I am in chapter 4 still, and money is getting tight again. But probably because I own just about every clothing outfit I could buy, and I have customized engraved weapons. :)
The best horses cost around a thousand bucks each, so that is the primary money sink.
Having a high honor rating can knock about 300 bucks or more off the thousand dollar horses, as well.
Yeah, it’s my second playthrough, so I know how the Epilogue ends. But I suppose at least that happens at the VERY end?
It just strikes me as odd that a game that’s all about “big scores” and “good takes”, provides you with so little in the way of actual money sinks into which to put your loot - that is at least vaguely commensurate with the amount of money you can obtain very easily, via missions they placed in the game (not grinding). And the potential money sinks the game DOES have (like weapons), it directly undermines by giving you most of them for free anyway.
The horses are a potential sink, but the way they work only really incentivizes you to buy one good one.
Maybe I’m viewing it too much through the lens of standard open-world action adventure design conventions, instead of how Rockstar usually tell their stories. I suppose it just seems like a weird, fairly easily rectified oversight, considering how far they went in other areas of the game, in the name of “realism” and “immersion”.
At any rate - great game.
Yeah, I’ve already maxed out the “good” side of the morality slider, and I’m not at the end of chapter 4.
The “honor” system in the game is actually another mechanic that feels a little undercooked to me, because the game just throws a gauntlet of fairly simple, binary moral choices at you late in the game, that give you a huge chunk of positive or negative honor, making it fairly easy to min/max no matter what you’ve done up to that point (unless you’ve truly played it down the middle).
Rockstar’s fortes have always been memorable characters and worlds that feel like living, breathing places - not necessarily their ability to layer in mechanics on top of it.
It may not have a deliberate design choice, but accumulating so much cash in single player should help prepare players for online, where money absolutely will mean a lot.
Is honor capped per chapter? I’m the friendliest, greetingest motherfucker in the West and I swear my honor bar hasn’t budged in a while even though I still get the “+ Honor” notifications. Looks to be around or just above 75%.
My experience matches yours, so I’m guessing that’s the case. Doesn’t matter how many people I say hi to, or how many fish I catch and release, or how many bales of hay I tote to the horse feeding area, I definitely have a hard cap on my honor.
Ya know, I’ve never seen the wood chopping area in camp (and I’m in Chapter 3.)
Little things that I probably love more than most people: Just riding into Valentine, maxxing out the mods on my new bolt action rifle, going into the saloon around 8:30 PM, eating dinner, sitting down and playing poker and listening to all of the conversations going on in the busy bar. Playing poker until about 2 am, then getting a bath and going to bed, sleeping until morning, going outside clean and refreshed, saying hi to folks, brushing and feeding my Arabian “Destiny”, looking at the map and deciding what to do today.
I think one reason I love the game and don’t have the problem with some of the inelegant aspects is the same reason I loved Skyrim. I really wasn’t all that interested in the “game” or the main story line. I just loved having a huge world to explore that was filled with interesting stuff to reward my explorations. I rode into a part of the map I’d not yet been in yet and was blown away by how the differences in the landscape and the wildlife I had not previously seen. They’ve given me a wonderful open world and the freedom to live my virtual life pretty much how I want.
I got pretty scared at seeing a 93 GB patch queued up. But after I deleted most other games on my drive, it still wasn’t starting, so I rebooted the Xbox, and when it came back up, it was only a five and a half gig patch instead.
Yeah, this is my take as well. I’m in chapter 4 still (restarted completely while in chapter 2 because I upgraded to a One X), and have had had to deal with RL issues and gone days without playing anything, but it’s always a joy to jump in even if I do nothing with the main narrative. It’s easily my favorite open world type game ever.
Something weird happened tonight. For several hours IRL, probably a few game days or so, I had two horses, and my original, inactive horse had been living at camp for a day or so after I purchased a second horse. Tonight I decided to stable the inactive horse in town, rather than keep him in camp. No real reason, just wanted to stable him. Along the way, we were acosted by a guy who didn’t like us wandering into his camp, and after murdering him I took his pretty white horse. After calming/taming her, I brought all three horses to the stable. Riding the new horse, I kept looking back to make sure the other two were still with me, and they were. They followed no problem and we arrived at the stable. As we entered, it looked like all three horses went in, but then my original horse seemed to vanish. I stabled the new, white horse, and my second, active horse just fine, but my original horse was simply gone. So I decided to head back to camp on foot, after naming the white horse and making sure she and my favorite, active horse were stabled OK. Now, back at camp, I can retrieve only the two more recent horses from the horse station, and not my original.
Did my horse vanish into the ether because I had never stabled him in the first place? Seems weird, if that’s the case, because I’d bought him, and had been riding him for a long time before purchasing my second horse. I don’t mind too much, because my second horse is the only expensive one of the three and I like him best, but I’m bothered that a horse I’d purchased outright and owned for so long could just disappear into thin air like that.
Oh, I should also mention that as I was discovering in the stable that the original horse had vanished, I also noticed that my second, favorite horse had somehow lost his name and had to be named again. But he still had the customizations I’d given him.
I think I figured out what caused the first horse to vanish, sort of. When I’d originally purchased it while playing the Hosea mission, somehow it was designated as my temporary horse and remained so up until now, in Chapter 3. So when I mounted another temporary horse, the original temporary horse lost even its old temporary status. Why that caused it to vanish upon entering the stable, I don’t know. So the lesson is to always stable, or at least manually saddle, any horse you don’t want to permanently lose.
Anyone else tried online? I’ve only just checked it out: created my lady gunslinger, played through the opening scenes until I hit free roam. Your only choice for hat at the beginning is real dumb, so I nabbed one off a corpse in the aftermath of a gunfight, but during the next gunfight I lost it. So–and I kind of feel bad about this–I got a little ways out of town, waited by the side of the road, and shot the next dude that rode past me so I could steal his hat.
I just took a break during the tutorial, at the point where the game wants me to start matchmaking. So far it’s pretty slick. As for the starter hats, if you don’t change hats while designing your look, you’ll start with the stovepipe by default, but there’s also a cap and a cowboy hat.
The flat cap is default for ladies apparently. And there was no cowboy hat option.
I was really hoping for a black betty outfit for the female gunslinger, but nothing so far.
Diego
Huh, my female gunslinger was initially wearing the stovepipe, when the option to pick a hat came up. I went with the cowboy hat. Or whatever it is. I just take the hat off each time I start.
Finished up the tutorial last night, which requires teaming up with 3 other people. We raided a small bandit outpost and stole some horses. Pretty easy. After that, I went solo and ran round for a couple of hours, hunting and selling to the butcher, who is now the only buyer of pelts and meat. That stuff sells for about the same as in single player, I think. Looting NPCs yields significantly less, though. I made it to Rank 4, and have about $30. Was going to save up for binoculars or a gun scope, but it looks like I’ll need to rank up quite a bit more, first.
Going solo doesn’t really seem to be a viable option, if you want to level up and make good money. Bracing myself to team up more tonight and over the weekend.
You can turn off voice chat in the settings
Yeah, I turned it off. But I do prefer to talk when I need to communicate in online games. Hopefully it’s easy enough to turn it on and off as needed. I suppose Discord channels are also a possibility (my PC is close enough).