Rockstar Games has given a rare gameplay preview of its massively hyped upcoming title, Red Dead Redemption 2, to a group of GameStop employees in the US, and as it turns out, a lot of them found it to be “boring”.
[jwplayer ufxzSg8Y]
During the 2018 GME Conference, the studio showed a 20-minute live demo of the game which was allegedly very pretty but had a long section of horse riding throughout the world, which one member of the audience says, “almost put me to sleep,” they wrote in a Reddit post.
“Beautiful game, but mostly just saw horse riding simulator. Very difficult to stay awake,” another user, jgrindberg, wrote. “Don’t get me wrong, I still think the game will be fantastic, just the demo was kinda boring to watch,” they added.
One user even described it as “Rockstar Equestrian Simulator 2K19,” but also said that “once shit started happening… OK… sure. Until then, though… not so much. Sure it was pretty, but more than half of the presentation did nothing for me.”
To be fair, showing an unreleased game like this is fairly out of character for Rockstar, who pretty much stopped talking to the media entirely after the release of GTA V, assumedly because they just don’t need to. Look at the success of their last few releases and that point becomes pretty clear.
Some have wagered the company is a little out of practice when it comes to this kind of demo, presenting too slow of a moment out of context with the rest of the offering. I mean, if they showed the first ride to Mexico from RDR1 and nothing else prior to its release, the same thing would probably be said, but slower sections like that in contrast to action-packed sequences help space things out and add atmosphere. In fact, many would regard that journey as one of the best gaming moments ever.
Others have argued that it was simply bad timing, as the presentation was given at the very end of the last day of the conference and everyone was exhausted after what was a long week.
“This is a vocal minority. The murmurs and talk of how amazing it looks far outweigh the few people here voicing negative opinions,” said another Redditor, Black_Static.
Perhaps that vocal minority has spent too much time playing COD to know any better, who knows? Either way, I’m still incredibly pumped for this game, particularly after seeing Rockstar’s official gameplay release a few weeks ago, which you can watch below.
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