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Unkind thoughts on the platinum


JEDLander

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You've mentioned grinding, which is easily in my list of my hated things in gaming, and with vitriol that is relentless. I don't get why developers (not publishers) need to put unnecessary grind trophies in their games. Grinding is the laziest thing ever, but making a trophy based on grinding is equally even worse. I probably have to stay away from games that have pointless grinding trophies, unless otherwise duly noted.

Edited by BadRep24
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RDR2 is most certainly a flawed masterpiece in my opinion. Absolutely phenomenal story, characters, visuals and acting. But the gameplay is just not all that great. The overt focus on realism hurt the game imo, really sucked the fun out of it for me. It wasn't all bad but I did feel as if most of what I was doing was a checklist of chores to slog through in order to get to the next cool part. I played the story and most of the side missions on Xbox but the hunts and other such side content is just a slog that I knew I would not enjoy, so there's just a lot there that I will not touch, thus I chose to play on Xbox, not PlayStation (also, it looks absurdly stunning in native 4K- one of the few games this generation to actually properly utilise the technology of the Xbox One X and there are some noticeable differences between it and even the PS4 Pro). Also the online was a total shitshow even six months after launch which was when I last looked in on it.

 

The first RDR is literally perfect though.

Edited by Lan Stee
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Red Dead Redemption 2 is nothing compared to some MMOs I played in the past where the entire gameplay revolved around grinding.

 

Think hundreds and thousands of hours of grinding. RDR2 is maybe 200 hours tops.

 

Sad to hear this sequel not being received as warmly as the original did. The first game is probably in my top 20 games of all time, and is easily one of my favorite games from the PS3/360 era. The online trophies are a pain though, main reason why I have not 100 percented it.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I didn't mind the whole having to collect stuff more than once and some of the more uninspired challenges. My problem is mostly with everything having to be slow and some stuff being very inconsistent and some stuff seemed like it wasn't well thought out and they were just like: "There, we coded it in, you figure it out.", which is basically the GTA + RDR Online theme song.

 

Gold missions for example. Some missions require you to skip cutscenes to make it in time, others will fail the time requirement if you skip a specific cutscene. Also not showing what you have to do for gold until you replay and forcing me to use a guide throughout so I don't have to replay most missions.

 

I started playing over a year ago and initially thought that I would probably Platinum it pretty fast, but nothing is fast in this game, everything has to slow down to a slog for some reason. Just let me run in the camp. Don't slow my horse down for 10 hours because I'm riding past some random event I don't care about. Have some more trappers.

 

Now to be fair, they have made some stuff better with updates, but I've had really bad luck with the timing.

 

I finished most of the challenges, trapper pelts etc. before doing the missions, so most of my time has been spent riding around on the horse around the world and from fast travel spot to fast travel spot. Since traveling was always so slow, I played a lot of it through remote play, so I can do something else while I was riding somewhere. Got through chapter 3 and stopped playing for a good while. They finally let me fast travel from camp in an update so I got back into it, but I was already done with almost all optional stuff, so it was mostly just riding to missions, which doesn't take that much time anyways. Update came too late for me.

 

I didn't want to waste any more time with replaying missions later, so I watched the cutscenes and parts of missions on youtube before actually doing them, so I can skip them for time and not mess up a simple gold requirement. So instead seeing the performances in 4K HDR, I was watching them on a tablet in a browser window in double speed. I didn't see that they made replay easier in an update when I picked up the game again, so I played through the entire game like this. I haven't gotten emotionally close to any of the characters at all, which is incredibly rare for me. I barely know their names. Instead of enjoying the missions, I was just paying attention to the gold requirements. Note that when playing Assassins Creed, doing the optional stuff was some of the most fun for me, doing it "the right" way, even if it meant hiding in hay for 5 minutes to get to know enemy routes, taking them out one by one. But they actually told you the objectives when they come up and tell you if you have done them, you don't have to constantly look at a guide for everything. In RDR2 it wasn't fun at all. Update came too late for me, since I didn't check all the changelogs and assumed it's not gonna change that much a year into the game.

 

Then there's the weird things like getting the guns you want out before starting a mission and suddenly, you were given other crappy guns you don't want. Or choosing your guns on your horse, getting off and suddenly you got different guns. Or the fact that I have 2 Lancaster repeaters for no reason. I had to upgrade all guns just in case the game decided to give me a crappy one. Would've been no problem if the gun locker was there in Story, but that update came the day I did the last mission, so I don't need it anymore. Update came too late for me.

 

I collected a bunch of gold bars and those disappeared after chapter 6, because they changed what you keep in an update. Now that I'm finally really starting online, they fixed the consumable fence glitch, so now I've got to waste money and time on getting good consumable items. Basically the updates that would've helped me came too late and glitch that would've helped me got fixed just in time before I could use it. 

