I'm always happy to get a comment like this one. Glad to hear you're enjoying my videos and stay tuned for many more!

Sounds like we share a similar opinion on the simplicity of the gameplay, but if you're still enjoying the characters and world then I'd say it's worth pushing through to the ending. I didn't try out the multiplayer because I heard it's been pretty much abandoned by Rockstar, but I bet it would have been a lot of fun with some friends. An open world Jurassic Park game is quite an idea; I guess Trespasser and the Horizon series are the closest things we have to that right now. Maybe the Peter Jackson King Kong game? I appreciate the comment and as always it's good to hear from you! Subs are going up slowly but surely... mostly I'm just happy that people are enjoying the videos I make.

@@Erumore I'm back after finishing the game yesterday! I can say overall that I really loved the story. (Spoilers below for anyone else reading this!) Arthur was a brilliant character and as someone who hadn't played the first game, I found the slow realisation of Dutch's true ideology to be incredibly fascinating. I didn't know Dutch was an antagonist in the first game, I didn't even know he, or anyone other than John, was even in it. That's how little context I had for most of the game and I still loved it. I found Dutch to be so charismatic and likable at the start, but I could tell there was something else going on, which gets more obvious the further you go into the story. I found the island section quite shocking and impressive at first, but disappointing overall, especially since I wanted to explore it myself, but then Arthur just finds the gang immediately (at least, to the player, it feels that way). My issue with the epilogue is that it's definitely way too long. I appreciate what they're going for, but much like the main story itself, it's just too much. Steam says I played this game for 100 hours, and that's obviously due to me doing basically all side missions I could find, along with hunting most legendary animals and going for my occasional blind hike into a new region of the map. Throughout the whole story, I felt like the game was far too long, but I also didn't want it to end, because I knew Arthur had to die. i was enjoying the story so much in spite of its length and the mediocre gameplay, but the epilogue really drives that frustration home with how pointless some of it can feel. While I understand John is the protagonist of RDR1, and the story is clearly presenting the negative aspects of revenge and the cycle of violence, it did slightly annoy me that it almost presented all of Arthur's story as just "setup" for John and RDR1, instead of letting Arthur's journey feel like his own. I dunno, this is all quite stream-of-consciousness for me right now. I also want to agree with you about the mini-map as I immediately switched it to the compass...however, the missions conditioned me to constantly be opening the larger mini-map that I couldn't take it anymore, and I switched it back to Regular. I also agree that the things you discover for yourself are far more interesting and engaging than most story missions (at least in terms of gameplay), but after I finished the story, I stopped playing and don't really intend on going back. I tend to explore as much as possible, or as much as I can be bothered to, during my actual playthrough. Once the story is over, it feels kind of aimless to wander around and look under every rock to find those handful of things I missed the first time. I prefer to do some story missions, then explore in the down-time in-between, and then get back to the main stuff. As much as I wanted to explore all of that desert...I instead just wanted to finally stop playing and move on to something else. If there's no major content out there, then I can't really be bothered, and if there *is* major content, I don't really think I can be bothered aimlessly wandering around to find it in such a huge open area. For example, I *could* wander around the entire map to find all those dinosaur bones, I could even use a guide for it, but why? Is it really worth it? After I finish that quest...then what? Quests like that in particular really don't interest me too much, as the map is just far too big for me to attempt that without a guide. There's probably other points in your video that I wanted to mention but I'm typing this a while after I actually finished it, that's my bad. I'm very glad I played this game but I wish the gameplay could catch up to its stellar character writing/acting and world design.

Looking back on the story a few months after finishing it, I remember it quite fondly too, I guess because the poor pacing mostly gets forgotten over time. I really liked Arthur as a character and enjoyed the moments where I got to learn more about him and his perspective. Dutch is still kind of an enigma to me, and I think the writers of RDR2 were constrained a bit by having to conform to the existing plot of RDR1, but on the whole the story successfully gave me the feeling of being part of a close-knit band of outlaws, which is probably the best praise I could give it. Taking part in the campfire scenes with Arthur and the others singing around the fire always brought a smile to my face. I still don't know what they were going for with the Guarma chapter though. The epilogue is definitely the section of the game I enjoyed the least, and is where the gameplay really starts to feel like a slog. The nostalgia of revisiting part of the map from the first game wasn't enough to justify the 8 hours of filler the game forces you through, and given that most of the map isn't even used I'm surprised that Rockstar thought it was worth the effort of including. I agree that Arthur's story is kind of diminished by presenting it as 'setup' for John's story from the first game, which I dislike especially because Arthur is a more likeable character in my opinion. Once I finished the story I was finished with the game as well. I don't think there's much enjoyment to be had lingering in the game's world after reaching the end of the plot, but while that plot is still ongoing it feels great to wander around, discover new things and stew over the events of the story. In my ninety hours with the game I found exactly one collectible dinosaur bone and zero rock carvings. I guess the player isn't really expected to find them without a guide, but as far as I'm concerned that just means that they'll end up watching the associated cutscenes on KZfaq rather than actually doing it themselves. I'm not too sure what the point is of long-winded collectathon quests like that, but I suppose they're harmless as long as they remain completely optional. I'm also glad I put in the time to play this game, and its open world design definitely gave me some new experiences and new ideas to think about. Assuming their next game is GTA 6, my prediction is that the shooting mechanics won't be made more complex than the simple baseline we have now, but if Rockstar can preserve and build on the immersive feeling I got from RDR2's open world then they're on the right track.

Thanks for the comment, it makes my day to be mentioned alongside Joseph Anderson. You're the second commenter to bring up the auto-aim, so I'm starting to think this is something I should have addressed in the video. There are a few reasons I didn't change the auto-aim settings. Firstly, I played with a controller (which I think is the intended way to play) which makes some kind of aim assist pretty much mandatory. Secondly, the auto-aim is on by default which makes me think that it's also intended: almost every Rockstar game of the last 20 years has also had lock-on aiming, and shooting from horseback without auto-aim would have been basically impossible with a controller. Thirdly, even if I had disabled auto-aim while on foot, I'm sceptical whether it would have improved my experience with the shooting mechanics. I'm sure it would have made gunfights longer if I had to line up every shot myself, and given my complaint that too much time is spent on pointless shootouts already, I don't regret my choice to leave auto-aim switched on. I think there are more interesting ways Rockstar could increase the complexity of the shooting than just switching off auto-aim, like the double-trigger-pull mechanic that I mentioned in the video, and I hope we see them building on that kind of thing in the future (though I highly doubt we'll see anything like that in their next GTA game). Thanks again for watching and I'm glad to hear you're enjoying my videos. Stay tuned for many more!

It's much better at what it's trying to do than totk.