If I had the chance to pick one game for future generations to preserve and experience, I wouldn't hesitate to pick Red Dead Redemption 2. It’d be shameful to deprive future gamers of a late walk in the rainy streets of Saint Denis, or a gentle sunset looked out upon from the Horseshoe Overlook. Calling the game a technical wonder or a financial success would be understating its role in the industry and its impact on Rockstar Games. It's an achievement worth celebrating, even 5 years after its release.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of my favorite games of all time. Compared with other Rockstar titles, it stands tall over its peers in almost all aspects, except maybe one: replayability.
175 hours is the estimated average time to see almost everything in Red Dead Redemption 2, supposing you know what to collect and where to find it. If you want to take your time to experience the game more carefully, then you could even be looking at 350+ hours. So there’s a whole lotta game there for one sitting, but despite its open world, Red Dead Redemption 2 lacks experimentation and incentives to replay things. If you want to replay a specific mission, you can always use the mission replay feature, but going back to do so has no satisfying reward other than rating your performance with stars. You cannot do the same mission in two drastically different ways (something our Rob Zak has complained about before), meaning that you'll always have to follow the path that Rockstar set; replaying the mission has no inherent value other than re-experiencing your favorite highlights of the game.
Obviously, no game in Rockstar’s portfolio is as big as Red Dead Redemption 2, making each one more replayable on the basic idea that it’s easier to complete, but it’s still telling that I've 100%'ed GTA 5 plenty of times, and the PS2 GTA trilogy even more. There are a lot of reasons for this, but perhaps the glaring difference lies in the pacing. Riding with Dutch on the long journeys between mission waypoints, I never learned anything new about his plans (other than going to Tahiti and running a Mango farm, or something). What I did learn is that my horse speed is locked every time I'm on a mission. I don't mind the prologue being an hour or more, I don't mind the massive world that I have to get through for each mission, but for God's sake Rockstar, why is it that my horse suddenly has lumbago? The map is already massive, and it costs me a lot of time to navigate between missions and waypoints—locking my horse's speed just makes this slow game feel even.
As well as taking extremely long to get to the meat of the missions themselves, Red Dead Redemption 2's mission design is extremely restrictive compared to something like Rockstar’s earlier works like L.A. Noire and the original PS2 GTA trilogy. As you get progressively deeper into the game, this issue becomes more apparent. There are a couple of missions in Chapter 3 called "The Course of True Love," which sees Arthur delivering messages between two lovers from the two controlling families of Rhodes town. These missions were the epitome of a "go from point A to point B, and then back" kind of mission. It was a subpar disconnect from the main story that served it no good and served me no fun. For some reason, that made it into the final game, and they managed to make it some of the most boring and restricting missions ever.
In the weakest chapter of the game, Arthur, Dutch, and other gang members find themselves stuck on a Caribbean sugar plantation island called Guarma. The whole chapter features some of the most scripted missions in the game, but the one that I can't go without mentioning is "Paradise Mercifully Departed." In this mission, Arthur and the gang members hatch a plan to rescue the ship captain and destroy gun batteries to escape Guarma. There is so little for the player to do here, that the actual gameplay feels like an ad break between cutscenes, making it one of those missions that you’re better off watching rather than playing.
Even the relatively recent GTA 5 wasn’t so heavily defined by cutscenes. Just think back to its final mission, "The Third Way." While both are grand shootout missions, GTA 5's mission was centered around the gameplay with minimal cutscenes in between. In the second portion of the mission, the game just prompts you to go to various locations to kill the primary antagonists of the game, giving you a lot more freedom than usual.
There's no incentive to start Red Dead Redemption 2 over unless you want to produce a psychoanalysis of each character in the game. It's not a game that lacks content depth. Instead, it's a game that's full of main and side content playing like a movie that feels exhausting to go through repeatedly. Rockstar tried to combat this problem by adding more player choices, but those choices amount to little. Killing or pardoning Jimmy Brooks, for instance, meant nothing for Arthur or John in the long run. Instead, it was just a way for Rockstar to give more value to the Honor system. This is the same Honor system that changes nothing except for minor dialogue changes and a new atmosphere for Arthur's ending.
It's totally fair if you want to experience the main story multiple times. After all, Red Dead Redemption 2 has one of the best stories out there, but it's a long old slog that doesn't give you much space to do things differently. Hunting all the legendary animals around the map was fun while it lasted, but there's no motive for you to do it again. And because Red Dead Redemption 2 is a "Rockstar" sandbox, the only things that can happen differently are away from the story-related missions.
The game intentionally restricts not just your choices, but your movements in missions to the degree that your horse, no matter how fast it is, will keep to a certain speed. Some Rockstar games, like GTA 5, suffer from this problem too, but never to this extent.
How much more would have been added to the game's multi-hundred-million-dollar budget to introduce choices that had noticeable effects on gameplay and story, or to allow players to be more creative in how they approach main story missions? Just something, anything genuinely worth my time to replay the game in a new save only to try out different stuff. Yes, the story is incredibly entertaining and emotional, but that alone isn’t enough to compel me to return to it any time soon.