There is so much polish in this game - especially in visual and audio department, so it is jarring to see how bad the tutorial/info stuff is. It seem like it hasn't evolved since GTA3. Somebody will still explain something to you, most likely while you are doing something game play wise and all the important stuff is just in tiny black box in the upper left corner. Why would I look there when something interesting is happening in the middle of the screen and it might require my input. Same with the icons and prompts that appear on the bottom or in lower right corner. Is this really the best they could come up with?

The little messages in a box in the corner that Rockstar keeps doing always feel like an insulting afterthought. Something that belongs in a low quality game. Do they still make that stupid chime?

I picture one of the Housers stubbornly insisting that this is the only way to convey information to the player. Question it and your work week gets bumped to 110 hours.

Yeah, I actually agree with this. It pulls my attention away from the sights and sounds of everything else, and I find it very hard to focus on the tutorial above as there are multiple things trying to grab my attention. I've on multiple occasions tried to pause the game thinking that it might pause the screen and show it there still so I don't miss anything. I wish it would do that. It doesn't help that it's a timed thing so you only have so much time to read it. There's not a lot of text there, but again, my focus is elsewhere so I've missed a bunch before. The good thing, however, is that they do pop up again and again whenever you have to do it. I haven't checked (although it didn't look like it in any of the times I've paused the game), but is there a tutorial menu in the options somewhere? That would be helpful.

Edit - Never mind. I suspected, but never checked 'help' in the options menu. That has all you need to know.

Wow, seems like there's a lot of issues with this thing. The top threads are all people complaining about it. Either the critics screwed up with this one or people once again let their hype get the best of them 0_o

@nicksmi56: It's a really popular game. A lot of people are going to buy it. Not everyone can universally praise it.

Surely these messages are logged so you can read them later if you miss them?

I..guess?

It takes one instance of Oh that's where the tutorials are and then I don't miss them.

@dgtlty: To the games credit there is a compendium which has everything you need to know explained, even if all the systems feel quite archaic.

I feel like people would complain regardless, like the Yakuza games just shove a black box with text explaining everything that you have to button past, which some people hate. (i'm fine with it)

To be honest, the more I'm playing this game the more I feel like Rockstar is trapped by their own success. There's so much "bad" stuff in this game that is grandfathered from their other games, but their games keep selling like hotcakes so they're probably scared of changing too much. At the base this game is still very much GTA4 (you could probably even argue further back) and that's a 10 year old game at this point. Like, there is probably stuff in this game that you could trace back 15+ years, which is now horribly outdated, that's still the same.

I think there's definitely kind of a we don't follow the rules we're Rockstar situation with some things.

For instance, I'm pretty sure everyone else had a meeting and said Okay the Touchpad Is for the Map.

Rockstar says F that Hold...Options?

@ares42: agree and that’s what’s been keeping me on the fence about buying it. To hear that rockstar not only didn’t address these issues but steered into them even more is a bummer.

Plus, Alex mentioned in the review video that there’s a white savior part concerning a tribe and I was so done with that when even as a kid.

@efesell: "X to reload like every game in existence? Fuck that we're Rockstar. B button reloads now because fuck you."

I can be easily overwhelmed, so having such an incredulous amount of things going on while asking me to read those is killing me. It’s been overwhelming trying to soak in the world while reading tutorials and listening to dialog all at once.

I will say that it’s the only aspect of the game that I havn’t enjoyed so far.

Yes the tutorials are bad and on top of that there are a lot of things that they don't even mention - I am only like 10 hours into the game so it may be mentioned later - like when aiming with left trigger every direction on the d-pad does something i.e. down makes you go first person down sights, left and right change over the shoulder, and up makes you point your gun in the air so you can fire warning shots. I found this out randomly. I've fallen hard for this game but their tutorials are shit, the info in the menus is dense but still lacking and the menu system sucks in general.

They've been doing that for a decade though, not really a point of contention now is it?

Square has been used for jumping since at least GTA III

I kinda chocked(chalked?) it up to rockstar being super secretive until the very end of development and everyone who worked on the game learned the intricacies over the years of development. They simply couldn't see that it was awkward because they had gotten used to it.

@xanadu: True, but you have to admit there's a surprising amount of negativity for a new AAA game everyone and their grandmother was screaming about. A 7.6 metascore for a game that was this heavily hyped as "definite GOTY" in the lead up to release raises an eyebrow for sure.

This game might have the longest tutorial ever made most off chapter 1 and 2 are kind off tutorials with them introducing new mechanics every mission.

@nicksmi56: I wouldn't read too much into meta user scores on metacritic or elsewhere, especially not right after release. Weirdly populist backlashes against big triple A games are basically the norm now. And they never really prevent good games from being a success.

