Got Red Dead Redemption 2. Played very little, but it seems very promising, but there is one catch: You can't manually save during "missions" and if you quit once a "mission" is started you start the game ... at some other place. This is a bit annoying, plus that I've so far started two missions just by greeting someone and I didn't even know that triggered a mission (and it was triggered by me just entering a building). When I started the first one I realized it was getting late so I just quit the game and just assumed that the game would have autosaved or something, but now when I started the game I started leaning against a barn (or horsey-house as it was called back then). I walked up to a dude and greeted him and bam, another mission initiated without me knowing. And I can't save manually. I kind of like it, because it feels like fighting the elements. Stuff just happens, deal with it. A guy wants meat, do it. It's not a choice. I have to do it and what I want is not part of the equation. I like it, but it's also pretty annoying. Like life.
R*'s mission design is give and take for me, I have to be in a bit of a patient mood to play that game between the mission structure, immersion elements, and controls. Sometimes I can appreciate falling into missions like that, but sometimes the way they do it just feels dated to me. That whole game kinda feels like the story parts and the open world parts are competing for my attention. Something between the two doesn't always jive for me and it's a little different from the usual ludonarrative dissonance.
I'll say two things for it... one, it is a beautiful game, not just in a technical sense but in visual design and immersive components. Two, the story is second to none as far as video game stories go.
I would encourage you to get into that whole meandering into stuff with people. But pay close attention to what the main characters are telling you about what's going on with the crew as you progress with their quests, and what's happening with the missions you do with crew members. There are little things that come up walking around camp and just interacting/listening in. It's possible to advance past camp missions that give a bunch more to that side of the experience as well as net generally helpful rewards. Some of them are static side-activities that you can do any time, but there are quests it gives semi-randomly involving certain characters that are not 'random' in quality. Worth doing in every regard. I think it's fair to let you know that you don't keep the same camp, and whenever it moves, missions available from different change, just as location and circumstance for them does. Some of it even depends on past quests/interactions with them. It's a good idea to explore and uncover side quests in a region before progressing too far with main missions for that reason, too. They may not go away, but the quest structure is such that encounters in early regions sometimes set off quests in later ones (IIRC.)
Elden Ring is a great game, but also occasionally a profoundly annoying game. Like, it is annoying in ways that I feel like past DS entries were not. It can be a bit like death by 1000 needles. All Fromsoft games are (in a sense) but I really think Elden Ring takes the cake for annoying clunk and balancing. I've been playing a lot of it over this week off and I can safely say as someone with 1.5 playthroughs and DS 1-3 + Bloodborne down that it does take some steps backwards from those games in different areas. I really don't care what anyone says. I feel like the veterans understand the issues, maybe better than I do.
It's less about things that make it difficult and more about things in the level and enemy design that make it needlessly tedious at points. Like, you can still master it, and it still feels tedious. The big gripe for me in feel is the combination of random input drops and long input buffer. I just think it's a little too long. I've had times where I pressed roll once, but got struck on release (so the animation cancelled,) and THAT got buffered. So after my character flies, flops on the ground, and slowly gets up, they instantly roll. Got me killed once or twice and I was just like "uhh... what happened?
" I can accept getting rocked for rolling late, but having the roll still go after all of that happens feels like a double-punishment. I think I could deal with it if roll fired on press instead of release - I probably wouldn't miss in that scenario or find myself ever mashing it to compensate for that little release-delay. By default it HAS to be release because press/hold on that same button is for sprinting. The release is the only way to differentiate the input. But what if I used Steam to decouple them? Put sprint on left stick and let crouch be a damned orphan. B can be dedicated to roll and just fire on press. Sometimes I swear, with the attacks and the experience of the lag in my head, I will mash not out of panic, but a sense of compensating. If rolling was a little more responsive, I figure I might not. It's something I think I've ultimately just gotta retrain on. But also something I think Fromsoft can and has handled better.
I mean, that aside, enemies and bosses alike have these mixes of longer wind-ups and spaz-speed combos - wayy more than any game before this one... when you also drag out the input buffer it just makes things feel kind of unresponsive to me. I understand not being able to cancel animations... that's a 'duh' for sure. But sometimes I am intentionally mashing just because I know I buffered a move I need to cancel by overloading the buffer before my current animation finishes, because something has changed. And I'll get that done without interference. But it doesn't feel good. Less of a problem if you really take your time and with skill it isn't ending your runs, but again... more of a feel issue for me. It's really only when you DO focus on everything happening on screen that you begin to notice that your character can have a bit of a mind of their own. Your inputs could literally be a half-second behind what's happening on screen if you manage to get yourself stuck in the buffer, in which case you have a better chance of surviving the mess you are in by allowing a neutral frame to pop and taking THAT little penalty to regain full control over what your character is actually doing. Cause if you manage to get hit while buffer-locked like that, you might just do whatever comes next after and wind up in a great spot to get hit a second time.
I'm betting a lot of people just don't notice it, outside of those "Why did my character do that there?" moments where an attack with a long wind up went when they didn't expect it to or something. But if you do, it's annoying as crap at the worst of times. Most situations are wibbley-woobly enough that the timing difference isn't a factor in your success. It depends on your playstyle. For me, I'm powerstancing and two-handing, meaning I can barely even guard-counter, so I rely on being quick with attacks and evasions to punish enemy attacks. Say I roll and queue an attack. Somewhere in my mind, I now need to track that, because if I queue another move after the attack, I enter a sequence where nothing I'm doing tracks with button presses and actual timing precision is compromised enough to cost me a vital window, not to mention feel really odd. It's situational, too. So across a battle you can be in and out of this without noticing, but it is still messing with your timing. If you respond to your eyes, you're mistiming things by at least a little more than you think. And like I said, often you can get away with that and might not notice that what you're seeing is 'late' because all of your animations have wind-ups that hide it a bit. It just makes things slippery in a bad-touch kind of way if you tune into the animations too much.
What's more puzzling is that among the many inputs with a decent half-to-full-second buffer, your weapon switching isn't among them. You can only begin to switch weapons on idle frames, which sucks and will get you killed at silly times. I can use the buffer to set up any attack I want after rolling... if you press say, R2 during a roll, the attack will fire off at the first neutral frame after the roll - you kinda rely on that to get moves off in otherwise impossible timing windows and I use it heavily to perform incisive, high-damage rolling powerstance moves. But for some reason, changing weapons doesn't work that way. And it fucks with you too... you get the little click letting you know it registered the press, whether it actually switches or not. Mid-action, it cancels instead of queuing in the way that any attack, jump, heal, cast, or roll would. I'm noticing a lot of weird stuff like that, and I think some of it is deliberate. And I still don't like it lol
I started getting burnt out, though. Some of that's on me. So I've switched to a tighter, smaller, simpler, but still combat-oriented game for tonight: Control. I just know I'm in good hands with that game, the combat is fun too. It's a lot more button mashey, and coming from Elden Ring, I feel like the best Control player ever. I don't think I've ever been nearly this efficient or dynamic with the combat lol. It's like dropping 40lbs of training weight with how responsive everything is compared to Elden Ring.
