Gamestop employees claim new Red Dead Redemption 2 demo put them to sleep
"Rockstar Equestrian Simulator 2k19."
Gamestop employees have been given an extended look at Red Dead Redemption 2, and some are reporting that the "boring" presentation put them to sleep.
At the 2018 GME Conference in Indianapolis, USA, developer Rockstar showed off an all-new 20-minute live demo to the Gamestop employees in attendance. While there's - unsurprisingly - no footage of the event, an Instagram post by user undermined_productions, which has since been deleted, confirmed that a Red Dead Redemption 2 presentation did indeed take place (thanks, wccftech).
Since then, people at the conference have been sharing their thoughts via a couple of Reddit threads.
"Beautiful game, but mostly just saw horse riding simulator. Very difficult to stay awake..." said one commenter on Reddit, while another said: "There was a shoot out after a bank heist but before the heist we saw 15 minutes of meandering through some woods and some plucky guitar playing."
When asked if the game looked fun, they replied: "Shootout looked decent, the bank heist was slowly paced. The game will be great and sell like mad but the demo they showed was really dry."
"Don't get me wrong, I still think the game will be fantastic, just the demo was kinda boring to watch," added another.
When two Gamestop employees commented that they'd missed the presentation and their colleagues told them they'd been "blown away" by the demo, other attendees responded to the post by saying: "almost put me to sleep", "Rockstar Equestrian Simulator 2k19", "that was painful to watch", and "I may have fallen asleep very briefly".
It's not all bad, though.
"I thought RDR2 looked great," said a Gamestop manager. "Definitely GOTY contender and I'm not going to judge by one mission. Anyone who enjoyed the first one is probably [going to] love this new one."
Of course, it's rarely possible to assess an entire open world game on just a 20-minute demo, and a couple of commenters were keen to contextualise why viewers may have found it boring... and why they might have dozed off a little.
"To give a little context, everyone was exhausted from the week and it's the last thing they showed us," explained another attendee. "I nodded [off] for a minute but the game is beautiful. The world looks so meticulously constructed and the demo was a flawless example of the mechanics, world, and physics the game has to offer. I didn't play the first one and had zero excitement for the game going into it but came out stoked on getting it."
Red Dead Redemption 2 is due out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 26th October 2018.