If you look at the breakdown of user reviews on MC, for instance, it's overwhelmingly positive reviews pulled down by a couple hundred 0's (which whatever your opinion of this game, it certainly isn't). I see a response like that and I see a group of people who either A) bought a game that just isn't for them, and/or B) feel compelled to push back against something popular to validate themselves. I would be considerably more worried about the quality of this game if all of those zeros were actually 5's or 6's, because that much more suggests a fundamentally flawed game with serious issues, rather than somebody with an axe to grind.

What I'm seeing is that the overwhelming majority of people who bought this game, and are willing to give it a fair shot, seem to be enjoying the hell out of it. But it has definitely made some intentional, conscious decisions that mean it won't be everyone's cup of tea.

@ares42: Totally. I hate Rockstars mission design and the footage I've seen of RDR2 makes me think it's still the same. The story missions are barely interactive. You just follow the text at the bottom of the screen and it accounts for every action you do. Go here. Talk to this person. Shoot that person. Go there. Any deviation is a fail state. That coupled with the long rides/conversations that we've been doing for so many years that just feel like a waste of time to me. They make amazing worlds that are fun to goof off in and the stories are good, I just don't find the stories particularly fun to play.

Also, if I'm riding everywhere, I don't want to stare at the postage stamp in the bottom left corner the whole time. I'm sure they could come up with a clever way to put navigation info in the world that doesn't compromise their minimalist UI too much.

I still really want to play this game, I just know that I'll get frustrated enough that I'll regret spending $60. Also, I'm not trying to convince anybody that I'm right about Rockstar in these respects, these are just my frustrations with the games they make.

This has definitely happened to me, and one thing I missed was maybe during all the hunting, what am I supposed to do with animal carcasses? I can skin them and that's one thing I understand, but I can also pick up the whole thing and stow the carcass, do I take it to a butcher? Or leave it somewhere in camp? I brought a carcass back to camp and when I tried to put it down the game just kept saying "things you leave in camp will be put in a convenient location" and teleporting me away. One time I came back to camp with meat and pelts and Pearson said "where's the rest of it!", like I was meant to bring him the carcass.

For animal pelts if I sell them to the trapper then he has them for when I want upgrades, right? Or sell them in camp for upgrades? Or give them to Pearson? I died with the legendary bear pelt on my horse and then suddenly the trapper had it, so what's even the point of handing it to him, seems like if I just lose it he will have it anyway.

Maybe the game never explained these things and I didn't miss it, but I definitely feel like there was some black box that was there while I was trying to shoot a rabbit with no stamina.

The tutorials have been fine for me. If you forget something, there is a manual in the start menu behind one of the menus that explains many things.

Boy this new poster really wants people to know that they like RDR2, and that any problems or issues you may have with it, even if it's something subjective you don't care for, you're wrong.

@nicksmi56: no. It's not at all. Vocal minority is always the loudest.

@xanadu: Yeah, I mean, even as a certified member of both the "WTF why did they make some of these decisions" and "I want to like this but find it very clunky and un fun to play and am dying for it to finally grab me" crowds, I recognize that like always it's those that dislike a hugely hyped game that are always the loudest right now. For the most part the people that love it are playing it or sharing absurd clips, not posting about how frustrated they are with it (naturally).

@nicksmi56: User score though. Hah!

I’ve read like 3 articles and watched 4 videos. Still have zero idea how the cores and shit work.

Speaking of bad tutorials, can anyone tell me how you tell your horse to stop following you ? I saw a tooltip pop up for it at one point, but didn't get to read the whole thing before it went away.

It works like conversation. Point at your horse with Left trigger and select the option you want to follow.

At least, that's how it works in theory. In practice, I actually get the horse behavior menu about 1/3 of the time.

The tutorial message system is one of my few gripes with the game. My biggest problem is it is constantly repeating things it has told me 20 times already and ruins immersion. I don't want to turn it off because I want to see the tips when I explore a new system. Also I have dueled like 4 people already and it keeps popping up telling me how to duel and also blocking the bar that you use during the duel.

@ripelivejam: @lemmox: @xanadu: Idk, I usually find the opposite is true after a big game like this releases. You have basically the whole internet united in a giant "OMG, GUYS THIS THING IS TOTALLY AMAZING!!!" front and bunches of people fawning over it, with those who have greivances shouted down by the majority until months or even a year down the line. Once the hype glow starts to wear off, THAT'S when you start to hear "Well, X, Y and Z weren't that great," and even then it takes a while for that kind of talk to gain traction unless it's a major problem.

With this game, it's markedly different. The metascore is only one example. Other places I've seen have the same thing going on. Seemingly neutral places like ResetEra and the PS4 subreddit have people complaining about the controls, the bounty system, how long animations take, etc along with wondering why the game got such universal praise. Even the game's own subreddit has more negativity than I'd expect. I wouldn't consider Giant Bomb to be a place of negativity from my experience and the same thing's happening here.

