The New 'Red Dead Redemption' Reveals the Biggest Problem With Marquee Games Today: They're Boring as Hell. (theoutline.com)

An anonymous reader shares a column: Everything about "Red Dead Redemption 2" is big. The latest open-world western, released in October by Rockstar Games, constantly reminds you of this. It takes roughly 15 minutes for its bland everycowboy star, Arthur Morgan, to gallop across the 29-square-mile map. It has 200 species of animals, including grizzly bears, alligators, and a surprising number of birds. It takes about 45.5 hours to play through the main quest, and 150-plus hours to reach 100 percent completion. There are more than 50 weapons to choose from, such as a double-barreled shotgun and a rusty hatchet. It's big, big, big.

[...] On top of all the bigness, "Red Dead Redemption 2" is also incredibly dull. I've been playing it off and on since it was released, and I'm still waiting for it to get fun. I'm not alone in thinking so -- Mark Brown of Game Maker's Toolkit called it "quite boring" and Mashable said it's a "monumental disappointment." There are a glut of Reddit posts from people complaining about how slow the game feels, usually with a tone of extreme self-consciousness. Unless you're a real a**hole, it's not exactly fun to stray from popular consensus. Perhaps the general hesitancy to criticize the game is due to the fact that it's not technically bad. Its graphics and scale really are impressive. It is designed to please.

And yet "RDR2" seems to exemplify a certain kind of hollowness that's now standard among Triple-A titles. It's very big, with only tedium inside. Call it a Real World Game. The main problem with "RDR2" is that it's comprised almost entirely of tedious, mandatory chores. It always feels like it's stalling for time, trying to juke the number of hours it takes to complete it.

Comments

Every review of Red Dead I saw

[rsilvergun]

even the positive ones said the same thing: It's a great experience but a lousy game.

This is the problem with "Live Services". Because the game has to go on forever with an endless loop chock full of microtransactions and loot boxes nothing substantial or interesting can happen in the game. Even Destiny 2 with it's instance dungeons fell victim to that.

The consoles still have 2 or 3 decent single player releases a year so there's that. But they're only there to move consoles. If we ever get the "ever-console" that streams the games then we'll lose that too.

What I don't get is these kids who pay real money for crap in game. Guess I'm just too old, but it ruins the experience to have a store front in my face non-stop. Even when I was at the arcades as a kid I didn't have that. Once the quarters dropped the game was a game (Double Dragon 3 not withstanding). Pac-man didn't distract me with a power pellets store and I couldn't buy armor for my flying ostrich in Joust.

Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw

[AmiMoJo]

"A hundred yards short of your objective, accidentally ride off a cliff and die"

Once I stopped giggling I started to think about older games. Many didn't have any save or password options at all. You got an hour in, died and had to go right back to the start. We really are spoiled with modern games that let you save after every mission, or even at waypoints during the mission, and give you infinite lives and continues.

The bigger problem for me is the amount of grinding in modern games. I don't mind a challenge that I have to work at and where I feel like I'm improving and making progress, but with GTA a lot of it is just fairly easy missions where you fail mostly due to bad luck or the janky game engine, and there is just so much of it. Seems like RDR2 is the same.

Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw

[cfalcon]

"Once the quarters dropped the game was a game"

Games had a variety of ways to ensure that the average quarter didn't stretch too far. Sure, Pacman can be played for hours (until you die or the game locks up) on a single quarter, but no one knew how back then- it took years to figure out the patterns, and to this day only a few people can execute them flawlessly. For the most part, the monetization was aggressive and subtle. Heck, by the 90s, that 3D Gauntlet game would start buffing enemies and eventually squeeze you out, and they added these patches in waves, each willingly installed by operators to keep good players paying something.

By contrast, when an arcade game hit your home console, this stuff was mostly taken out, as it was only ever added to fit the actual sales model of the game. And when a home system WAS made available as an arcade- such as the Playchoice 10- the quarters directly paid for time.

I'd say that games have ALWAYS been created around their sales systems, that this has ALWAYS determined how the game is designed, developed, and implemented, and that even the progressive difficulty you find pleasing in old school games was created by the desire to get you to put more quarters in the game, by honest implementation at first, and by harsher tricks as you went on.

Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw

[apoc.famine]

The one thing that distinguishes games from other forms of media -- interactivity -- appears to become less and less important.

