Like millions of gamers, I spent November of 2018 playing through the single player campaign of Rockstar’s blockbuster Red Dead Redemption 2. I thoroughly enjoyed RDR2 from beginning tutorials through the end credits. Yes, I even loved the prologue! I was constantly in awe of the game’s polish and attention to detail.

During the time that I was playing through Red Dead 2, I recall that hosts on several games media podcasts were complaining about the numerous, drawn out animations that RDR 2 forces on the player. It is true, every activity from scavenging resources from a cupboard through skinning a boar included very detailed animations that take several seconds of game time. However, not once during my playthrough did I think the animations took away any from my enjoyment of the game. They only added to the immersion of living in a slower paced, albeit more dangerous time.

Fastforward to mid-January of 2019… I decided it was time to get back into my backlog of PS4 games. Next up was Horizon Zero Dawn, a big 2017 hit that I was really looking forward to playing. I typically try not to play big open world games back-to-back, so I did take a little breather in the first two weeks of January to play with the PSVR I got for Christmas.

Horizon Zero Dawn is an incredible game in its own right. No, it’s not as immersive and the open world is nowhere near as detailed as the world of Red Dead 2. Still, the beauty and scale of the world and the robo-creatures that inhabit it stunning. The action based gameplay is addictive as you gain skills and weapons that allow you take on larger and more formidable inhabitants of the world.

After several hours in the open world it dawned on me that the act of harvesting resources in Horizon stood in stark contrast to the same actions in Red Dead 2. Gone were the 12 second animations for skinning a boar carcass or five second animation for gathering plant materials. In Horizon, these resource gathering activities were distilled down to the bare minimum animation required to convey the activity to the player. I appreciated the decision to limit time consuming animation. It just felt “snappy” and fit perfectly with the action heavy gameplay. I even jumped back into Red Dead 2 Online to try the resource gathering again to see if I remembered the slow deliberate animations correctly.

Two amazing games with two very different approaches of how to animate resource harvesting.

Clearly, Rockstar had an artistic vision they were going for with the their animations in RDR2. The decision to add such a large amount of detailed animations to Red Dead 2 was certainly costly in development effort. The easy decision would have been to fall back on the minimal animation style that many other open world games use. Prior to the release of Red Dead 2, it wasn’t uncommon to hear things like “I’ll be happy if it’s just like Red Dead 1 and they just cut out some of the boring skinning animations.” Instead, Rockstar doubled down. Not only were the skinning animations more elaborate, all sorts of new activities received longer animations, like looting corpses and mounting your horse.

I have no doubt Guerrilla Games, the studio behind Horizon, had the artistic and technical skill available to create more detailed resource harvesting animations. At some point in the design, a decision was made to produce very basic and abstract harvesting animations. We’ll probably never know if that was a gameplay or financial decision. I do believe however, that it was the right decision for the game.

Here’s the thing – now that I’ve finished the single player story in Red Dead 2, I’m not sure I ever want to go back and mop up the challenges and collectables. I have an enormous backlog and Red Dead 2 simply doesn’t value the gamer’s time. I had always intended to go back, but the transition from Red Dead to Horizon has been a real eye opener. The long animations fit very well with the Red Dead 2 single player narrative as you were learning about the world through Arthur. Now that the story is over, I would love the option to short circuit the animations. I’ve had my fill of the Red Dead immersion by animation. It was amazing during the campaign, but in the post-game open world I want to pick up the pace.

Of course, I don’t expect Rockstar to ever give the player an option for streamlined animations in Red Dead 2. They were 100% committed to a specific artistic vision for the game and I respect that. However, as a mature gamer with limited leisure time, I certainly appreciate games like Horizon Zero Dawn that do show that they value the player’s time.