I'm not trying to start a fire here, nor am I trying to make anyone who's enjoying it question their purchase, and I'm sorry if my initial comment came off that way. I was just noting that the reception to this game is markedly, and interestingly, different than one would expect and wondering aloud why that this.

@nicksmi56 said:

I don't what to tell you but "big budget game xyz is trash" is like the single most common knee-jerk reaction on the internet, and I haven't seen anything with this game to suggest the reaction is substantially different. The balance of the reaction is going to depend on where you're looking and even thread to thread. I've seen people saying they hate the game, and I've seen orders of magnitude more talking about how incredible it is. I disagree that this reaction is at all surprising or different. Hell, it reminds me a quite a bit of the reaction to TW3 when that game came out. It's not shocking that there are people out there who don't like the game or have issues with it, but the overwhelming reaction seems positive. And whenever that happens there's a very vocal group of people who feel compelled to point out "I have no idea why this is as popular as it is blah blah blah".

I'm genuinely weirded out at how nonplussed you seem to be that people on the internet are complaining about a new game. Shit, I've lost count of the number of times I've seen subreddits for popular games turn themselves inside out bitching about a game they're all playing obsessively. This is the internet: it's a global computer infrastructure for whining.

Like I said, just take a look at the MC, it's overwhelmingly positive reviews and then a bunch of the 0 score review-bombing you always see from people when a popular game they've decided they don't like comes out. You take those out, or round them up to a more-realistic 5 or 6 and you're suddenly looking at a MC north of 9.0 again. This is what happens.

When they're low, you eat something.

@lemmox: I guess I'm nonplussed because usually the internet doesn't let people complain about new games, especially with a pedigree like this. Usually you get a handful of complaints, and 85-90% of this handful are shouted/stomped down by those who are enjoying it. So noticing that the top threads on RDR2 for Giant Bomb were all complaints instead of "Red Dead is the greatest, most amazing game in the universe" or "Red Dead Photo Thread" got me interested, and looking around other places had me intrigued. It hasn't even been a week yet, and yet I'm seeing the kind of discourse that usually takes months.

@malaccans101: The bars are your resources, the cores are your regen. So if you spend half your stamina bar and let it regen you lose a small amount of your stamina core. The cores are also affected by other stuff like environment etc, and they also function as a last resort resource (so if you have no health left and take a hit you lose a bunch of your core).

You can increase the bars by doing certain activities. Every time you see like a heart +10 or an eye +1 that's you gaining core XP. Generally you get health from doing survival activities, stamina from doing strenuous activities and dead eye from shooting stuff.

You have two sets of consumables. The ones accessible through the weapon wheel will refill your bars and the provisions, accessible through your satchel, will refill your cores.

@nicksmi56: I disagree completely. That's not a hard and fast rule, and depending on which circle jerk you stumble into it's often the people who are positive about a new game that are shouted down. There are plenty of people in all of these threads saying "Red Dead is the greatest, most amazing game in the universe", and Reddit is full of people swapping in-game photos and anecdotes. You're seeing the conversation you want to see, there is no shortage of positivity about this game. But it's simply the same pattern as every other major release: the people enjoying the game are playing it, while the people who aren't go online to complain. You may be correct that this is more polarizing than some of their other games - that's why I compared it to TW3 (which basically took over the internet with people complaining about the controls). But I don't see any sort of major disconnect between the reviewers and the consumers. There are a ton of people enjoying the crap out of this game right now.

First off, how can I see the conversation I want to see if I wasn't aiming for any conversation to begin with? No need to get aggressive.

Secondly, I never said people didn't like it. What I said was that the negativity is surprisingly loud for a brand new AAA game from a public darling developer that just came out three days ago. Sure, Reddit has plenty of people that are sharing stories and such, but the top post on the Red Dead subreddit is a guy's video of the controls making him attack townspeople, with some of the top comments complaining about said controls. That's what I'm saying, you don't see that kind of stuff in three days for a game like this. Usually the people saying that would be met with a chorus of "Well, it's not bothering ME! Git gud, scrub!", "I'd hate to see what YOUR favorite game is!", and stuff of that nature. It's a symptom of the hype culture we as gamers have created, and I thought it was interesting to see a pronounced lack of that defense mechanism with this game.

Look, I can already sense increasing hostility here, and I don't have the time or will to engage in some pointless internet argument about a game. If you're one of the people who absolutely adores everything about this game, by all means go play it and forget about everything I've said if it offends you. I was just noting the difference between the reception of this game and the reception of other hotly-anticipated games in the same shoes. I realize my initial comment gave off the wrong impression and I already apologized for that. Not looking for a fight or looking down on those who enjoy RDR2.

