It has come to my attention that Red Dead 2 has a 2 HOUR LONG UNSKIPPABLE INTRO

shootouts against absurd numbers of enemies

This really made me hate doing missions. Its always been an issue with Rockstar but GTAV took it up a notch and RDR2 brought it into the stratosphere. My theory is that it is a consequence of R* trying to appeal to casuals by implementing a very powerful autoaim system into the game. Normally, without autoaim, you have to take the time to aim, you might miss, fights become more satisfying. With autoaim, your character perfectly snaps to each target, any action sequence would become trivially short unless you A: jack up the enemies' health to lengthen fights with bullet sponges, or B: let enemies still die in one or two hits, but you increase the number of enemies tenfold. Clearly they went with B, because bullet sponge enemies are no fun and remove the possibility of the kind of cinematic, single-shot kills often seen in westerns.

Because of this, every mission requires you to kill 50 guys, followed by 50 reinforcements, all in a game where the story wants me to empathise with a character coming to terms with his violent past and seeking redemption, trying to put crime and killing behind him. I believe this is what those cute twinks on reddit call ludonarrative dissonance. Go play RDR1 on Hardcore mode, you have to actually aim, you're more fragile and can't faceroll every fight, and instead of a large number of meaningless enemies you're fighting a much smaller number of more significant enemies.