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

[skam240]

"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. "

I'm puzzled. The core Red Dead 2 game play is single player (so much so that multiplayer was still in beta on launch) which has no micro transactions.

"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."

Why would they stop making successful games because of game streaming? Online gaming where they lock you into needing an internet connection already exists and they still make single player games. Streaming wouldn't change a thing in this context,

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

[fazig]

But how long did the average player have to practice the game before they could beat it without virtual deaths? I'd wager that most players of these old games have never reached the ending on their own before saving features were introduced.
I would say that this practice made the games still repetitive. So that's not a good argument here.


Disclaimer: Now I'm talking about myself here in a more subjective manner. Your mileage may differ.
I used to play games. I'd still do if most of them weren't just so terrible. What do I mean by terrible?
When I was first confronted with video games, this new form of media thrived on innovation. Practically all games had their unique angles that required the player to either learn new motor skills or new ways of thinking to solve the problems the game posed. You had to learn to master these new skills in order to beat the game, which then was a reward on its own.
Today however, most of the games have to play pretty much exactly the same, because apparently you can't ask from your consumers to learn and train a new skill, which can lead to frustrating experiences if it doesn't work right away. Therefore pretty much every big first person shooter has to play exactly like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Every 3rd person shooter has to play like Uncharted. Every 3rd person action RPG has to play like Dark Souls. And so forth. Then there's also this competitive-multiplayer craze, which I won't touch here because it'll take too long.
From my perspective the few things that make these games different are their graphics and the stories they try to tell. The one thing that distinguishes games from other forms of media -- interactivity -- appears to become less and less important.
So I came to the realization that I do not need to spend $60 every time a big studio craps out one of these games, just in order to get essentially the same experience that I can get on platforms like youtube or twitch (played by a trusted streamer) for almost no additional costs. There's no more need for an expensive gaming computer or maybe a console as I can watch these things on my phone, while I'm on the go. If I want good stories there are even simpler ways like picking up plain simple book or even audio book if I'm lazy.

Now and then I still pick up some simulation games like ArmA or DCS. The odd low budget indy game can be interesting to me. But all in all I've shifted my focus on other, factually healthier activities for my spare time.
Maybe I'm just getting old and bitter.

Re:Every review of Red Dead I saw

[lgw]

Those old games in reality took only a few hours to beat if you didn't die once.

Many just take a few minutes. The speedrunning community is amazing.

I'm still torn by which I'm most impressed with: the cubing community with their blindfold cube solving, or the speedrunning community beating Punch Out blindfolded (the final fight requires 1-frame accuracy).

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:15 minutes to ride across the map?

[DontBeAMoran]

It's a western-based game that has a western-based environment and western-based tasks to accomplish.

Maybe the author doesn't like westerns.

Re:15 minutes to ride across the map?

[skam240]

"People want more variety in these games."

Which is why these games sell so well?

Re:15 minutes to ride across the map?

[JD-1027]

This game is definitely of a slower pace. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I've enjoyed that pace just fine.

Besides fast travel, you also have "Cinematic Travel"... it is basically auto-steer... set a waypoint, and you can set the controller down and enjoy the (very well done) scenery as it takes you to your destination. I've not seen that in a game before, but I don't play a ton of games, so it has probably been done before.

Re:15 minutes to ride across the map?

[Raidion]

Zelda: Breath of the Wild, also an amazing open world game, has something similar. A horse automatically follows the path, so you only have to nudge the controller at intersections and whatnot instead of having to be driving the whole time. You're also able to fast travel, but honestly, if the option is a 30 second load screen, or a 3 minute trip through some scenery, I'm taking the 3 minute trip most every time.

Why is this news?

[steelwraith]

Looking at the articles by the author he's not a games 'journalist' (and very few of the people calling themselves game journalists have a clue how to actually be a journalist), so I'm not sure why I should care what he thinks about RDR2 (BTW I have not bought/played the game, so I don't have a dog in the fight myself). If this was an article of cultural or artistic aspects of the game he might be a bit more qualified in his opinion, but to someone who is not specifically interested in this genre of games of course this is going to be boring.

Imagine trying to get Johnny who's only game experience is CS:GO to play Civilization. He might take an interest, but I'm going to bet he's going to think you're torturing him by making him play a slow/boring game.

Re:The real biggest problem

[DontBeAMoran]

The real biggest problem is the surging rates of adult ADHD in western society.

I see what you did there.

Alternatively, it's just not the game for you

[jeff4747]

If you think riding across the map is boring, don't do it. Use fast travel, or use it as an indicator it's not a game you find enjoyable.

We don't say there's a terrible problem in books today when someone who likes mysteries does not find an autobiography interesting.

An open-world RPG is going to have certain game elements, no matter what the setting. Like repetitive "chores", and a slow pace. If you don't like those elements in your video game, don't play an open-world RPG.

It's not like RDR1 was a frantic experience, so you should know this going in to RDR2.

Re:Online

[desdinova 216]

that's part of the problem, so many major games are being released that treat the single player aspect as more or less a tutorial and base the "real game" on competitive multiplayer. probably because writing even a subpar story is expensive.

When you judge by numbers, you get numbers

[Opportunist]

We started judging games by the hours it takes to play through them, is it any kind of wonder that game studios try to maximize the hours it takes to play through them?

The problem is that many modern games have zero replay value. After you've seen the game and its story once, there is very little incentive to do it again. You already know how it unfolds. If you're the achiever type you can try to slaughter a billion (insert animal here) or find all hidden masks of Ujawuja in the cave but for the normal, non-OCD player, being done with the story means being done with the game.

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:Different design philosophy

[Tom]

Thanks for the compliments.

I still love the game, but wish it were up-to-date with technology. That's why I made Might & Fealty, but for some reason it didn't catch on quite as much.

I'd very much love to see the concept of BM in an AAA open-world MMORPG. But I guess the business model just isn't there to pay for that.

Re:The problem is...

[plague911]

I agree, there are loads of GOOD games. Cheap ones as well. Darkest Dungeon, This War of Mine, The Awakening of Theam Wasteland 2. All great, all without EA or Ubi behind them ripping you off. You can easily avoid the big guys 90% of the time. The only problem is that the humongous studios tend to buy up any good IP or small studios and destroy them. What I wouldn't give for a decent version of Civilization to come out again.

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.