Biscuits are not dinner!
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/10/26/tips-tricks-and-suggestions-for-the-novice-red-dead-redemption-2-cowboy/
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2018/10/26/tips-tricks-and-suggestions-for-the-novice-red-dead-redemption-2-cowboy/
How do I turn in the deer I have shot at the camp. Do I walk up to the butchers counter with the deer on my shoulder, click the right button on the pad to donate and select the deer? Or do I just drop it on the ground with X? I tried the former method with two dear now but the status icon for food in the camp doesn’t seem to change. Feels like I’m doing something wrong.
No need to tote the deer around camp! Leave it on your horse and Pearson will accept it as a donation at his butcher’s table.
Should we have a separate thread for these kinds of spoiler-free questions and tips? You know what. Stand by. Let me set something up. I hope you guys don’t mind if I pull a few posts from the general thread.
-Tom
Thanks for clearing that up. This is a dense game with lot’s of stuff to figure out. 🐎
Ain’t that the truth. Wow. I am loving this experience so far, I’m only two hours in and only just did the hunting tutorial bit and it looks like I’m about ready to rocket out of tutorial island. This has been fantastic so far!
If I have one complaint it’s holy crap, there are a LOT of buttons to memerize, from how to mount a horse or open up your satchel to how to crouch and sneak. In an early mission I was told to “keep low, keep quiet” and trying to figure out what button that was I fired my pistol at the ground, which did, in fact, get a reaction out of everyone and led to a crazy moment. LOL. Kind of amazing. Now I know, by the way, crouching is L3. :)
Indeed. I went to the controls menu just to commit some of them to memory and it was borderline unusable – kept cycling through 3 different “on-foot” modes. So there are 3 different on-foot control layouts based on context. This might take a while to get comfortable.
This is where I’m at. I only sat down to play it once, for a few hours, and I honestly think taking the day to work and get back to it this afternoon will be good - I find setting a complex down for a bit and coming back to it I pick it up faster, knowing a bit more what I’m in for. Plus, after not too many hours you have to think a lot of this becomes muscle memory. Fingers crossed.
I have only played the game for an hour. I enjoyed a lot of it.
I also found the controls to be almost a parody, like someone’s cruel, idiotic joke of overly complex control commands. It also felt sludgy, the control of everything my horse to Arthur was clunky at times, almost more oddly out of control than the Witcher 3. Who thought making players play thumb twister on the controllers was a good idea?
Based upon the reviews I’m sure I’ll eventually fall in love…but I have played a few other games that created a better first impression.
I don’t recall Roach’s handling from The Witcher 3 specifically, but the horses in Red Dead Redemption 2 are definitely finicky. Far more finicky than Phobos’ point-n’-go controls in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. But a couple of things to keep in mind. The horses are like cars in a driving game. Starter horses aren’t as good as better horses. As you study the horses you see, you’ll note they have different qualities in the compendium. Arabians are good in battle for a specific reason, for instance. Appaloosas are flighty little things in comparison. Shires have great stamina for long distance sprinting. That sort of thing.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, a horse’s control changes as you level up your bond with it, as well as the tack you’re using, which can be upgraded at any stable. So the horse you’re riding when the game begins won’t be the same horse you’re riding later in the game, even if it is, technically, the same horse.
It starts to make sense eventually. Such as the way the weapon and inventory wheels are laid out, which I explain above. These are some of Rockstar’s usual idiosyncracies, but they’re not just random. Basically, the X button is always your feet or legs, running, galloping the horse, that sort of thing. The triangle button is reaching out to manipulate something with your hands, always context specific. The circle button is for punching or kicking. It’s your melee control. And the square is for interacting with the terrain (picking up stuff, changing cover, mantling). The L2 button aims your weapons, but it also aims your intent to interact with someone, whether it’s talking to a character or addressing your horse. Just make sure you don’t have a weapon drawn.
It can feel like a mess, and you will fumble it early on. But you should start to see patterns eventually. It’s too bad the controls aren’t revealed in such a way to teach you those patterns.
-Tom
I’m happy to hear that there’s a logic to it. At one point I almost burst out laughing last night, because there was an almost Onion-like “They can’t be serious” level of control wrangling going on.
