Even though I play it on my old low end laptop, I still able to get a stable 60fps on medium settings at 1080p (Linux) and the game is still gorgeous looking probably looks better than most if not all UE5 games released in the past 3 years.
I really wanted to like this game. I wanted to so bad. I can acknowledge many of its pros, and I can understand why many people like it.
But everything is so. Fucking. Slow. And every mission is “hold A to ride your horse for a long time and then do a small amount of actual action, if you’re lucky”.
I agree with you that it’s slow – and yet, it is one of the very few games I actually finished. That’s highly unusual for me. And then I went back and played it again.
Say what you will about Rockstar, but they make games that 20 years later you still want to return to them (I guess just about 8 years later in this case).
I don’t think this holds up anymore. RDR2 was supposed to be a lot more, but GTAO really derailed the company. I expect GTA6 to be worse than GTA5 and 5’s endgame was anemic and boring.
Can’t speak for you, but I’m still playing both pretty regularly. I still play GTA IV quite a bit too, and return to San Andreas often enough. Vice city is still a classic, but those older ones are just getting a bit janky, which is ok considering they are 20+ years old. All of these games were ahead of their time.
Definitely sets the bar pretty high, maybe impossibly high, for GTA 6
Yeah, I’m kinda with you. I played a lot of it, in the tens of hours, but I didn’t finish it. It may be at the peak of self-indulgent simulation for simulation’s sake in open world games.
I think I’m glad it exists. Somebody had to do this, like somebody had to do CJ getting fat when he eats and slim when he runs, right? That’s a fun thing for someone to have done in a successful mainstream game release.
But there’s a reason that didn’t show up elsewhere, and that’s also a good thing.
I’m with you. I loved the first RDR, one of my favorite games of all time. Fun interesting characters, the side quest plots all went a little sideways, which was refreshing. I really wanted to like RDR2 but it ended up feeling tedious. Lots to love in the game so I understand why so many people said it was an amazing game.
I feel like Rockstar did the same thing with the GTA games. GTA3, VC, and SA were somewhat realistic games set in a goofy world with strange characters and interactions. By GTA4, all the interesting plots were replaced by pointless minigames and going bowling with cousin Roman. That’s basically the same way I felt about the jump between RDR and RDR2.
I never played Red Dead Revolver so I don’t know how that fits in with the rest.
Honestly, this is just one more of the indicators that AAA development budgets have gotten way too large. I love when devs put care into their art, but it should be somewhere it matters. I can count the number of times I noticed my horses testicles retracting on my knee. It’s just a waste of money.
In Dwarf Fortress, for example, when detail is added and actually relevant, it’s great. We need more of this, where useful additions are done to create a more tactile world. When time and money are spent doing stuff like the testicles in RDR2, I just imagine how that could have been spent on a different game, instead of just inflating an already massively expensive game and adding essentially nothing, except something for people to post about online.
I don’t think it was their plan to make testicles things, game development is not one process but many separate processes tied together. So while several hundreds people were working on important stuff one dude could have finished their tasks and had nothing to do, so they thought why not do fun stuff quickly.
but their point is that if there are hundreds of people working on stuff and some of them have nothing to do, then the budget is too big in the first place
True. That feature may have just been added randomly, though I doubt it, because it requires the artists to add things to the models, the programmers to add reactivity, and the designers to mark things as cold/hot. It’s more than just a one person job on a game this big, because it touches so many things. In an indie game, sure. There’s too much bureaucracy in a large studio to just go off and do this though.
Regardless, the point is they have way too many people working on a project. Instead we could get dozens of games for that same budget. Budgets have gotten ridiculous.
I can’t agree with you on this one. Sometimes, I think this is the kind of detail that benefits other games : the assets are there and can be reused, in other forms.
Plus, sometimes it’s better to make one great game than a plethora of good games.
RDR2 wasn’t my cup of tea but I have nothing bad to say about this game. It was a masterpiece, in all aspects and in all comes down, at the end, to the attention given to trivial things such as horse testicles.
