I was playing red dead 2 a few weeks ago and picked it up with my steam deck. Now I'm playing uncharted 4 and realizing how rockstar and naughtydog built very similar games between the two. Rockstar is far more slow and frankly full of themselves. Not respecting the players time. Meandering through the story with no real semblance of player respect. I put 26 hours into red dead 2 and I feel like I've literally done nothing and feel very under accomplished. I've put 8 hours into uncharted 4 and feel extremely accomplished and invested in the characters.
Even though I'm pissed at Nathan. He's such an idiot, I hate him and can't wait to play him more. Author Morgan is just a bland cowboy that tries so much to just get by. Red dead 2 introduced more main characters than uncharted 4 has in side and main characters. Yet in red dead 2 they've developed none of them part the point of the basics. I'm uncharted they've developed all of their characters. Even the side ones that barely show up.
Likewise in red dead 2, they kill one character I only liked because their accent allowed me to actually tell them apart from the rest of them. The other character the big baddies kidnapped and I've played like 2 hours waiting to go get him back. It's like wtf, let me go rescue the damn character already. Yet the game keeps saying we'll do it as far as possible. We gotta track down all this shit. It's clearly like this filler content because during it another random main character gets kidnapped, they find her right away and it's rescued in one mission. Like what universe is this?
In conclusion, red dead 2 is trying hard to do what uncharted 4 did extremely well. The open world system does not help it one bit and it's turned me off of open world games altogether for a while.
Hmm I had the opposite feeling about Red Dead Redemption 2. I felt the slower pace was nice, and respected the player by not having a false urgency for most of it like so many other games do. I really enjoy slow burn movies and novels though, and I can understand they aren't for everyone.
Love the Uncharted series. Naughty Dog makes some good shit. I also loved both Last of Us games, but they might be more on the slow side again.
I don't feel like Uncharted ever had a false sense of urgency. A lot of the time I would go at my own pace. Where Rockstar specifically slows you down and prevents you from going as fast as you'd like. Uncharted does this but far less often and it is far less noticeable because Uncharted doesn't have a sprint button. So I am not explicitly telling the game my intent and having the game directly ignore it. The game is giving me feedback directly of "this is the pace we are going". Rather than "this is the pace I want to go." and the game telling me "no."
Sorry I didn't mean that Uncharted has a false sense of urgency, those games are perfectly paced. I meant other open world games sometimes do. Oblivion and Skyrim are good examples, where the main quest seems to want you to rush through it since it sounds so urgent, but there is no need to.