averyminya , 5 hours ago

The game isn’t immersive to me because watching one button perform a 20 second interaction just isn’t engaging. Which to me is the forefront of the difference between “immersion” and “engagement”.

That on top of all the little frustrations that OP mentioned. Hitching your horse is a huge pain and takes you out of the moment every time, for example.

Tbh, the entirety of RDR2 feels like that to me. It’s been critically acclaimed as the most immersive game ever, but it just is so far from actually being that for me because of all of these little things that actively take away from it.

Overall, it’s fine. It’s not really a great game IMO, but a prolonged interactive story. The gameplay aspects are sporadic and mostly require you to mash the A button to keep your horse on the trail, else you don’t move along it. With the advertising and gamers both claiming it to be an immersive game, things like these really detract. I went in expecting a cinematic experience and came out of it with the saddest GTA jank and repetitive grinding for time sensitive unlocks.

Add in the senseless unskippable animal skinning and it just results in a good 70% of the game being unenjoyable for me. I played through the story, which was mostly pretty good, and the rest of the game was waiting to get to a destination to do one thing or see one event, then waiting til I got to the next destination. The gunplay is alright, the spontaneous events are funny, sometimes a little shallow but mostly are good. but man… I was disappointed with the game, as a game.

Of course, this is all my personal preference too. I just don’t find watching multiple extended cutscenes and multiple sub-scenes every few interactions. I don’t blame it all on these sorts of things, but I have a really hard time agreeing that it deserves the acclaim it’s gotten when these are pretty significant shortcomings for a game, specifically advertised to be immersive.

Sometimes you want to ride around on a horse and take on the sights, and it sure does to a good job at that. There’s some good tools and gunplay which are pretty fun to play with and… Well, that’s about where the fun ends.