I'm not gonna try and discuss this on a point by point basis or anything since that would be needlessly hostile for someone voicing their opinion but:

[quote=@Dynamo Frokane]
'Slow and deliberate' is good for setting tone but its not a fun gameplay mechanic. 
[/quote]


I disagree with this. I disagree with some other points made, like the shooting mechanic being cumbersome and personally never running into a situation where I needed to keep hunting in order to feed the camp (especially since fishing takes less time and if you upgrade the camp fully food basically handles itself), and I think the brawling is bad,  but the slow pace is kind of the most fascinating aspect of the game to me. Fascinating is a word I keep coming back to with Red Dead Redemption 2 because so many of its design decisions seem so deliberately obtuse, archaic, or otherwise a matter of respecting 'realism' over concepts like 'moment to moment fun'. Whereas most open world games have fast travel unlocked almost by default, here you have to unlock it deep in a menu and you still have to manually travel back to a central location just to travel elsewhere which makes you wonder why you bothered going back to camp and not just taken the journey to the town or wherever yourself. 

I've barely interacted with the story, I'm only shortly into chapter three and already find the narrative of the feuding families far too familiar to care - there is almost no way to make a Hatfield/McCoy or Capulet/Montague type story interesting and from what I've played so far I don't think Rockstar will change that - and most of the gang members are one note that's been plucked to death. The game, to me, is at its best when it's just that frontier survival simulator of going out, tracking animals and looking for that perfect three star animal and getting the clean kill, taking the pelt to camp while selling the crappier pelts, then going after a legendary animal and taking a trip to the trapper. The problem with that is far too often the other part of the game gets in the way, with the random events popping up and all of them falling into basically four categories of dull. 

One of the best times I had with the game was treasure hunting simply because it fell in line with how I was already playing the game. The serial killer mission was fun as well from an exploration aspect - and then it glitched out on me once it was resolved and the culprit fell through the geometry and I was reminded I was playing a video game again. 

RDR2 is a game I think people will get out of it what they put into it. It's often chunky to control and it does a terrible job explaining its systems and I honestly think people who just wanted GTA but with horses are going to come away upset with how much it isn't that and how much it is a survival game down to weight management and needing to change your clothes or hide your face or remembering to take weapons off your horse. 

The game seems like it was designed around trying to take the Mexico moment from the first game and making an entire game to feel like that, and it is full of those kind of moments. Those personal, immersive moments like when I had a particularly lengthy ride back to town after a hunt and as I slowly trotted along up a hill, the sun was setting at just the right moment to bathe the nearby town in its glow as a perfectly timed musical cue played. It was terrific in a way many games try to emulate in their narrative moments to ill effect. 

I don't know if I'm having [i]fun[/i] with it. But I'm constantly fascinated by it and this weekend I played it for about five hours and all I actually accomplished was killing an alligator, a beaver, and a deer. And even still I was enthralled for the entire time.