It cost $540m in just development costs! Skyrim, for example (from what I found online) cost $40-50m. That’s 10.8-13.5 Skyrims. Halo 2 was $40m, and it was big at the time. The Witcher 3 cost $81m in total, not just development. Ghost of Tsushima (which is modern, so surprisingly low, but still not small) was $60m.
Yeah, no way in hell do I think RDR2 was worth it. I’m fine with some large games being made, but this is ridiculous. It’s why the industry is in such a rough spot. They’re putting ridiculous money behind singular projects instead of spreading out risk while also making more unique games. These massive games can’t take risks, because the budgets are too massive. That’s why they’ve all become so bland.
I was looking forward to play it once it was on GOG. I had avoided all spoilers for years. Only for Lemmy to spoil the apparently unavoidable ending via a meme on All…
Haven’t got far into the story just yet but I completed chapter 1 and so far so good, gameplay is tight and of course being a RS game the writing is excellent no complain from me
I’m playing it for the first time at the moment as well! But on ps4.
It took me a little bit to get used to the slow pace in parts - almost closer to a sim. I’d just finished Horizon: FW, so the speed of movement was a big change. Now I enjoy the extra time to smoke weed and head-cannon my character.
The writing and plotting are the real treasure of the game so far. I’ve enjoyed the scenery and the views well enough, but I rarely find myself impressed by graphics.
Are you describing Motion Blur by chance? A very common graphical effect used in AAA games these days that try to mimic how objects look blurry when moving quickly in real life. I hate it and always turn it off when I’m able to.
I don’t think so, in Cyberpunk 2077 I disabled motion blur and depth of field (also tried FSR) but the image is still blurry and jagged edges everywhere (even with 8x AA) same with Control and SH2, in RDR2 I forgot to enable AA only FXAA and it still sharp and crisp also older AAA games like Doom Eternal SOTTR don’t have this blurry image and jagged edges problems
Jagged edges are the opposite of blurry. Blur smooths out sharp edges.
When edges are sharp and crisp, that’s when the jagged nature of square pixels is visible.
The screenshot you posted here has lots of blurred edges. Look at the grass, trees, and hair.
Maybe you could post a screen shot of the problem you’re talking about?
I mean, it’s a very nice looking game, which may have something to do with it having about ten times the budget of your average game from a major publisher (the term AAA is now entirely meaningless and I refuse to use it without clarification). Guessing that helps.
I’m not sure “clean and sharp” is a positive value, though. This becomes a problem because I don’t know what people mean, and people often don’t know what they mean, either. Good picture quality doesn’t need to be “sharp”. Things that are in focus realistically aren’t impossibly pin-sharp, that’s a videogamey thing. Shadows definitely aren’t ever sharp. And of course the picture you presented is anything but sharp, since it’s… well, a pretty low-quality 1080p image, so the trees are blobs, the hair is a grainy mess and distant models are blobby.
OK, here’s a true fact I would think is common knowledge but it may not be: A slightly older game on higher settings often looks better than a newer game on lower settings. Remedial performance options are often very compromised and not really meant to be used. Expensive features can look bad on minimum settings and newer games can be built around more expensive stuff and look off when those settings are toggled off. Lower resolution rendering of a better looking image can produce worse results than higher res output for a worse looking image for a number of reasons.
That doesn’t mean newer games look worse, though. It’s just the nature of the beast in PC gaming and it has been for forty years. That’s why it’s always been cool to go back to old games when you update your hardware.
If you don’t disable TAA RDR2 actually does look quite blurry, especially the vegetation looks terrible. I found the best results from using DLDSR as anti-aliasing, but it does take a heavier performance toll.
Also I should get around to finishing RDR2 some day.
Three full story playthroughs is a lot of dedication lol I love rdr2 but it sure drags on towards the end. Ive played to the late game probably six times but only actually pushed all the way to the end twice. Kudos!
