How Red Dead Redemption 2 Attempts (and Struggles) to Emulate the Modern Western

During the Epilogue, John is forced to take up his guns and mount his horse in order to go after a small gang of bandits who are threatening the farm he works for. Abigail disapproves, terrified that she might be about to lose John. John, however, must use his less than savory skills to defend their livelihood and ends up cornering the last bandit in the barn. While the man screams all sorts of threats at John, the player is treated to an in-game recreation of the cover of the first game, with John glaring down the barrel of a

And though that ending was a kick to the soul, it was meant to be, and needed to be. Arthur’s death is fully symbolic of the death of that time in the world, the death of the west. He was old-school, and as you know, his world was no country for old

Red Dead Redemption 2 forever changed the gaming landscape, and those changes will be long-reaching and will reverberate in this industry for years. So what is it that makes Red dead redemption 2 strategy Dead 2 so exceptional? Is it the scope? Is it the characters? Is it the graphics? Is it the truly engrossing tale of a wild west posse on a scary downward spiral? Yes to all those things. It is a perfect storm of gaming, where every element that factors in helps make it even more powerful. With that being said, it is safe to say RDR2 has forever changed gaming, and here are ten things that prove that to be t

While we have already touched on how amazing it is to see Arthur and the gang evolve and devolve, in this case, I literally mean NPCs. Never in gaming have NPCs been this, for lack of a better term, re

Deadeye makes quick work of the beast and we get a neat lions paw that makes for a handy-dandy trinket from your fence. Honestly even knowing the lion twist ahead of time, the dialogue and writing in this quest is hilariously charm

The visual connections stack up when you compare transition scenes with Arthur Morgan having a blurry, dream-like quality that resembles the film’s cinematography from Roger Deakins. Thematically, both Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Assassination of Jesse James focus on a commune of criminals and gang members, led by a charismatic leader who the rest of the gang eventually become disillusioned with. There’s even the same devotion to realism—Dominik’s film attempts to be as authentic in portraying events, dialogue, and action the same way it would happen, with shootouts happening at point blank range with both combatants missing each other. It’s slow, deliberate, and honestly, a bit boring—which is how I felt about Rockstar’s game every time I was told to search a room.

But that wouldn’t go with Dutch Van der Linde’s positions against industrialization, modernization, and technology. Dutch, who I couldn’t help but see and hear as a more handsome Matt Foley from SNL , finds a rival in Leviticus Cornwall, a captain of industry and one of the many banes of Dutch’s existence. He may as well have ended every encounter him by shaking his fist at the sky and screaming “Cornwall!” in anguish. Using Cornwall as a target, Dutch fashions himself as a man of the people, wanting to go back to a time before “law and order” and attempting to score cred by helping some local angry indigenous folks. As Arthur Morgan discovers later, this is all part of Dutch’s plan to exploit this tribe’s conflict with the U.S. Army for his own gain.

No big deal, since Marston, doesn’t have any personal investment in the conflict—but why does no one ever really call him out on it? He’s easily able to saunter over to the other side without even the slightest resistance—it’s a bit of a stretch methi

As the Mexican chapter wraps itself up with some dramatic and exciting set-pieces, and with Marston finally getting the better of Bill Williamson—a man he’s been chasing from the jump of the game—yet, all of the excitement sort of glosses over a important fact—why and how has Williamson been hiding with Captain De Santa this whole t

The original game was always a touch ambiguous about how John won his facial scars. Aside from a voice clip that happens when John attempts to fight wolves in the first game with a knife, players were left to speculate as to what animal did that to him. This is confirmed in RDR2 to have in fact come from a close encounter with a wolf pack. After Arthur and Javier track John in the Grizzlies, they come across a perished horse and tons of evidence of a fight, and then a wolfpack as they come off the mounta

By the time we first meet Dutch in the first game, he’s a shell of a man still fighting uselessly against the march of civilization. A single glance at him might still reveal a glimmer of a great man worthy of John’s loyalty, but many players found it difficult to understand how John could have followed such an obvious madman. RDR2 answers this by presenting a much more lucid Dutch at the beginning of the narrative, still filled with his trademark charm and wit. As the story continues and pressures mount, we witness Dutch slipping towards his inevitable heartbreaking fall into madn

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