 

If I waited and played it now, I wouldn't have watched the mission beforehand, because now replaying has been made eaiser. I wouldn't have needed to play through remote play, because I can fast travel from camp and skip the useless riding around. I wouldn't get annoyed with the 100 weapons in my weapon wheel. All in all it would've been a much, much better experience. 

Edited by the_m4jX
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Agree with the OP for the most part. RDR2 is a masterpiece in terms of its content, story, characters etc. Imo there's not much disputing its one of the finest crafted games ever made.

 

The trophy list though... jesus. I quite like that Rockstar ask us to fully complete their games in their entirety if we want the platinum, but a couple of these have not been too fun. All animal species is the worst of it I'd say. But a special message to the Level 50 trophy. It's not as bad due to all the different roles these days, but you have to be patient unless you're just going to cram in Collector XP (I couldn't face hours on end of this myself, so have been just mixing it up). RDO really does not have that much to do, so Level 50 isnt proportionate to the content. Not even close imo.

 

Gold Rush... just a practice in inducing annoyance. Some of the objectives are madness, even the easier ones only take a small screwup and you've just wasted the past 20 minutes (especially at the end when you're scrapping around for any gold medal you can get). It's better now you can keep your gear but it's still an annoyance.

 

It's certainly a game where playing for the trophies is detracting experience imo. Some of the tasks are just annoying and not well thought out. 

Edited by christhedog3
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On 16/7/2020 at 1:45 AM, Spaz said:

Red Dead Redemption 2 is nothing compared to some MMOs I played in the past where the entire gameplay revolved around grinding.

 

Think hundreds and thousands of hours of grinding. RDR2 is maybe 200 hours tops.

 

Sad to hear this sequel not being received as warmly as the original did. The first game is probably in my top 20 games of all time, and is easily one of my favorite games from the PS3/360 era. The online trophies are a pain though, main reason why I have not 100 percented it.

 

Same here, this kind of platinum reminds me of MMOs.

 

I spent too many thousands of hours playing World of Warcraft, if there was something that could be done alone like grinding for absolutely anything, missions, rares or whatever, I did it.

 

When I did the SO4:I Platinum that is a total grindfest and took me more than 600 hours, I wasn't really tired in the end. I could have gone for even 400 hours more, lol.

 

This platinum requires 200 hours and while I understand a lot of people will be tired just by finishing its campaign, more than 8000 players have been happy to use it as a excuse to keep playing the game. That alone shows that the developers did a hell of a job.

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I literally gave up and sold this game after trying for 3 solid days to find a perfect 3 star skunk carcass, that's with all the amulets and shit equipped. I followed all the guides, every video on YouTube and nothing!! Between that and the ridiculous requirements to reach level 50 and the poor payouts for anything did me in.  

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6 minutes ago, DreddPirateRobb said:

I literally gave up and sold this game after trying for 3 solid days to find a perfect 3 star skunk carcass, that's with all the amulets and shit equipped. I followed all the guides, every video on YouTube and nothing!! Between that and the ridiculous requirements to reach level 50 and the poor payouts for anything did me in.  

The hunting requests were the most infuriating part of the 100 percent imo. Untill i realised how one of the trinkets worked. I spent hours trying to shoot 3 star birds down with a arrow but with the trinket equiped you can use a varmit rifle on it to still get a perfect pelt.

 

But agree that 3 star animals seem to apear the most when you dont need them but it didnt take me long to get a 3 star skunk. Just go to the spawn, save and reload and eventually one will apear

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I’ve had this game since release and I’ll be honest it was a struggle at first. The pacing of the game was a real issue for me, every time I felt we were doing something exciting, Arthur would end up on a stupidly long and slow horse ride to mull over the events that happened. 

 

I think it maybe took me a year to finish the story but that still leaves everything else. I maybe have like 5 trophies left, but what I have left is probably 100 hours of work. I’ll hold my hands up and say the challenges is my fault, I didn’t realise you needed to complete all of them to level 10 so I only really did the horse riding one as that looked the easiest. Now I realise you need them all in cursing not working on it more during the story. 

 

I’m level 40 online I think and 50 is the last MP trophy I need, and that’s been an absolute slog getting there. I realise that now there’s so many more roles and things to do to get XP, but they’re not really fun. I also struggle with the collector and trader roles because I know I need to hunt down all these animals and collectibles in the story mode, so I don’t feel like doing them twice since progress doesn’t transfer. I tend to wait until Rockstar do higher XP for things and then I’ll play for a while. I really wish that the online was better as it’s the first AAA title that I’ve actually focussed on the MP, but it’s just not fun. 
 

