Just barely 3 weeks from release, but Take Two hasn't sent out review copies yet. They gila want people to finish the game in less than 2 weeks or what?

I believe online will only be activated sometime in November or early December. There will be an open beta in early November though. So no co-op for a while.

Day 1 patch is about another 3-5gb (or so I'm told) btw.

There will be a "Play disc" and "Data disc".







So no, for those thinking that you can just lend the second disc to someone to play, you can't. Also the entire first disc needs to be installed first before you can start the game. It's not a partial install and you can start like in most other games. So yup, physical owners - you're in for a wait.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 20 2018, 07:01 PM

There's so much to talk about, but it's impossible to even put it into a post. This game is just insanely huge, it's true. You can almost live you second life in this game. I really wonder when everyone get their hands on it, how much secrets would there be to uncover.

To be clear once again;

The Bank Robbery mission in the special edition plays out like a heist, just like in GTA5 and just like in all the other bank robberies in the main game. It's an extra.

The other "Gang Hideout" is actually also a mission. There are some confusion as people thought that this is supposedly a hideout for your gang where your NPC buddies can stay in and you can build it up like a fort (similar to Fallout 4). No, it's simply just a mission where you go kill a bunch of idiots, take their loot and sing kumbaya. That's all.

PS4's fault, not R*. PS4 doesn't read UHD disc, so they cannot use 100GB blu-ray discs. The Xbox One S and X can, but since the original xbone doesn't - they are getting the 2 disc treatment too.

Embargo lifts at 7pm today. Watch out for spoiler filled reviews.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 25 2018, 01:16 PM

Little late but here's the quick and dirty forum review, no spoilers:

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+ 8 years in the making and it's understandable why; the depth this game has is basically unrivaled as far as open world designs go.

+ A great balance in old west grit, the brutality and how human lives being portrayed as nothing important can be an eye opener for those not familiar with the "old wild west". The story is unique and truly "western", there are themes that will absolutely make you go "wtf did I just witness?".

+ You feel like an outlaw, you are an outlaw and you can continue to be the asshole of your dreams. The game doesn't stop you from being righteous or a conceited SOB. It's a lot more dynamic than in GTA5 and in RDR1 where the path is generally fixed for the player.

+ Gunplay is fairly simple but engaging, Dead Aim is addictive and shooting people's testicles off never gets boring. Watch them bleed out of their nutsack.
+ Cutscenes are well framed and shot, its style is similar to that of the legendary western film Unforgiven (1992).

+ When Rockstar said they had over 300,000 lines of dialogue in the game, I thought that was an exaggeration. How the hell do they even have that many dynamic NPCs to talk pointless bs? Well turns out, there ARE that many banters that goes on in the game. Go to the bar, sit down and listen to some jackass blow hot air, they weren't joking.

+ Game sounds engaging, atmospheric and amazing as a whole. If you have a fairly recent HT system with Atmos/DTSX ceiling or height speakers, engage your receiver's DSU or Neural X upmixing. Going to the forest and hearing the wildlife there with all the animals making noises and chirps, it's like virtually being in an episode of Planet Earth 2 - jaw dropping stuff. The attention of detail the sound designers has captured and mixed into the game is eerie in a very good way!

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~ While gun combat feels engaging, hand to hand fights are... meh. It's a series of mashing the right buttons and it's pretty much watching how Arthur beats the shit out of some poor sod rather than being engaged in a brawl.

~ As with all open world games, the game has bugs. I have not run into any game breaking ones, but there are annoying ones like how my horse simply refuses to listen to me for whatever reason despite having a maxed out "relation" meter. There are also NPCs clipping through buildings, the odd stuff like enemies not dying to headshots but dying to limb decapitations.


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— The only low point of the game on PS4 and PS4 Pro, as far as these systems are concerned - is that they are not perfect nor great. It's definitely very playable and way better than when GTA5 first released on the PS3. As was already shown on DF's analysis videos - the framerates are quite erratic in the towns and what they showed was really only 2 towns. There IS another town that actually tanks the framerate even more, but it's kind of spoilery so I understand why they didn't mention or show it.

— Load times... welp, those on standard PS4 with stock drives - you're in for quite a bit of waiting. I shudder to think how bad load times will be when Red Dead Online launches.


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Is this the best open-world game ever made up till this point? Has Rockstar finally surpassed San Andreas in design, scale and outlook? Yes. It's just day 1 and I'm already seeing things from many players that I thought wouldn't surprise me after playing this game for over 2 weeks. That's how much detail this game has and I'm not even done with everything yet, hell I think 100%'ing this game is a pretty tall order. Then there's RDO which I hope R* has taken lessons from GTAO, absolutely looking forward to that.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 26 2018, 05:13 PM

Still waiting for Agent 11 years later....

Actually, there's something wrong with the Pro mode as a whole. Being curious, I just restarted the game up on my old Sony W900A 1080p TV and the game doesn't actually have any internal downsampling at all. This means that the super sampling option needs to be forced enabled from the PS4 Pro's Video and Sound settings menu instead. The other odd thing is that the 1080p mode has a sharpness slider under the game's Video settings where as in 4k mode there isn't.

Force enabling super sampling will make the Pro's fans ramp up and the extra heat output is obvious. So it's clear here that the option does something.

Now what's EVEN more interesting is that cutscenes (including the odd taxing scene DF showed) does not drop below 30 often at all! This suggests that PS4 Pro at 1080p DOES NOT use any Pro enhancements at all but the increased clock rate from Boost mode is helping the game run at a more stable 30fps (which isn't the case if it runs at 4k).

The implementation on the Pro is busted at this moment.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 27 2018, 10:07 PM

Here's a comparison. Please disregard the time of day difference, it is virtually impossible to have the same time of day between resets.

Please right click open in new tab:



Look at alpha transparencies like tree branches, leafs, and grass. You can see they are much cleaner. But on the flip side, if you look at Arthur's coat - the non-super sampled image is sharper as well as the roof tiles.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 27 2018, 10:00 PM

You can change sprinting to hold X instead of tapping X in the settings.

My suggestion for aiming in this game, completely turn deadzone down to zero, acceleration to max, auto aim to 1 or 2 clicks from zero and sensitivity to anywhere you want. This is as close as I can get it to Max Payne 3's feel.

This post has been edited by SSJBen: Oct 28 2018, 02:04 PM

When you get a legendary pelt, first thing you do is make a manual save. Second thing you do is go to a trapper and sell it.

You can't get your legendary pelt back once it's gone because those legendary animals only exists once.

As long as you give/sell it to a trapper (be it Pearson or the NPC who has a store at St. Dennis/in the wild) then your pelts are safe.


It's much better on an SSD of course.

Check some of the chimneys, literally, in St Dennis. I won't spoil it for you.

Legendary animals you can kill them however you want (except dynamite), you will always get legendary quality pelts.

Perfect pelts are easy after you get a trinket that improves pelt quality. Meaning good pelts becomes perfect.

As for animals not appearing, you understand that animals react to the weather as well as time of day right? They don't just hang around at the same spot forever.

Don't do it. Spoils the game, especially after chapter 4.

These people just ruining the experience.

You can lasso anything between medium and large animals. Good luck lassoing a bison or a bear though.

Also you can lasso animals that are dead in the river to pull them up to shore.

When America started to have state of laws, there was this big grey line where people who were outlaws are regarded as bad people. But when you think about it, who said the ones who made the law were good in the first place? As has been proven through real life history, the ones that made the law weren't always right - which still goes on today.

A little birdie told me sometime before end of the month...

May be delayed... though.