So glad it’s finally like this because this game was rough at launch (on PC)
On a GTX1080, I played the entirety of it at 50% of my native resolution (3840x1440) with a lot of settings turned down. I could barely maintain 60fps, with stuttering / dips to as low as 16fps and random crashes.
Since they patched it up, I got a 3080 but have only played the endgame content. Really ought to do another playthrough and experience it properly.
First thing to do when starting a new game. Go to visual settings and turn off motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, vignette, film grain, and depending on the game, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, and texture filtering.
Maybe it’s just because I’m stuck in 1997, idk, but all that stuff just looks bad to me.
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I really wanted to like this game. I wanted to so bad. I can acknowledge many of its pros, and I can understand why many people like it.
But everything is so. Fucking. Slow. And every mission is “hold A to ride your horse for a long time and then do a small amount of actual action, if you’re lucky”.
I agree with you that it’s slow – and yet, it is one of the very few games I actually finished. That’s highly unusual for me. And then I went back and played it again.
It’s a game designed to be sipped, not gulped.
Say what you will about Rockstar, but they make games that 20 years later you still want to return to them (I guess just about 8 years later in this case).
I don’t think this holds up anymore. RDR2 was supposed to be a lot more, but GTAO really derailed the company. I expect GTA6 to be worse than GTA5 and 5’s endgame was anemic and boring.
Can’t speak for you, but I’m still playing both pretty regularly. I still play GTA IV quite a bit too, and return to San Andreas often enough. Vice city is still a classic, but those older ones are just getting a bit janky, which is ok considering they are 20+ years old. All of these games were ahead of their time.
Definitely sets the bar pretty high, maybe impossibly high, for GTA 6
Maybe it will make a good HBO show one day.
Yeah, I’m kinda with you. I played a lot of it, in the tens of hours, but I didn’t finish it. It may be at the peak of self-indulgent simulation for simulation’s sake in open world games.
I think I’m glad it exists. Somebody had to do this, like somebody had to do CJ getting fat when he eats and slim when he runs, right? That’s a fun thing for someone to have done in a successful mainstream game release.
But there’s a reason that didn’t show up elsewhere, and that’s also a good thing.
Yeah on chapter 1 it played like Life is Strange game or Telltale games, but I enjoy my time with it because of good writing and great scenery
Yeah, when i played through it i quickly discovered that I’d have to set aside a few hours at a time in order to actually let myself enjoy it.
Luckily, this was mid 2020 and i had just gotten laid off, so i had time.
It’s really slow for about 1/3 of the way through, and then you get to Saint Denis and it starts taking off a lot harder.
It’s a masterpiece, but definitely a slow burn. It’s a top 3 game for me for sure.
Surely there is a mod to speed things up. Faster horses and whatnot.
I’m with you. I loved the first RDR, one of my favorite games of all time. Fun interesting characters, the side quest plots all went a little sideways, which was refreshing. I really wanted to like RDR2 but it ended up feeling tedious. Lots to love in the game so I understand why so many people said it was an amazing game.
I feel like Rockstar did the same thing with the GTA games. GTA3, VC, and SA were somewhat realistic games set in a goofy world with strange characters and interactions. By GTA4, all the interesting plots were replaced by pointless minigames and going bowling with cousin Roman. That’s basically the same way I felt about the jump between RDR and RDR2.
I never played Red Dead Revolver so I don’t know how that fits in with the rest.
A game for everybody is a game for nobody.
I like the fact that everybody seemed to be expecting Grand Theft Horsey, and got a slow paced Wild West sim.
I actually played Assassin’s Creed Origins right after playing this for like two months straight, and it just felt so “gamey” in comparison.
I play games of many varieties, and didn’t care for AC Origins either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve bounced off of it twice now after really trying to get into it. It’s just too damn slow for my taste.
when characters eat a meal they actually cut up their food and eat it, not just a few motions on loop. Lots of love and detail in this game
also the horses balls go up when you ride into cold water
Honestly, this is just one more of the indicators that AAA development budgets have gotten way too large. I love when devs put care into their art, but it should be somewhere it matters. I can count the number of times I noticed my horses testicles retracting on my knee. It’s just a waste of money.
