Fishing was just another pointless side activity which didn't require player skill. That's a fact. As for the rest of your assertion here (pretending I rushed or something), you're incorrect, i.e. I also took my time between main missions, with treasure hunting, legendary animal hunting & various side activities being the bulk of my time in the game. Whether someone rushes or takes their time, Arthur is still a hypocritical turd, as is Dutch, as is Hosea & the rest are just as unpleasant to varying degrees. It's standard Rockstar "we want to write an anti-heroes with redeeming qualities, but we fail & we produce shitbags who quickly become moralizing & annoying".
Never implied fishing required skill. Really, nothing in RDR2 does except the shootouts. You thinking the characters are hypocritical and unpleasant doesn't make them poorly written characters, you're right, they're all varying degrees of liars, scoundrels and thieves. Of course they're going to be full of shit. You really gonna tell me most of the characters John Wayne played weren't some degree of unlikable?
That's Arthur Morgan, his gang & RDR2's "story". Steretypical evil rich capitalist who they repeatedly rob? Check. Stereotypical hillbillies to gun down? Check. Streotypical betrayal within the gang? Check. Stereotypical critique of 19th century USA in which murdering, thieving sacks of shit moralize the player about the wrongs of that era? Check. The gameplay elements surrounding the gang don't even work, i.e. the player quickly becomes the richest contributor to the gang by a huge margin & yet everyone still acts like Arthur is worth nothing. The irony in this "game" being the fact Arthur would survive & prosper far better on his own without handing welfare payments to those ungrateful morons we're told Arthur needs to provide for in the name of their mutual survival. I donated thousands of dollars & upgraded the camp, whilst the rest gave peanuts by comparison & permanently acted like the gang was poor & desperate.
You imply strongly that stereotype and cliche are somehow inherently bad things. What's wrong with doing something unremarkable well? Do you think they wouldn't have all the staples of a western... in a western? There's plenty of stuff that isn't borrowed from other sources, a lot of it just isn't in the main plot. Your observation of the gang's inability to properly recognise John's contributions is also a little unfair, of
course there's going to be cognitive dissonance,
no video game can get around that. As soon as you hand control off to a player they're going to do things their way. Just because you donated thousands and thousands of dollars doesn't mean everyone did. Maybe someone's John blew all their cash on guns and gambling and had nothing left for the gang. Could they have dynamically altered the gang's reactions to John based on this? Sure, but I'd argue that the game already dynamically responds to player interaction on a level that the vast majority of others simply don't. It's not an RPG.
How about no? The Walking Dead might still have "critical" support from the mainstream so-called media, but the rest of us realized it was a complete unredeemable pile of shit back in season 3.
You specifically said "a mediocre rating". If not by the media, then do you wanna go by user metrics? 8.3 on iMDB. 77% on RT, even though like you said, it's been shit for years. Not only that but it's
still in the top 10 most watched TV shows. Making the assumption that a story like RDR2's given the TV treatment would receive a "mediocre rating" is a little delusional given how low the bar is set. RDR2 has a better story than most of the garbage on TV.
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