For the past three months I’ve been an outlaw. I’ve killed people, robbed banks, stolen horses and instigated fights like I was on The Jerry Springer Show. The gang I rode with milked money from the poor, pitted the rich against themselves for our benefit and left a trail of bodies — of the rich and of the poor — in our wake. Being an outlaw was not easy, but who would have thought that trying to become a better person would be even harder.
This Red Dead Redemption 2 review discusses game events that some players may consider spoilers.
Red Dead Redemption 2 protagonist Arthur Morgan experiences a moral awakening about halfway through the game. The event is best left discovered in game, so I won’t reveal it here, but if you’ve already reached that point in the game you’ll know what I’m talking about. The event revamps everything Arthur thought he knew about himself. He starts questioning his role in the gang, who his true friends are and if he’s living his life the way he wants to or if he’s living his life the way he thinks society forced him to.
The gang, ironically, feels trapped by time. They feel like the world is changing at such a brisk pace that soon everyone will have their anonymity wiped away and no one will be able to live life on their own terms. It’s a philosophy that the gang’s leaders use to justify their actions, and it works for a while, but it eventually unravels as the gang recognizes that their ambitions are unsustainable and they will have to adapt or die —a sentiment echoed throughout the game in many different ways.
Where the Deer and the Anti-heroes Play
Red Dead Redemption 2 starts and ends as two very different games, but that difference was only felt in my perception of the game. The game’s vast, beautiful world goes on uninterrupted and unbothered by the life of Arthur Morgan and the gang. The world has no trouble moving on without you. Arthur and company were not the harbingers of societal enslavement or the martyrs of freedom they thought they were. Unless you directly impacted a person’s life, or were recognized for an extreme reputation, people don’t care about you. No game has ever achieved that feeling so completely for me and that speaks volumes to the world Rockstar was able to build. It feels so complete that it actually feels alive.
Random, nonessential characters have entire routines programmed into them. I once followed a guy around a lumber camp and watched him go about his chores and make small talk with another worker. If I had not been there, at that exact moment, would that conversation have happened without me? If I had been riding through the lumber camp at the exact time when he was chatting, would I have still heard it over the hoofbeats of my horse? I believed so, thus the illusion of a living world held strong. Experiences like that were multiplied countless times within my days spent playing Red Dead Redemption 2.
The amount of systems facilitating such a living world’s existence are incomprehensible to a non-developer like me.
Standing at the edge of a cliff and peering out across a prairie can reveal numerous logic systems at work: sheep guided by a shepard who know to follow that particular character and know not to run off behind the guy driving a stagecoach who just rode by the herd; a coyote chasing a rabbit through some shrubs who recognized the rabbit was prey and not the wild horses grazing just a few yards away; the possum playing dead to avoid the coyote; crows descending upon the corpse of a skinned animal that a hunter left behind; and from behind me, “You chose to look like that?” A passerby thinks he knows all about fashion and judges me on my outfit choice.
The downside to having so many systems running at once is that sometimes they clash. Because the game is incredibly immersive otherwise, when the systems falter it’s hard not to notice.
Doesn’t Look Like Anything To Me
After a particularly grim gameplay moment in a town, I turned a corner and, out of habit, I greeted a stranger. From Arthur came a far-too-cheery, “Hey, mister!” It felt as if Arthur had completely forgotten about what just occurred, mere moments prior. Equally odd was the behavior of the weather and time systems. Sometimes the weather is wonderfully gradual, with clouds rolling in slowly and building up into a raging storm, and other times I go over a hill and the weather shifts from being sunny and into a blinding downpour. The sun also rises and sets far too quickly. The vistas in the game are spectacular and I would have been happy to enjoy the setting or rising sun for a bit longer than the thirty seconds it seems to take for the game to move between day and night.
At another point in the game, the game’s systems failed to recognize a completely logical task I took upon myself and punished me for it: a criminal had somehow escaped from jail and he approached me out in the wilderness. I promptly punched him to the ground, hog-tied him, tossed him on the back of Penny (my first horse) and took him to Valentine. As I made a beeline toward the Valentine jail, people began to scream and point at me. The game failed to recognize the basic logic of what I was doing and only recognized I had a character tied to my horse. By the time I arrived to the jail the sheriff and a few deputies were ready for me. I was arrested at gunpoint for kidnapping. My victim, still clad in prison garb, ran off.
That is one, very specific example, but events like those really shatter the otherwise amazing illusion of a living world that is the star of the show.
The Gang’s All Here
If the environment is the star of the show, the characters, collectively, come in close second. There are so many different people you meet throughout the game, and each and every one feels like a completely unique individual. From the members of the gang who are like Arthur’s brothers and sisters, to the store owner at the shop you visit the most, everyone has a name and, at the least, a personality. Usually in games with large casts I have trouble remembering who is who. Not in Red Dead Redemption 2. The game does such a great job presenting each character naturally, in their own unique ways. Whether you’re meeting the hot-headed Sadie Adler, or crossing paths with a Civil War veteran-turned-mountain man, each character is memorable in their own right.
More than a few characters are going to be familiar to players of the original Red Dead Redemption, and I’m happy to say that their personalities are just as you remember them…as good or as bad as that may be.
Besides exploration, one of my favorite things to do in the game was just spend time around the other characters in the gang. In between story-focused missions, you have the opportunity to visit the gang’s hideout to catch up with each character and get their unique perspective on how life is treating them. Sometimes you’ll get a bit of background information about their lives, other times they’ll all just get together to get drunk and sing songs.
Every time I loaded my save file and the game loaded me back into the world of Red Dead Redemption 2, I got excited. Even with the story completed, I was still eager to hop on my horse and ride off to an unvisited location on my map. Maybe there was treasure to find, or a stranger to help. Maybe there was a camp of outlaws and I’d get tangled in a five minute gun fight, or maybe I’d stumble on the trail of one of the game’s legendary animals. Even a seemingly empty field or dead-end canyon can yield secrets with the Eagle Eye ability that highlights wildlife, herbs and collectibles.
Arthur Morgan’s story may have ended, but my time with Red Dead Redemption 2 is far from over.
A retail copy of Red Dead Redemption 2 was purchased by Epic Brew.