In Dwarf Fortress, for example, when detail is added and actually relevant, it’s great. We need more of this, where useful additions are done to create a more tactile world. When time and money are spent doing stuff like the testicles in RDR2, I just imagine how that could have been spent on a different game, instead of just inflating an already massively expensive game and adding essentially nothing, except something for people to post about online.
I don’t think it was their plan to make testicles things, game development is not one process but many separate processes tied together. So while several hundreds people were working on important stuff one dude could have finished their tasks and had nothing to do, so they thought why not do fun stuff quickly.
but their point is that if there are hundreds of people working on stuff and some of them have nothing to do, then the budget is too big in the first place
True. That feature may have just been added randomly, though I doubt it, because it requires the artists to add things to the models, the programmers to add reactivity, and the designers to mark things as cold/hot. It’s more than just a one person job on a game this big, because it touches so many things. In an indie game, sure. There’s too much bureaucracy in a large studio to just go off and do this though.
Regardless, the point is they have way too many people working on a project. Instead we could get dozens of games for that same budget. Budgets have gotten ridiculous.
Rockstar has well documented crunch. I can confidently say nobody there had enough spare time to add this on a whim.
I can’t agree with you on this one. Sometimes, I think this is the kind of detail that benefits other games : the assets are there and can be reused, in other forms.
Plus, sometimes it’s better to make one great game than a plethora of good games.
RDR2 wasn’t my cup of tea but I have nothing bad to say about this game. It was a masterpiece, in all aspects and in all comes down, at the end, to the attention given to trivial things such as horse testicles.
It cost $540m in just development costs! Skyrim, for example (from what I found online) cost $40-50m. That’s 10.8-13.5 Skyrims. Halo 2 was $40m, and it was big at the time. The Witcher 3 cost $81m in total, not just development. Ghost of Tsushima (which is modern, so surprisingly low, but still not small) was $60m.
Yeah, no way in hell do I think RDR2 was worth it. I’m fine with some large games being made, but this is ridiculous. It’s why the industry is in such a rough spot. They’re putting ridiculous money behind singular projects instead of spreading out risk while also making more unique games. These massive games can’t take risks, because the budgets are too massive. That’s why they’ve all become so bland.
I was looking forward to play it once it was on GOG. I had avoided all spoilers for years. Only for Lemmy to spoil the apparently unavoidable ending via a meme on All…
Damn those trees are low poly. I know you said its a low end laptop but still.
Probably because I disabled tree tessellation
Haven’t got far into the story just yet but I completed chapter 1 and so far so good, gameplay is tight and of course being a RS game the writing is excellent no complain from me
it just gets better and better
I refunded it when I found out I had to create a rockstar account. I would like to play it though. Maybe in 20 years when it’s on gog 🤣
I don’t have that problem if you catch my drift ;)
Totally, I just like the ease of install for the steam deck lol
I’m playing it for the first time at the moment as well! But on ps4.
It took me a little bit to get used to the slow pace in parts - almost closer to a sim. I’d just finished Horizon: FW, so the speed of movement was a big change. Now I enjoy the extra time to smoke weed and head-cannon my character.
The writing and plotting are the real treasure of the game so far. I’ve enjoyed the scenery and the views well enough, but I rarely find myself impressed by graphics.
Are you describing Motion Blur by chance? A very common graphical effect used in AAA games these days that try to mimic how objects look blurry when moving quickly in real life. I hate it and always turn it off when I’m able to.
If it’s not done right it can really make your screen stutter trying to render it too.
