Foxtrot

You can't catch the Legendary channel catfish. You can catch the ordinary one though.

The challenge log will give you a list of the fish you need. Bear in mind that the legendary fish don't appear to count - you have to catch a "normal" kind of the fish in question.

I just need one three-star skunk, and I need to kill it well. I know where to find everything else for the next hunting challenge, so this one skunk is between me and 100% game completion.

I got stuck on this recently. A reliable place to get the gold earring (if you can't get one from robbing/looting) is the farm near Mattock Pond. One of the chest of drawers there has gold earrings.

Ok, so the Legendary Channel Catchfish is (as far as we know) is uncatchable; if it was catchable, it would have been documented by now. The Legendary Northern Pike is part of a stranger mission. Neither of these fish form part of the Legendary Fish list required for game completion. I believe that the glitch involves you catching the fish, but it not being crossed off on the map? I saw a post on Reddit that if the legendary fish is marked off in your compendium, that's all you need. I forget whether or not the collectable strand is marked as complete when you've sent your last fish or when you've completed the end with Jeremy. I did have an issue where I had to catch the Legendary Perch twice, presumably because I died.

You can't. Animals respawn periodically. There was a part of RDR1 where you could make the buffalo extinct if you wanted to (and it earned you a trophy too).

Isn’t it funny how the game knows what you’re hunting and shows you every animal except the one that you want!

I can confirm that the glitches in the hunting requests I quoted above are now fixed. I'm able to collect animals before they're due and not have to discard them before each round. So that's good news. Just have to find a darned skunk.

I found one easily enough on the main road between Twin Stacks. Varmint rifle and the buck trinket invariably gives you a perfect carcass. I don't even think they need to be three-star to start with.

Huh, so the Donkey Lady was pretty freaky.

This seems to be an app version of the extremely useful rdr2map.com. Nice find!

The bear in the story mission? No, I don't think it's possible to kill that one as part of the mission. I think Arthur is simply better than John at fighting off bears.

For the Herbalist 9 challenge, you need to pick all variants of the 43 plants after you get the prompt. If you've already got them in your satchel, you'll need to get them all over again. When I played this part of the game, I chose to start Herbalist 9 at the same time as the exotic hunting, so I got all of my orchids ticket off as I found them.

For this mission, you just need to complete it without killing anyone. I've seen a report that you can keep the trinket for good if you replay the mission, but I don't see any confirmation of that.

It kind of annoyed me to start with having to accept the really slow respawn rate for herbs. Then I learned not to pick them unless I really needed them. And don't feed them to your horse because you might need them later. Satchel of the East is great for 99 hays and 99 oatcakes to stop this happening.

You'll see (if you wish to), that there's a strong narrative and backstory woven into the story missions - it's far more than a standard CoD campaign where you run on rails killing things in ever increasing amounts. There's a lot more sensitivity here than there were in the GTA V mission strands; Rockstar is encouraging it's players to have an emotional connection to the main protagonist.

Yes, there's an enforced learning curve here - it doesn't last long until you're let loose in the world to hunt and find gang members (and innocents) to interact and maim. Yes, you're confined to walking in camp. You'll soon learn that you spend very little time in camp, only really going back to start missions or complete some challenges and other tasks. The story missions are scripted and you don't really get to see what kind they are before you take them on. Some of them are optional, but missing them impacts your ability to 100% complete the game. The missions don't last that long, and you can skip a lot of the cut scenes if you so wish. Fast travel is opened up when you gain enough money to upgrade the camp - you then have the ability to fast travel to the towns that you've already visited. Trains and stagecoaches can also be used as fast travel mechanisms.

You won't need this for 100% game completion. Simply surviving one ambush (from any gang) is all you need. I wouldn't worry about it. Unless you really need to fill out your entire compendium.

I'm now just three wild horses and three hunting requests away from 100% game completion. When I'm done, I'll go and collect Buell, take him home and have dinner with my family. And then sit on the porch. For a long time. And then maybe I'll go looking for the animals I've not seen before.

Yeah, I don't really do online versions of many games - there's always far too many people who want to make sure that you're not enjoying yourself. My lifestyle (being a mature adult) means that I'm not able to be online at set times so that I could session up with like-minded people. So I stay offline. I also played Far Cry 5, back when it first came out and loved it. You probably will as well, once you shake off the urge to mount horses and shoot at birds. I'm not sure that many things will be able to replace RDR2, I have just totally loved being part of that world.

The amount of times Charles tracked me down and asked if I was returning to camp any time soon... Not right now Charles, I'm picking orchids and shooting Murfrees in the head...

No, you get it as part of a mission late on in Arthur's game. It's missable.

I don’t think that anyone is blindly flag waving for Rockstar. People here just have a shared understanding of what constitutes an “open world game” in that there’s a level of freedom of movement across the map and flexibility in that you can do. Theres a complaint here that Red Dead 2 can’t be classed as being “open world” because you can’t perform various actions or activities. The issue is with that complaint is that this kind of truest open world where you’re not limited by your imagination is probably decades away. As I said before, the scope of games right now are limited by time, money, resources, and the commercial drive to make more money than the game takes to develop. This isn’t fan boy flag waving, it’s an accepted understanding of how games are.

I doubt that. There's plenty of other places in the game where you're not punished for already having items in your satchel. It's even scripted where Arthur/John says "Hey, I already have these items, take them".

More of a bug than a restriction.