This was a replay, the first time I played I loved the story.
This time I spend around 100 hours in chapter 2 exploring the world, which was amazing, before moving on with the story.
The things I found annoying-
- Weird NPC comments - like remarks by gang on how soon Arthur returned to camp or the blood on him, when he has a deer on his shoulder, when Arthur is the only one feeding them. Or NPC saying why is Arthur following him, while walking down stairs.
- Arthur saying he'll look for gang member request item even when he already has it.
- Law system, inconsistent economy.
- No repercussions of Arthur's behavior with gang or Arthur's contribution to camp funds.
This broke immersion for me on several occasions even when I wanted to believe otherwise as I was loving the world and wanted to be deeply immersed regardless.
But these were minor issues and were overshadowed by the beautiful world.
I finally lost it with all the spoon-feeding and the hand-holding during missions, and when daddy rockstar did not like it when I did not play EXACTLY how they wanted me to, standing in the wrong spot - mission failed, try a different strategy - mission failed, jumped directly outside Danbury's window - guess what - mission failed because Danbury just had a divine vision and destroyed the documents in a second. Fuck this shit.
However much I loved the open world this time and the story in the first play-through. RDR2 is definitely overrated and extremely annoying.
End of rant. This is obviously just an opinion, and enjoying game is the only thing that matters, so if you do, lucky you.
It's funny because a lot of the things that bug you are immersion features that gamers of 20 years ago would be blown away by, regardless of how badly they were implemented. Goes to show how spoiled we are for immersive games these days. But interestingly, it sounds like RDR2 was less immersive for you because of those additional immersion features, because it always had little hitches that completely shattered your immersion. I guess realism has an uncanny valley in games - a game with more simulated elements also needs a higher degree of polish on those elements, as the errors become more obvious the closer you get to reality.
The game isn't immersive to me because watching one button perform a 20 second interaction just isn't engaging. Which to me is the forefront of the difference between "immersion" and "engagement".
That on top of all the little frustrations that OP mentioned. Hitching your horse is a huge pain and takes you out of the moment every time, for example.
Tbh, the entirety of RDR2 feels like that to me. It's been critically acclaimed as the most immersive game ever, but it just is so far from actually being that for me because of all of these little things that actively take away from it.
Overall, it's fine. It's not really a great game IMO, but a prolonged interactive story. The gameplay aspects are sporadic and mostly require you to mash the A button to keep your horse on the trail, else you don't move along it. With the advertising and gamers both claiming it to be an immersive game, things like these really detract. I went in expecting a cinematic experience and came out of it with the saddest GTA jank and repetitive grinding for time sensitive unlocks.
Add in the senseless unskippable animal skinning and it just results in a good 70% of the game being unenjoyable for me. I played through the story, which was mostly pretty good, and the rest of the game was waiting to get to a destination to do one thing or see one event, then waiting til I got to the next destination. The gunplay is alright, the spontaneous events are funny, sometimes a little shallow but mostly are good. but man... I was disappointed with the game, as a game.
Of course, this is all my personal preference too. I just don't find watching multiple extended cutscenes and multiple sub-scenes every few interactions. I don't blame it all on these sorts of things, but I have a really hard time agreeing that it deserves the acclaim it's gotten when these are pretty significant shortcomings for a game, specifically advertised to be immersive.
Sometimes you want to ride around on a horse and take on the sights, and it sure does to a good job at that. There's some good tools and gunplay which are pretty fun to play with and... Well, that's about where the fun ends.