Finally I got a chance to play Red Dead Redemption 2 for the very first time, and the graphic is clean sharp and none of that blurry mess most of the AAA games have nowadays.

Oh so I'm not a crazy old man? I always thought UE5 games had that weird motion blur I just thought it was my computer/eyes.

Since UE4 motion blur has been on by default. And I absolutely despise when devs don't include the option to turn it off.
Motion blur makes games look like absolute garbage and I will die on this hill any day.
- I will die on that hill with you, friend.

First thing to do when starting a new game. Go to visual settings and turn off motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration, vignette, film grain, and depending on the game, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, and texture filtering.

Maybe it's just because I'm stuck in 1997, idk, but all that stuff just looks bad to me.

Also, fuck Bloom. It's bad enough that my eyes are starting to do it at night, I absolutely don't want that in video games.
Wrong. First thing you do is turn off TAA, DLSS, Frame generation, upscaling, Lumin, and if possible; anything related to sub-pixel geometry.
Ir better yet; don't play UE5 where most of these things are forced upon you.

I was looking forward to play it once it was on GOG. I had avoided all spoilers for years. Only for Lemmy to spoil the apparently unavoidable ending via a meme on All...

when characters eat a meal they actually cut up their food and eat it, not just a few motions on loop. Lots of love and detail in this game

also the horses balls go up when you ride into cold water

Honestly, this is just one more of the indicators that AAA development budgets have gotten way too large. I love when devs put care into their art, but it should be somewhere it matters. I can't count the number of times I noticed my horses testicles retracting on my knee. It's just a waste of money.
In Dwarf Fortress, for example, when detail is added and actually relevant, it's great. We need more of this, where useful additions are done to create a more tactile world. When time and money are spent doing stuff like the testicles in RDR2, I just imagine how that could have been spent on a different game, instead of just inflating an already massively expensive game and adding essentially nothing, except something for people to post about online.
- I don't think it was their plan to make testicles things, game development is not one process but many separate processes tied together. So while several hundreds people were working on important stuff one dude could have finished their tasks and had nothing to do, so they thought why not do fun stuff quickly.
- I can't agree with you on this one. Sometimes, I think this is the kind of detail that benefits other games : the assets are there and can be reused, in other forms.
  Plus, sometimes it's better to make one great game than a plethora of good games.
  RDR2 wasn't my cup of tea but I have nothing bad to say about this game. It was a masterpiece, in all aspects and in all comes down, at the end, to the attention given to trivial things such as horse testicles.

I played it a little after release. Yeah, no. I needed an upgrade for it, but I played it anyway, and it was blurry as shit. Worse than modern games. Their version of TAA was so much worse than the modern DLSS/FSR TAA we have today. It was purely a temporal blur, adding previous frame data to new frames. It still looked good, but it was blurry. I should try it again now that I've upgraded...

I feel exactly the same. My rig is much better now. Need to try it again.

I really wanted to like this game. I wanted to so bad. I can acknowledge many of its pros, and I can understand why many people like it.

But everything is so. Fucking. Slow. And every mission is "hold A to ride your horse for a long time and then do a small amount of actual action, if you're lucky".

I’m with you. I loved the first RDR, one of my favorite games of all time. Fun interesting characters, the side quest plots all went a little sideways, which was refreshing. I really wanted to like RDR2 but it ended up feeling tedious. Lots to love in the game so I understand why so many people said it was an amazing game.
I feel like Rockstar did the same thing with the GTA games. GTA3, VC, and SA were somewhat realistic games set in a goofy world with strange characters and interactions. By GTA4, all the interesting plots were replaced by pointless minigames and going bowling with cousin Roman. That’s basically the same way I felt about the jump between RDR and RDR2.
I never played Red Dead Revolver so I don’t know how that fits in with the rest.
A game for everybody is a game for nobody.
I like the fact that everybody seemed to be expecting Grand Theft Horsey, and got a slow paced Wild West sim.
I actually played Assassin's Creed Origins right after playing this for like two months straight, and it just felt so "gamey" in comparison.
- I play games of many varieties, and didn't care for AC Origins either. ¯(ツ)/¯
There's a lot to like in there: The environments are gorgeous. The main characters are full of texture. The wildlife feels alive. The soundtrack is excellent. The voice acting is good. The details are fine and abundant. I'm really impressed with the team members who worked on these things.
But sadly, the slapdash user interface, hostile save system, unskippable cut scenes, and absolutely garbage mission mechanics (mostly having to do with robbing the player of agency and imposing ridiculous failure conditions) ruined it for me.
The time I spent wandering around the world simulation was mostly enjoyable. The time I spent playing it as a game was mostly miserable.
- The UI is why I couldn't finish it. My gaming PC is hooked up to my TV and even with a 70" screen I couldn't read hardly any of the maps or menus. I even dusted of a pair of readers but still struggled. It's a beautiful game and looks incredible but after a few hours of that I just got tired of squinting and moved on.
  Maybe someday I'll come back to it and try to find a mod or something but it's just not worth giving myself a headache when there are so many great games out there.
- Yeah I think I agree with you on all counts. I haven't finished it, mind. I also sort of got taken out of immersion constantly by the enormous body count you rack up in every single main story mission. You're essentially committing genocide, and nobody fucking cares. It's such a bizarre clash with all the immersion centric features of the open world sandbox. Even the story tries to be grounded, and then you murder like a thousand O'Driscolls and several hundred sheriffs.
Surely there is a mod to speed things up. Faster horses and whatnot.
Yeah, when i played through it i quickly discovered that I'd have to set aside a few hours at a time in order to actually let myself enjoy it.
Luckily, this was mid 2020 and i had just gotten laid off, so i had time.
I agree with you that it's slow -- and yet, it is one of the very few games I actually finished. That's highly unusual for me. And then I went back and played it again.
It's a game designed to be sipped, not gulped.
- Say what you will about Rockstar, but they make games that 20 years later you still want to return to them (I guess just about 8 years later in this case).
It's really slow for about 1/3 of the way through, and then you get to Saint Denis and it starts taking off a lot harder.
It's a masterpiece, but definitely a slow burn. It's a top 3 game for me for sure.
Maybe it will make a good HBO show one day.
Yeah, I'm kinda with you. I played a lot of it, in the tens of hours, but I didn't finish it. It may be at the peak of self-indulgent simulation for simulation's sake in open world games.
I think I'm glad it exists. Somebody had to do this, like somebody had to do CJ getting fat when he eats and slim when he runs, right? That's a fun thing for someone to have done in a successful mainstream game release.
But there's a reason that didn't show up elsewhere, and that's also a good thing.
Yeah on chapter 1 it played like Life is Strange game or Telltale games, but I enjoy my time with it because of good writing and great scenery

