izigame.me

An absolutely amazing game that comes bundled with an abysmal third-party software that is required to run said game. Or at least in theory that's what the Rockstar Launcher is supposed to be for. In reality the version that is installed on your computer when you download RDR2 is totally broken. Upon launching the game for the first time you'll be brought to the Rockstar Launcher login page where you'll be asked to either sign-in to an existing account or create a new one. No problem, right? At least it wouldn't be if Rockstar gave a sh*t about the products they're selling their customers.
I tried several times to log into my existing Rockstar account which I've had since the days of GTAIV & Max Payne 3 only to be told that my email isn't associated with any account. It took me several attempts because I assumed the error was me entering the wrong password - but once I actually read what it was telling me I was struck with momentary panic. Has my account been hacked and stolen from me? It seemed entirely possible given how vulnerable Rockstar seems to be to all sorts of hacks and leaks these days. But that's not what was happening, fortunately. Instead I was able to log into my account just fine via the Rockstar Social Club website on Google Chrome which meant the problem lay with the launcher itself and not my account - and in the end I had to completely uninstall the launcher, re-download it directly from the Rockstar website, and then launch it independently before trying to run RDR2 through Steam. This way I was able to login to my account without issue before finally being able to play the game I bought on Steam.
But the problems didn't end there.
I played for a couple hours after this whole ordeal with all the graphics settings maxed out and the game running flawlessly (and beautifully!) but once the next day rolled around and I got a chance to boot it back up I found the game looking worse than it did on PS4. For some reason the Rockstar Launcher appeared to be loading cloud saves of my settings from when I was playing many years ago (and on a much less powerful computer) and refusing to update or overwrite these settings with my new ones. Now every time I launch the game I have to go back into the graphics settings and max things out.
It's all so tiresome.
And at this point it's pretty clear to me that Rockstar is not the company that I fell in love with in the 2000s. Money has ruined them just like it did to Bethesda - and now the writings on the wall: GTAVI is going to be a crude mockery of the great games that preceded it. And when they finally get around to porting it to PC a year after releasing it on consoles (so that more people will buy it twice) you'll have to contend with one of the worst launchers I've ever had the displeasure of installing on my computer.
All this to say that I think Red Dead Redemption 2 is going to go down in history as the last truly great video game that Rockstar ever made. But my god do they ever make it a pain in the arse to go back and replay.