I would agree with that wholeheartedly. As the publishers started to get a hard-on for ham-fisted scripted games, I really started to rage about that shit. The first "fuck it, I'm out" I remember really, really clearly was the first Assassin's Creed. I was supposed to kill a dude. Managed to spend a large amount of time once I found him to stealthily infiltrate the building he was in, navigate above him, and line up my kill-shot. I dropped down and....CUTSCENE! I walk in through the front door, witty banter ensues, and then all the guards come to have a giant fight with me.

It's not just the interactivity, it's ripping control of the game out of the hands of the player to force it to go the way the publisher has laid their animated movie out. And the way they laid it out is a linear, inflexible, predictable path, with a couple of sharp bends right where you'd expect to find them. Maybe if we're lucky there's a fork in there somewhere, but more than likely no matter which one you pick you end up back on the same path.

Thinking back to games of yesteryear, a lot of them let you play the damn game, successfully or not. I definitely remember breaking games by dicking around in them. Killing a critical NPC. Making quest-givers mad at me so I couldn't progress. Unintentionally ruining things I needed later. Today, very few publishers are willing to allow stuff like that to happen, because inevitably some entitled twat will go and post a shitty review because the game allowed them to fail.

Lately, I've been playing text based RPGs, because those are all human-driven, and don't have significant issues with a storyline being imposed on the player. I've been a Duke in a doomed kingdom, and a minor criminal in a modern-times crime game. Those are/were tons of fun, and not having a story imposed on me was very liberating.

I also dabble in Dwarf Fortress every now and then. I really need to be in the mood to battle that dumpster fire, however. My current save is a fortress where I have an abundance of dead dwarves, and nobody will engrave memorial slabs or make coffins because they're being haunted, so more ghosts are showing up because the dead are lying around everywhere because nobody is making memorial slabs or coffins. I'm trying to drag the corpses way off to a corpse stockpile on the edge of the map, but nobody seems interested in doing that either, because they're all traumatized due to seeing dead bodies and ghosts.

Maybe I'm just getting old and bitter.

Maybe. Personally, I find battling something like a vicious ghost cycle a hell of a lot more interesting than fetchem quests and heinous railroading to force a game story to unfold in a single, uncompromising way.

15 minutes to ride across the map?

[skam240]

"It takes roughly 15 minutes for its bland everycowboy star, Arthur Morgan, to gallop across the 29-square-mile map."

Apparently the author is new to modern RPGS
            A) Relative to other modern RPGs, that's not very much at all
            B) The game has fast travel

Everything else in the review just makes me think "Well, maybe you need to accept that big open world RPGs are not for you".

Re:The problem is...

[Opportunist]

Dude, have you been playing any games lately? Yes, you have to lay off EA, Ubi and Blizzard like they do developers, but there has NEVER in the history of gaming been a larger, more open market for independent game developers that offer great games without any DRM bull.

Forget about the big studios. They're a lost case and probably won't shit out anything worthwhile anymore. They can't take no risk, they will offer nothing interesting. What they do is to give last year's turd a new shine, slap the current year onto the title so there is actually a noticeable difference to what they sold you last year, sell it to you for 60 bucks, sell you the 0-day DLC for another 30 (that you need to finish the game at all) and milk the rest from you with microtransactions. Forget them, they're a lost case.

But aside of those studios there is a very large amount of small game makers, usually with only a handful of games to their name (if that) that sell you absolute gems for maybe 20 or 30 bucks. Without DRM, microtransactions or any other bullshit.

Of course they have less money at their disposal for advertising. Their money is in the game.

Different design philosophy

[rsilvergun]

older games needed hard penalties so you didn't blow through them in an afternoon. When I was a kid I could make it through Shinobi on the Master System in an hour flat.

Good Modern games have a ton of content, so they don't need lives to keep you from blowing through the game. Bad modern games, OTOH, don't have much to do, so they substitute grinding.

In the old days the goal was to keep the game out of the used bins (and before that to keep your parents from getting made when you asked for a new game in less than a day). Nowadays the goal is "engagement". To keep you playing so they can sell you more crap. That'd be fine if the crap was more gameplay, but these days it's skins and minor stat tweaks.

What I hate about modern games is how the constant nagging for microtransactions reminds me of the real world. I play games to unwind after a long day. It's an escape. Nothing drags me back faster than a frickin' advert and a reminder about real money in the real world.

Re:What are you looking for ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're going to die either way, people choose what to spend their time on and it doesn't actually matter. Your opinion is that writing a poem is a better use of time, but that is only your opinion.