When this game finally came up on special after being out for years I thought that I was going to be in for a real treat based on all the praise that it had received over the years. It is a visual masterpiece that is for certain, but right now I am 20% of the way through the game and I have to say.... I'm fucking bored man!
I walked into this game not really knowing anything about it other than the fact that it is open world and very story-driven. The story-driven part of it worried me because I am always annoyed by excessive cutscenes in any game... and this game has a LOT of them.
While some of the action is pretty great it seems to me like this is for the most part a horse-riding and shopping simulation with occasional gunfights built in. You spend absolute ages just riding on your horse from place to place and while the scenery is very pretty, just running down a track for sometimes 10 minutes or more isn't exactly what I consider gaming excitement.
The above image is basically 90% of the game that I have experienced thus far.
Also, there are a ton of side quests that you can do but most of them are "fetch quests" that send you to some distant location, have you do something trivial, and then you have to horse your way all the way back to the person who gave you the quest in the first place. Every now and then the game gives you the option to "warp" back to where the quest began and oh my god do I love it when that happens.
In one particularly annoying and seemingly pointless quest, you go into town with your buddy to help him drink off his sorrows at the saloon.
You get hammered, piss on the ground, get into arguments and eventually a fight, then you wake up back at your camp but you no longer have your horse. Now you have to friggin WALK all the way back to town in order to retrieve it because the game will not let you use anyone else's horse to get there. At the end of all of this there is no reward and it probably took me 15 minutes of holding down the "X" button to run all the way back. It's just stupid.
I've been involved in a couple of missions that were kind of fun and most of those involved shooting people and I suppose I like the fact that you can do whatever you want in this game. If you want to run into town and shoot the sheriff in the face just for the hell of it you are welcome to do so. You can rob, beat up, and shoot anyone that you want and I think this is what most people probably end up doing just so they don't have to do another fetch quest.
RDR2 won 175 gaming awards and I am not going to give up on it and stop playing because I've gone too far at this point. I just have to say that after years of waiting to play this game that I am a bit disappointed that so far anyway, it just seems like a go to this place, get that thing, go back to where you came from, get another quest, run somewhere, do that thing, run back, get another quest game and if this doesn't change soon I don't really understand what it is that everyone likes so much about this game.
Maybe it will change later and for my own sanity, I certainly hope so.