride down the main road in Valentine and your white horse looks as if it had spent some time in front of that fan. Which is probably why you need to brush it off because it is detrimental to your horse's health and that means, more food to replenish its cores.

So a rather big part of the game is

FEEDING YOURSELF AND YOUR HORSE(S) and keeping at least the horse(s) clean. Oh, and your weapons, of course, need cleaning because just a few specks of dust cause them to degrade and decay while you're only looking at them. Not even a professional gunsmith can stop that. He doesn't even notice it unless your weapon looks like made of Swiss cheese. "Perfect condition," he keeps telling you, and when you go outside, take a look at them again, it's a miracle they're not yet rotten to the core. But they still need cleaning. Brilliant.