Unkind thoughts on the platinum

[Fingolfin-II]

On 16-7-2020 at 0:49 AM, 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.

Tears are rolling down my face from laughter reading your post JEDlander. I recognise most situations you describe and share your pain. Thank you for making me laugh and making me feel better just knowing that i am not the only fool who gets frustrated from some of the gameplay of RDR2. In my mind i see you shouting at your television set and throwing your controller against the wall after another attempt at a gold medal gone bad after just watching like 10 minutes of the mission before it actually starts like old friends in chapter 1

Edited February 9, 2021 by Fingolfin-II