Also when I played through the story I didn’t use a mission guide so now to go for the gold medals I need to replay almost the entire game ?

 

Red Dead is one of those games that no matter how much time you spend on it or how much you do, you’re still never any closer to actually finishing 

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Fortunately I didn't fall that in love with 2 to begin with, I did love 1 and only platted it this year because all I had left were the multiplayer trophies. 2 overall is just way too hampered by the focus on realism, and the story is way too stretched out, either for melodrama or characters that show up to be quirky for a mission or two and then disappear. I'd completely forget various gang members existed, then suddenly they'd be the main character of a mission, give out their entire backstory and struggle, get it resolved, and disappear again.

 

Arthur Morgan also wasn't nearly as interesting a character as John, who is at least forced to do everybody's chores and dirty work for his family's safety and not out of the goodness of his heart. I think most people love Arthur out of stockholm syndrome being stuck with him for so long. Granted the VA is really good and the last chapter gives his character some real heart, after being pretty much a grumbling buffoon for the whole game.

 

One thing I'll give the MP over the SP is that your character actually moves at a decent pace, I'm going to wear out my X button trying to get Arthur to move with a purpose. That being said, most of my time in the MP has been spent essentially solo anyway, it's really weirdly designed where your progress is better the less other people you interact with, but it's then unclear what that progress is for since you're rarely incentivized to play with other people, outside of the popup games that are usually just interrupting something else you're working on. I didn't play much of 1's multiplayer but it was pretty straightforward drop in and screw around, no hard feelings. 2 is just a breeding ground for salt with all the work people have to put in that can be screwed over by other players. At least the gold bars are pretty easy to earn, I've gotten the last two battle passes and all the roles with just the gold earned in game.

 

For the SP I actually liked the challenges, and hunting the legendary animals, same as in RDR1 (the herbalist one in both is pretty BS). But the story really dragged to the point where it also took me pretty much a year to complete. Getting halfway in and then learning there were missables that I'd need to replay the entire game for really hurt my enjoyment, though that's probably more on me for looking that up in the first place.

 

Actually getting the 100% trophy isn't too bad, from what I recall, since you didn't actually need to get 100% animals, but you did for the animal trophy so wtf. And these gold medals are pissing me off, this isn't an arcade game. If you have to have that because the last game did at least let us skip the walking and riding technically-not-cutscenes. And looking at the missions I'm not sure if you can even replay any of the good riding sections, like the That's The Way It Is ride.

 

Didn't exactly intend to write out a whole review, but basically while the game is good I'm not that in love with it that the grindy trophies bring it down a notch.

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  • 3 months later...

There was a guy who got the platinum in under a week, but either he got flagged for suspicious timestamps, or he made his account private. 
 

The fastest time is one week, four days. That’s 11 days. If you play this for 14 - 15 hours a day, it’s quite possible to finish this game in under two weeks. But I can’t imagine Red Dead Redemption 2 being any fun. 

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I was going to attempt the platinum after I finished it in 2018 (has it really been that long? what has happened to time?). But I realised really early on that getting that gold rush trophy was going to completely dilute the impact of the story for me, having to repeat the same missions over and over again. I don't mind the other requirements, like the wildlife collecting or fishing trophies etc, but the story for me was truly special and the idea of that becoming passive and me getting desensitised to that, maybe even feeling like it was a chore wasn't something for me at the time. Maybe I'll go back to it again in 2021 and play it fresh.

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On 7/15/2020 at 6:49 PM, JEDLander said:

Foreward: I just want to write all this down because it's cathartic. I posted it somewhere else but it's going here too. You may disagree, in which case it's fine to be incorrect...

 

If you enjoy this game, don't go for the platinum. Do yourself a favour, just don't do it. It might seem like a good idea. It's not. Red Dead 2 is the most tedious platinum I've ever seen. Everything is a miserable chore. 

 

Pretty much all the requirements for 100% completion are bitterly, bitterly unenjoyable. I genuinely don't believe that anybody at cockstar actually did any of these things themselves, because why would you bother? They're a total waste of life. You're going to be spending 70 hours, maybe more, looking for a ridiculous number of plants, trying to get animals to spawn in, trying to get fish to spawn in, trying to get bears to spawn in so you can be mauled by 18 of them, the list goes on. The challenges are piss poor because they only start tracking when you complete the previous one. For herbalist, you need to pick 15 herb species, then later you have to pick every herb species and the 15 you found earlier need to be found again. Utterly nonsensical. Oh and the game doesn't track which ones you have and haven't found. A couple of the gambler challenges are 100% RNG so settle in for that shit, and I hope you like trying to find every breed of horse. Prepare to get annoyed at YT videos where some smug asshole is stood in the middle of a herd of horses, but you ride around for an hour in the same spot and find fuck all. Algernon Wasp is a dick. Even the less immediately annoying ones like the dino bones just degrade into a boring slog, and the 19 perfect carcasses are for masochists. You could literally play through an entire other game, maybe two, in the time it takes for you to do this painstaking clean-up alone, so go and do that instead.