Are you describing Motion Blur by chance? A very common graphical effect used in AAA games these days that try to mimic how objects look blurry when moving quickly in real life. I hate it and always turn it off when I'm able to.

Side note, why the FUCK do devs turn motion blur on by default?!
nope, they're talking about blurry pixelated messes when running on epic settings on a 5090, rendering at 25% scale at single digit fps.
tldr: unreal engine 5
No hes talking about TAA temporal anti aliasing. Makes everything look smeared
- TAA is good, if implemented right. Most games don't do it right tho.
- RDR2 does have TAA though.
I don't think so, in Cyberpunk 2077 I disabled motion blur and depth of field (also tried FSR) but the image is still blurry and jagged edges everywhere (even with 8x AA) same with Control and SH2, in RDR2 I forgot to enable AA only FXAA and it still sharp and crisp also older AAA games like Doom Eternal SOTTR don't have this blurry image and jagged edges problems
- Jagged edges are the opposite of blurry. Blur smooths out sharp edges.
  When edges are sharp and crisp, that's when the jagged nature of square pixels is visible.
  The screenshot you posted here has lots of blurred edges. Look at the grass, trees, and hair.
  Maybe you could post a screen shot of the problem you're talking about?
If it's not done right it can really make your screen stutter trying to render it too.

Absolutely loved rdr2. It’s a gem. I played story mode three times and I love it to death.

If only rdr2 online wasn’t the pvp obnoxious pay-to-win microtransaction-riddled cesspit that it is, I’d still be playing that now.

Three full story playthroughs is a lot of dedication lol I love rdr2 but it sure drags on towards the end. Ive played to the late game probably six times but only actually pushed all the way to the end twice. Kudos!
- Stretched out over a couple of years, with about 10% of game time actually spent on progressing the main story, it’s not that bad ☺️
  I loved loafing around, really.

If you don't disable TAA RDR2 actually does look quite blurry, especially the vegetation looks terrible. I found the best results from using DLDSR as anti-aliasing, but it does take a heavier performance toll.

Also I should get around to finishing RDR2 some day.

I mean, it's a very nice looking game, which may have something to do with it having about ten times the budget of your average game from a major publisher (the term AAA is now entirely meaningless and I refuse to use it without clarification). Guessing that helps.

I'm not sure "clean and sharp" is a positive value, though. This becomes a problem because I don't know what people mean, and people often don't know what they mean, either. Good picture quality doesn't need to be "sharp". Things that are in focus realistically aren't impossibly pin-sharp, that's a videogamey thing. Shadows definitely aren't ever sharp. And of course the picture you presented is anything but sharp, since it's... well, a pretty low-quality 1080p image, so the trees are blobs, the hair is a grainy mess and distant models are blobby.

OK, here's a true fact I would think is common knowledge but it may not be: A slightly older game on higher settings often looks better than a newer game on lower settings. Remedial performance options are often very compromised and not really meant to be used. Expensive features can look bad on minimum settings and newer games can be built around more expensive stuff and look off when those settings are toggled off. Lower resolution rendering of a better looking image can produce worse results than higher res output for a worse looking image for a number of reasons.

That doesn't mean newer games look worse, though. It's just the nature of the beast in PC gaming and it has been for forty years. That's why it's always been cool to go back to old games when you update your hardware.

I just watched a good Any Austin video on RDR2, he studies the power line infrastructure on the map. Makes me want to play again.

So glad it’s finally like this because this game was rough at launch (on PC)

On a GTX1080, I played the entirety of it at 50% of my native resolution (3840x1440) with a lot of settings turned down. I could barely maintain 60fps, with stuttering / dips to as low as 16fps and random crashes.

Since they patched it up, I got a 3080 but have only played the endgame content. Really ought to do another playthrough and experience it properly.

Does anyone know how it plays on the switch?

Yes, it doesnt
- Thanks!

I'm playing it for the first time at the moment as well! But on ps4.

It took me a little bit to get used to the slow pace in parts - almost closer to a sim. I'd just finished Horizon: FW, so the speed of movement was a big change. Now I enjoy the extra time to smoke weed and head-cannon my character.

The writing and plotting are the real treasure of the game so far. I've enjoyed the scenery and the views well enough, but I rarely find myself impressed by graphics.

Haven't got far into the story just yet but I completed chapter 1 and so far so good, gameplay is tight and of course being a RS game the writing is excellent no complain from me

it just gets better and better

I refunded it when I found out I had to create a rockstar account. I would like to play it though. Maybe in 20 years when it's on gog 🤣

I don't have that problem if you catch my drift ;)

Damn those trees are low poly. I know you said its a low end laptop but still.

Probably because I disabled tree tessellation