No hes talking about TAA temporal anti aliasing. Makes everything look smeared
TAA is good, if implemented right. Most games don’t do it right tho.
nope, they’re talking about blurry pixelated messes when running on epic settings on a 5090, rendering at 25% scale at single digit fps.
tldr: unreal engine 5
I don’t think so, in Cyberpunk 2077 I disabled motion blur and depth of field (also tried FSR) but the image is still blurry and jagged edges everywhere (even with 8x AA) same with Control and SH2, in RDR2 I forgot to enable AA only FXAA and it still sharp and crisp also older AAA games like Doom Eternal SOTTR don’t have this blurry image and jagged edges problems
Jagged edges are the opposite of blurry. Blur smooths out sharp edges.
When edges are sharp and crisp, that’s when the jagged nature of square pixels is visible.
The screenshot you posted here has lots of blurred edges. Look at the grass, trees, and hair.
Maybe you could post a screen shot of the problem you’re talking about?
Side note, why the FUCK do devs turn motion blur on by default?!
I mean, it’s a very nice looking game, which may have something to do with it having about ten times the budget of your average game from a major publisher (the term AAA is now entirely meaningless and I refuse to use it without clarification). Guessing that helps.
I’m not sure “clean and sharp” is a positive value, though. This becomes a problem because I don’t know what people mean, and people often don’t know what they mean, either. Good picture quality doesn’t need to be “sharp”. Things that are in focus realistically aren’t impossibly pin-sharp, that’s a videogamey thing. Shadows definitely aren’t ever sharp. And of course the picture you presented is anything but sharp, since it’s… well, a pretty low-quality 1080p image, so the trees are blobs, the hair is a grainy mess and distant models are blobby.
OK, here’s a true fact I would think is common knowledge but it may not be: A slightly older game on higher settings often looks better than a newer game on lower settings. Remedial performance options are often very compromised and not really meant to be used. Expensive features can look bad on minimum settings and newer games can be built around more expensive stuff and look off when those settings are toggled off. Lower resolution rendering of a better looking image can produce worse results than higher res output for a worse looking image for a number of reasons.
That doesn’t mean newer games look worse, though. It’s just the nature of the beast in PC gaming and it has been for forty years. That’s why it’s always been cool to go back to old games when you update your hardware.
I just watched a good Any Austin video on RDR2, he studies the power line infrastructure on the map. Makes me want to play again.
If you don’t disable TAA RDR2 actually does look quite blurry, especially the vegetation looks terrible. I found the best results from using DLDSR as anti-aliasing, but it does take a heavier performance toll.
Also I should get around to finishing RDR2 some day.
Absolutely loved rdr2. It’s a gem. I played story mode three times and I love it to death.
If only rdr2 online wasn’t the pvp obnoxious pay-to-win microtransaction-riddled cesspit that it is, I’d still be playing that now.
Three full story playthroughs is a lot of dedication lol I love rdr2 but it sure drags on towards the end. Ive played to the late game probably six times but only actually pushed all the way to the end twice. Kudos!
Stretched out over a couple of years, with about 10% of game time actually spent on progressing the main story, it’s not that bad ☺️
I loved loafing around, really.
Does anyone know how it plays on the switch?
Yes, it doesnt
Thanks!
So glad it’s finally like this because this game was rough at launch (on PC)
On a GTX1080, I played the entirety of it at 50% of my native resolution (3840x1440) with a lot of settings turned down. I could barely maintain 60fps, with stuttering / dips to as low as 16fps and random crashes.
Since they patched it up, I got a 3080 but have only played the endgame content. Really ought to do another playthrough and experience it properly.
First thing to do when starting a new game. Go to visual settings and turn off motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, vignette, film grain, and depending on the game, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, and texture filtering.
Maybe it’s just because I’m stuck in 1997, idk, but all that stuff just looks bad to me.
Wrong. First thing you do is turn off TAA, DLSS, Frame generation, upscaling, Lumin, and if possible; anything related to sub-pixel geometry.
Ir better yet; don’t play UE5 where most of these things are forced upon you.
I have no idea what any of those are, heh. I stopped playing fancy games about ten years ago and now play 2d indie games.
Also, fuck Bloom. It’s bad enough that my eyes are starting to do it at night, I absolutely don’t want that in video games.