What Red Dead Redemption 2 On PC Is Like To Play

Waiting for Nintendo Switch version ;)

Freezes after 1 hr of play for me. Have to manually save every time I do something worth keeping. Pain.

Well, it's a technical wreck, but you can brute force through that mess with a beast of a PC. Tough luck for non-enthusiasts with modest PC's, though.

Aside from the technical shortcomings and performances issues (which should NEVER be dismissed and always factor as a part of my score), the other aspect of this game, seemingly small as it is, but in reality, vastly important (and failed miserably by Rockstar), is the UI.

It's beyond horrendous.

Basically, a system that works well on consoles was almost 1:1 ported to PC and left as is. Menus are time-consuming to navigate, often don't register focus or change context with ease. Keymappings are unintuitive, requiring your hand to leave home row very often and pulling attention away from the game. If you try to remap keys, it hard binds 1 key to multiple actions (because it assumes we only have 14 buttons like a gamepad) and when you attempt to rebind 1 key, it wipes the binding for everywhere else it was used.

On top of that, there are next to no tutorials, and many of the ones they provide (like hand to hand combat) put you IN an active fight and then expect you to notice a series of tooltips that appear slowly which tell you about the controls while you're mainly focused on the fight occurring at center screen. This is all testament to the fact that Rockstar was, is and will always be a console developer, despite building these games ON a PC, they're never developed in a way where you feel like they fit the PC platform; LOTS of friction.

On the good side, there is an attention to detail that also makes it evident that next to CDPR, there's simply no other developer out there who does a realistic open-world game better. Voice strain that matches character actions in the audio, random events like people being thrown through saloon windows, etc. Immersion is something Rockstar does in spades.

Sadly, the aspects that are done poor have a significant detraction to that which is done well. I feel for those consummate professionals who know their craft well at Rockstar being shadowed by someone else's shortcomings and inadequacies.

Do I still have to keep tapping the A button to keep my horse running? That is the only thing I care to know about.

I'm not even going to attempt to play this game with my piss-poor 1060 graphics card.

I am sure people trust Digital Foundry more when it comes to PC analysis sorry Gamespot no hard feelings but nobody takes anything Gamespot say seriously when it comes to PC.