Rockstar's Game Design is Outdated

so real late last night as I was finally tying the bow around this fat ass christmas gift, I was gettin REAL nervous cause I know I say some pretty savage shit about the most beloved child in video games right now. But I spent a LOT of time on this vid (as you know) and rewrote it and kept editing it down until I could fully stand by every word. I think my only regret is not giving more attention to all of the things that Red Dead 2 does SUPER GOOD (visuals, writing, characters, music, D'Angelo) but I guess that would kinda go against the thesis of the vid. Anyways, just wanted to say that I care about this vid a lot and I hope you like it and I hope it leads to lots of interesting conversations. I'm super interested to hear your responses either in this gamer chat or on Twitter. Thanks for watching and have a lovely holiday :)

xoxo - Jacob

I recently found a random camp in the middle of nowhere, I saw absolutely no one in it, so I decided to take the loot on its side.
Immediately after doing so a random ass person very clearly spawned to my left, counted as a witness for me stealing even though too far away to have seen me, and he started shooting me without hesitation.

The beat at the end is excellent

Its funny how this gets recommended to me again before gta 6 comes out this year

Let's see if GTA 6 changes things up.

I HATE the rifle stowing thing with your horse! Why on earth did anyone think that it would be fun or engaging to have your weapons unequip without you saying so, all it does is make combat, which is already really janky, more awkward and irritating. It basically means that most of the time if you get ambushed and need to get off your horse, all you have to fight with is your pistols. And may god help you if you forget about all this as you enter a mission where you don't get your horse and you have to play the entire thing with nothing but your pistols

I really hope rockstar made notes with this video for GTA 6 I do not want another boring linear storyline.

People still talk about this video years later. Shits crazy.

i think youd like the kcd games, esp hardcore mode

The money part really confused me in my playthrough, too. About halfway through Chapter 3, I basically never worried about spending money again, and it just kept piling up. No amount of donations to the camp seemed to make anyone less stressed out, and I kinda don’t know what the hell they were expecting you to sink money into. Horses? Unlike in GTA, you actually have to RIDE the horses for upgrades instead of just souping your car out in the garage as soon as you buy it, which makes you way less likely to want to switch horses unless it’s strictly an upgrade already compared to your trained horse. I only bought 2 horses the entire playthrough: the required purchase for the story beat, and one later about 2/3rds of the way through the game that was basically one of the best horses in the game. I never needed another and never spent any money on horses besides the occasional service fee at the stable, and those fees were a fraction of a fraction of my total wallet.

7 years later and this still hits

Just played RDR1 for the first time, one of the worst games I've ever played

Another thing about the "random encounters" is that they are so heavily front-loaded, ie they seem to happen all the time when you reach a new area in the world, but the second, third, fourth .... times you go there, nothing happens at all. Whereas in Red Dead Redemption, much more limited in the different types of encounters of course, but they actually make the world feel more dynamic, because they can and do still happen after you've explored the map, found every item, and completed all the missions.

Rockstar’s primitive design needs to be left behind with GTA 6.

The story and character still make this game a 10/10 but I agree with this video even more rewatching this video again after 7 years.

Just tried to chase the bear me and Hosea hunting, and I failed the mission. I understand now what you meant.

Coming back nearly 8 years later and I feel like people now forget about these valid criticisms. The game is amazing and holds up today, but the criticisms laid out here are 100% valid and I think was a MAJOR factor on why God of War won game of the year that year. They definitely both deserved it but I think the right game won the award.

An immersive sim cowboy game sounds like it could be cool

It's still my all time favorit

its so funny how no one bother with the points of this video, until it this video was posted, and now everyone says the same shit that this guy sayed, over and over and over again.

hi. i came to know abt u from yard podcast. i like the perspective of yours about the game. i didn't think like that way. most of it, i didn't have any problem with. i agree on the complaints where: we are not able to access weapons in the camp. black magic of taking out weapons from horse xD. and the bounty system.

Hello, watching this in 2026. yeah, I agree on a lot of the points made in this video. the best way, that I can describe rdr2, without spending 2 hours going over the same shit in this video, is it's a flawed masterpiece. that could have been just a masterpiece, if Rockstar was actually willing to budge, on how they approach game design.

The amount of Red Dead apologies is wild. You’d think they were part of the development team or something lol

its 2026 and i just remembered thats so raven had anything to do with psychic premonitions because of this video. im 35. meow.

I honestly do not understand how people call this game a flawless 10/10 masterpiece. The second you try to actually play the story missions, the entire production quality takes a massive 90-degree nosedive.The rigid script design is completely broken. On the boat mission, the game expects a stealth sequence but forces you into a gunfight anyway. In Guarma, Hercule's AI completely glitched into a bush and soft-locked the game. In the cave rescue, choosing to use the canoe forces you into a grueling, unskippable slow walk. Even the basic stealth in 'Honor Among Thieves' and 'Archeology for Beginners' is statistically impossible due to broken NPC vision cones and pathing errors. If you dare to try a non-lethal, logical solution—like using a lasso to stop a runaway horse during a random kidnapping event—the game engine panics, treats you like a criminal, and docks your Honor.Worse yet, the narrative completely falls apart in Chapter 6. The characters flatten into one-dimensional, gamey plot devices. Micah’s logic makes zero sense; he has no logical reason to chase Arthur on the mountain when his only priority should be escaping the Pinkertons, and he had a dozen better opportunities to turn rat before then. Sadie’s transition into an unkillable super-soldier is completely unearned. And the hypocrisy is staggering—the game beats you over the head with the lesson that 'revenge is a fool's game,' yet explicitly punishes you with a negative karma penalty if you choose to practice what it preaches and refuse to help Sadie massacre a ranch.RDR2 is a beautiful cowboy simulator, but the actual video game and mission scripting are held together by digital duct tape. No wonder Dan Houser quit after writing this.

Now rockstar is going full in on the fortnight and roblox experience with their online mode

In order to tell an effective story, meaningful context must be provided. This requires restriction in any medium. Your argument is like saying that you want to read a book by only reading prime number pages because you "feel like it" and that this is more "free" but then complaining the story makes no sense. Or that you want a movie to move its camera away from the central characters to see what's happening behind them and then complaining that you can't see what the characters are doing now. Good artists control context in order to create meaning, bad artists destroy context or fail to provide it. The user is not the artist. Your idea of "freedom" is rooted in ego.

What you're arguing for is a child's idea of freedom. Rockstar are not building a Lego sandbox for you to frolic around in, they're building an immersive experience that tells a competent story. You can dislike this form of game design, that's perfectly fine, but to claim it's outdated is not true, especially when this kind of cinematic game design became popular in the late 2000s. GTA and Red Dead should not be Saints Row and Saints Row should not be GTA or Red Dead. If you want to play with Lego go play Minecraft or something. I buy Rockstar games because I want an immersive experience that tells a good story.

Recently, playing RDR2, I was able to rob Strawberry's shop very fast, main entrance in and out tied him and run away. Already had a bounty of 500$+, no mask, I was doing the 4th bandit quest. You say it's impossible at 20:36

So basically Rockstars games would work better as immersive sims.

I did not play the game when it released mostly because of this video. Well I didn't play the original either because I didn't like aiming with the controller. now I just finished the two games back to back on PC, and I think the video is spot on, but I still regret waiting so long, should have given it a chance anyway.

not outdated, just bad. There are games from the late 90s / early 2000s that provide more player agency and emergent gameplay. Examples include Thief, System Shock and Deus Ex, aka immersive sim game design

85 million copies