Red Dead Redemption II – there’s been a surprising number of discouraging words

A secret GameStop demo of Rockstar’s new game has been accused of sending viewers to sleep, in a surprisingly mixed reception.

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Rockstar Games don’t really do game previews anymore. You could tell they never liked doing them in their earlier days, but since the success of Grand Theft Auto V – and the thinning of their releases schedules – they’ve almost completely given up talking to the press.

They certainly don’t attend events like E3 or Gamescom, but apparently they were at the 2018 GME Conference in the US over the weekend, where GameStop employees were treated to a 20 minute live demo of Red Dead Redemption II… which many of them don’t seem to have liked.

As you’d imagine, no footage of the demo was released and nobody has officially acknowledged it happened, with an Instagram post showing it in progress now having been deleted.

But GameStop employees gathered on Reddit to discuss the demo and a lot of them were surprisingly negative.

Was it the demo or the employees that were boring?

‘Beautiful game, but mostly just saw horse riding simulator. Very difficult to stay awake…’ said jgrindberg before adding: ‘Don’t get me wrong, I still think the game will be fantastic, just the demo was kinda boring to watch.’

‘Half my district was sleeping through it,’ said Caffeineisbad. ‘Almost put me to sleep,’ agreed dutrank on a different thread about the conference in general.

‘Game looked great but what they chose to show for the first 20 minutes was very boring and not what you would want to show to the people who you want hyped about your game’, they added.

‘Rockstar Equestrian Simulator 2K19’, is how Canicallyoukp described it. ‘I mean. Once s*** started happening… OK… sure. Until then, though… not so much. Sure it was pretty, but more than half of the presentation did nothing for me.’

‘There was some action, but he didn’t run at all. I fell asleep during it’, added Quigonsin.

It turns out that the demo was at the very end of the last day of the conference and that some of the attendees were tired simply because it’d been a long week.

But there’s also a certain art to putting on a good game demo and it may be that Rockstar has lost the knack, given how rarely they do it.

We’ve attended plenty of interesting demos for games that turn out to be disappointments, and vice versa, so while things like always walking rather than running may have seemed a good idea to Rockstar it’s probably not how most people are going to play the game.

‘This is a vocal minority. The murmurs and talk of how amazing it looks far outweigh the few people here voicing negative opinions’, said Redditor Black_Static.

’They showed off the graphics and an early robbery. The game looks gorgeous and the physics were amazing. This is easily going to compete with God Of War, and I also see Spider-Man making the lists as well.’

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