I find this the most jarring thing with Rockstar Games, and it was particularly noticeable to me in Red Dead Redemption 2. It provides a beautiful, immersive w

I find this the most jarring thing with Rockstar Games, and it was particularly noticeable to me in Red Dead Redemption 2. It provides a beautiful, immersive world that is ridiculous in its attention to detail. The amount of stuff to do, accurate flora and fauna, weather effects, and NPC behavior, is ridiculous. But the moment you start a mission, things are on rails and you lose that freedom. Or the moment you commit a crime even without witnesses the law will find you like a homing pigeon. Most entities in the wild (trees, animals) are just elaborate props and there's nothing emergent about them, and random encounters are not random at all, but just selected from a pool of missions. They're still great, but for me it did mean having to let go of the 'immersive sim' expectation and instead approach it as a ridiculously detailed version of a 'typical' GTA-style non-emergent game.