 

The online is a miserable, contentless void of repetition that rockstar refuses to invest any time or effort into. If you really want to go for Lv 50, I  recommend doing a level or two per day and then doing something else because there's just so little to keep you entertained. I genuinely had a better time with Fallout 76 than this multiplayer.

 

The requirements for the gold medals are a failure from start to finish. There's no real checkpoint feature to retry tough sections, the objectives are utterly uninspired and boring, and they don't stay completed on successive attempts, so if you manage to do a mission with 90% accuracy but not in the time limit, and then you try again and you do it within the time limit but miss three shots, you're still no closer to the gold. MGSV did this so much better. Just like the rest of the game, you need to do an unnecessary number of the missions over and over again. 50 golds would have been more than enough, but thank god they don't ask for all missions gold. This is the only time that they were at least semi-reasonable.

The objectives for completing a mission in the certain time limit are the worst, because every mission has long sections where the game dictates what pace you're allowed to ride/ walk at, you have to stop and wait for NPC's who can clip onto walls or scenery, or other random NPCs, slowing you down and junking that attempt because the time limits are eye-waveringly strict most times. Seriously, you have to be borderline input-perfect on some of these missions to make the time limits they want, it's just plain not fun.

Any failure screen will void the accuracy and health-item related objectives (not sure if this is intentional) so if a moron NPC walks in front of a stagecoach, or skittles a pedestrian, or is struck by a bolt of lightning, then boom, attempt over, do it all again. Quit the game, reload the game, go back through the menu and reload the whole mission, listen to all of the dialogue again during the mandatory slow-ass trailing session at the start, and then you can try again. Seriously if something goes wrong, you're probably going to be waiting about 10 minutes before you're back at the section you failed. Just utterly fucking boring and frustrating.

 

Just when you think you've done the most tedious thing, you realise that the thing you have to do next is just as soul-destroying. Everything seems intended to waste as much of the player's time as possible.

 

I really liked the game when I first played it (apart from Ch6 because most of that is utter drivel), but holy shit does it LONG out-stay its welcome. And since quitting at any point means that all the time you spent grinding thus far is a total waste, you kinda get sucked in to seeing it through.


you pretty much nailed it. i have to say i got the game on release day and i went from first hating the first chapter, to absolutely loving the game. but that love slowly turned to hate once the grind came. and then once the online came it turned into pure hatred for this game and i will never play it ever again even if its remastered in the future. i spent 2 months straight finishing this game. i cant recall the total hours but it was between 400-600 hours when sony told me the end of the year time stats. the online grind was one of th worst ever. me and a friend nonstop were grinding kills. and then having to travel to the same spot to try to get money to buy more ammo and hope someone else wasnt there doing the same thing who was going to kill you. not to mention when farming kills someone else comes and tries to steal your spot. i also had to gold the missions before they were patched which sometimes it took me a entire day just to gold one. i really thought many times i just wouldnt be able to. the countless hours i spent trying to get certain animals to spawn that i didnt see through the entire game. like you said the plants, and the tiers. pointless time wasters. i feel like they made things this way to make the online community stay around because rockstar loves releasing a bunch of crap dlc for people to buy. which unfortunately was the worse part about this game was the online portion. you run to gather resources and not bother anyone, just to have some idiot come and kill you for no reason and ruin all the work you just put in

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For me, you have to be in the right frame of mind.

 

I've only got the multiplayer trophies finished so far but the day I started this I hated it, got bored very quickly as it's so slow, then months later I came back to finish it off and I enjoyed it immensely, the slow pace was actually quite welcoming and I was drawn in to the world they've created.

 

If the single player is similar to multiplayer then it will be one I dip in and out of when the mood takes me.

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I'm on an extended break from it for these very reasons. Wonderful game but an awful experience attempting the platinum. Just when you feel like you are making progress you just grind to a halt. It doesn't help that the game actively tries to stop you as well. If you have a quest where you need a particular animal it will spawn less

 

A few times I went behind the waterfall at that lake, Elysian pool or something, every single time there were bats there. Until you need a bat carcass for the hunting requests and then it took me 7 attempts to get them to spawn again ?‍♂️

 

What broke the back this time was fishing, need all species for final stage, of course that meant every fish other than a bluegill went on holiday ?‍♂️

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