But the way you describe it reminds me more of Metal Gear than Rockstar, and again, maybe this has always been the case. I haven't tried this out yet, and I recall not hating RDR mechanically, but that was in 2011. Movement, shooting, driving, even mission design structure. That isn't to say they weren't competent, but honestly it kind of feels like they are guilty of just doing whatever is considered standard in a lot of the gameplay mechanics side of things. They never were the studio that took the mechanical components super seriously. Bad controls mixed with bad missions loaded with fail states. I tried to return to GTA 3 San Andreas etc, basically the entire PS2 era Rockstar and man. Similar to how Bethesda games have their own type of quirks, annoyingly obtuse controls in Rockstar games have always been a thing. I feel like this has been an exclusively Rockstar problem for quite some time. So far my main complaint would be that I'll have to choose a weapon to start shooting it and even then there are times where I have it selected and Left Trigger doesn't bring up the aiming, instead I have to press the right trigger to 'activate' the gun or something. It's sort of like a Kojima game where the industry has certain baked in standards, and Metal Gear games always used their own weird control schemes but I just went with it because usually they matched the gameplay. In any other game this would be annoying and to a certain degree it still is a bit annoying for me here, but I don't know why I guess the mood and the setting just kind of make me give it a pass - I'm used to it for the most part. Everything in RDR2 is very slow and deliberate by choice and it's definitely not the sort of game where you run over corpses in circles mashing A to pick up loot which just magically appears in your inventory. Like a few posts above, I can completely understand the complaints and there is really no way to defend them - butafter having played several hours of this game I think they just match the style of gameplay.

Rdr2 ps4 controller layout