My one worry – and I will try to state this in a way that doesn’t sound cranky, because I mean it as a clear-eyed observation – is that the control scheme is something that game reviewers may not have minded so much. If you’re reviewing a game, I’m guessing that you’ve (a royal “you”, by the way!) have poured multiple heavy gameplay sessions into this in a fairly compact (one week? two? three?) span of time to get to the end. But for a player who may need to take a week away from the game – or more – and return, it may be tougher for the controls to get to fully intuited levels. Maybe.
Does the game give out some control cues throughout at least? That will absolutely be helpful.
It is cool that noob horses handle like noob horses, and that better horses will have a better feel and also that the relationship between man and horse affects things. I like that mechanic a lot!
I have to agree on the controls. The first hour it felt very clunky to me. I will say by hour 3 I mostly had it down. I didn’t really spend time to look up the controls to see what you can customize if anything either. I just wanted to see as much as I could before I hit the sack.
The one thing I did right away was jack up the control speed. By default I found the aim VERY slow and this is from someone that generally plays with a slowish aim speed. So I would make sure to look at that if you haven’t.
This is a great point. And related to this, I was really dismayed that there’s no controls screen that I can find in the menus. So there’s no way to look up what the controls actually are within the game. And since I bought a digital copy on Xbox Live, I don’t have a physical manual to reference either.
Unrelated to the above, here’s a tip for new players:
- Don’t start the game 30 minutes before you have to go to work. As far as I can tell, there’s no place to save the game. I played for 45 minutes, and got to work 15 minutes late, but I still hadn’t reached a point where it let me save the game. So give yourself a big chunk of time to start the game.
Oh, you’ll definitely get rusty if you put it down for too long. I had the luxury of falling into nothing but Red Dead Redemption 2 all day every day for the last week or so. By choice. I normally wouldn’t have cared about trying to get a review in on day one. But I didn’t want to put it down. So if I’d jumped back into Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, or Spider-Man, or whatever, I’m sure it would have been a mess. Your worry is well founded.
Not really. I mean, it does when you need to get something done. It won’t leave you hanging when you’re supposed to press triangle to light a fuse or pull a lever or something like that. But that whole idea of each button doing a specific thing is never spelled out. And it should have been.
I usually go to the control layout screen to take notes when I sit down to play a new game. After staring at the screen in RDR2 for a moment, I just sighed and put the legal pad down. Notes weren’t going to help. It was only through playing that stuff about the control layout and inventory wheel started to come together.
-Tom
You actually can create hard saves whenever you want. I think it’s the Story sub-menu in the start menu.
The save game option is under Story in the pause menu. First big box on the left. It’s sometimes locked – maybe during scripted sequences? – but otherwise, you can save anytime.
EDIT: Too slow! What Scott said.
-Tom
Yes, that save game option in the story menu is the one I was referencing when I said that was never unlocked in the first 45 minutes of the game.
They don’t even really point out that you can go in there to save. Or if they did I totally missed it. I found it by accident before I went to sleep.
I went into every submenu this morning, looking for the control scheme to the game, but never found one. But I did find that locked Save Game option that will presumably unlock at some point.
IT does auto save a lot as well. It’s just not obvious.
These are some of Rockstar’s usual idiosyncracies, but they’re not just random. Basically, the X button is always your feet or legs, running, galloping the horse, that sort of thing. The triangle button is reaching out to manipulate something with your hands, always context specific. The circle button is for punching or kicking. It’s your melee control. And the square is for interacting with the terrain (picking up stuff, changing cover, mantling). The L2 button aims your weapons, but it also aims your intent to interact with someone, whether it’s talking to a character or addressing your horse. Just make sure you don’t have a weapon drawn.
Oh, man. Thanks for this explanation. I haven’t played a Rockstar game since San Andreas and I don’t know that I ever realized the logic behind the controls. Like some of you, I also struggled with the complexities of precisely controlling Arthur but practice and Tom’s explanation will help!
Another thing I also had trouble with was following some of the verbal directions shouted out to you. “Get behind the cow shed”! Heck, I’m a city slicker. I don’t know enough to differentiate sheds and their various uses! This misstep prematurely started a firefight but we got through. I did have to go find and pick up my hat afterwards, though. Good thing it was clearly marked on the map!
This dang game, man.