@nicksmi56: I'm not sure, because I'm at a loss to explain how you could miss the amount of positivity around this game. You said

"Either the critics screwed up with this one or people once again let their hype get the best of them".

Pointing out the overwhelmingly positive nature of the response would suggest that neither of those are true. In any case, I'm not hostile, I just disagree - quite strongly as it were. The amount of negativity isn't unprecedented nor surprising. If people aren't defensive about the controls it's because the controls are empirically weird, and you either accept them as ultimately helping to get into the slow-pour mood of the game, or you take them as a bizarre and indefensible design choice. But that isn't indicative of any sort of mass buyers remorse or anti-critic uprising incoming (like that weirdly quick heel-turn that Bioshock Infinite took).

Also, I dunno man, I'm not sure what post on /r/ReadDeadRedemption you're looking at but the last time I was on there the top posts were all memes about wanting to play more and tutorials so *shrug*.

I agree the tutorial delivery should be a lot better but I just want to say it always baffles me when a person's legit complaint is

"___ SHOULD BE MAPPED TO ___ BECAUSE OTHER GAMES ARE LIKE THAT"

Like, I remember a LEGITIMATE complaint people had with the last guardian was that jump was triangle. Seriously, guys? Who cares if reload is B instead of X. You really expect all games to have unified controls? Jesus

@lemmox: Yeah, that line was why I felt the need to apologize. I was thinking aloud about reasons why there was this sort of reaction, because once again I was expecting sunshine and butterflies for at least a couple of months, so I was surprised when we got three complaint threads in rapid succession. After posting it, I realized that it came off more dismissive than I would've liked, but a post has to be really bad before I outright delete it.

I know we all have our biases, but please believe me when I say I'm not looking or hoping for any sort of negative discourse about this game, nor do I harbor any sort of grudge towards the Red Dead franchise or Rockstar in general. Tried GTA IV, didn't click for me so I deleted it, was curious about GTA V but ultimately decided against getting it because of that experience. Since then, I've become neutral towards Rockstar games. They come, people scream over them, and then they leave. I can't say I understand the hype as I've never played or been interested in the original Redemption, but I'm not angry about it.

Now if we were talking about Last of Us or God of War PS4, then we might get closer to some latent hostility XD

As for what post I'm talking about, it's this one. Give it a look, it's pretty funny.

But...why though? Chances are if other games have adopted a unified scheme it's for this incredibly crazy reason of "Because it works really well and is familiar".

If you adopt a different control scheme for a sensible reason, like say something unique to your game requires unique controls, then that's fine. Rockstar however feels like it looks outside of its own bubble as though it takes them only seconds to suffocate.

@efesell: Can you explain what's more sensible about jumping being on x rather than triangle? Or reload on B rather than x?

These are the specific things I was talking about. What's so difficult about playing different games with slightly different commands? It's not rocket science and certainly not a legit flaw.

@efesell: Rockstar games have always had this control scheme. It's not like they're coming out of nowhere with this game.

Speaking of tutorials, either I missed this completely or it is completely omitted. You can use the "duel draw" at any point by just holding R2/RT halfway. Also the way they explain the duel mechanic sucks, because it doesn't actually matter how much you are pulling the trigger. Just hold it halfway until the bar fills up, then press once, aim, then press again.

Just had a really cool moment where I got ambushed on the road while on my horse. Went into the quick draw while still on the horse and murdered all 5 thugs with one deadeye. Felt unbelievably badass. Do they seriously never mention it in the tutorials? Hopefully I just skipped over it and don't remember, because that is absolutely insane if they don't even mention it.

Yeah, I was actually surprised to see they were still doing the black/white boxes in the upper right still.

I think I have a pretty good grasp on all of the games controls/menus/systems, but I have had to look up very basic things (like saving and loading) online. I have also accidentally fucked up simple things (trying to hitch horse, only to grapple a near by civilian). I really loathe the term, but I can't imagine playing this if you were a "casual" gamer. Its an incredibly unfriendly experience.

It’s my biggest and only real complaint with the game after 33 hours with it. I do not understand why they think it’s a good idea to have text pop ups without pausing the action. It wouldn’t be so bad if you could go back and read them after the fact but for some baffling reason, they took that out.

@doctordonkey: I’m 99% sure they never mentioned that. That’s for letting me know!

@doctordonkey: Does it have any advantages over just doing normal dead eye though ? Like, does it not drain your meter or something ?

@frostyryan: There is a reason buttons are usually mapped the way they are. Having buttons you use more frequently make more sense closer to the right analog stick. Actions that you do while also moving the camera and character should be on the shoulder buttons or sticks, so you don’t have to use your hand like a claw.

Having limited control options on top of bad controls is a huge flaw. Is there ANY reason players shouldn’t be able to remap controls without going to the system level?