Since Red Dead Redemption 2 was released on PC, there have been widespread reports of problems: crashing, stuttering, freezing, audio problems, fps drops, and graphical issues. In fact, everyone I know playing it has had some fairly big, recurring issues with it that's making it hard for them to enjoy the game.
And as a quick and sloppy metric, the user score for RDR2 on Metacritic is an 8.1 on PS4, but the PC version currently has a 3.6. Everyone seems to be having a hell of time getting RDR2 to run well on PC.
Except me.
For me, Red Dead Redemption 2 has been running like a dream. And I'm feeling a lot of guilt over it.
My specs, if you're wondering:
Intel i7-9700K 3.6GHz
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 8GB
Resolution: 1920 x 1080
I've been trying to find a way to express feeling personally guilty when things are going great for me but horribly for everyone else. The Germans have a word for the opposite of schadenfreude (feeling pleasure in the misfortune of others) which is fremdscham, or 'vicarious embarrassment': feeling bad when witnessing the embarrassment of others.
That's not quite right, but it's close: when I hear about all these issues but I'm experiencing none of them myself, it makes me embarrassed that I'm not suffering the same way everyone else is. Feels bad, man.
It's also unusual because I'm typically the one searching through forums for solutions to technical issues with games. I'm used to the frustration of seeing a handful of people pleading for help and bumping their posts repeatedly as their requests for aid go unanswered. Or worse, that feeling when someone happily reports back that a fix solved their problem, but the same fix doesn't work at all for me and I have to resume the miserable hunt. For once, it's been smooth sailing.
My unhappiness at my lack of unhappiness isn't purely an empathetic response to other people's misery, either. It's partially selfish. I want to talk to my friends about how much I'm enjoying the big, beautiful open world of RDR2 but it's hard to excitedly chat with people who are gnashing their teeth over performance issues and crashes. It seems in poor taste to gush over how much you're enjoying your ice cream cone when your friends all dropped theirs on the sidewalk.
This isn't to say my time with RDR2 has been completely flawless. In Red Dead Online I've experienced a few disconnects when horsing around as Sacramento Stu. I played online with James, Lauren, and Morgan the other night and had a few server disconnects then too, along with one complete crash to desktop.
In singleplayer, I had an intermittent issue with the UI flickering, but it only happened a few times and hasn't happened at all since the game was patched last week. And I do very rarely get noticeable frame drops, but that's only happened a couple of times.
RDR2 has been running great for me otherwise. I just hope a patch fixes everyone else's problems soon so I'll actually be able to get some enjoyment out of my enjoyment.
