Things were going great in my first preview of Red Dead Redemption 2, the big Wild West game from Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive coming on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One on October 26.
Things were going great in my first preview of Red Dead Redemption 2, the big Wild West game from Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive coming on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One on October 26.
Until I accidentally shot a dog. Yes, you can do that in this game. On more than one occasion, I accidentally pulled the R2 trigger in the PlayStation 4 Pro version of the game, rather than the L2 trigger. In this case, I was supposed to pet the dog, who was sitting on a wooden sidewalk. Instead, I shot it accidentally. (Let it be known I would never intentionally do this, in real life or in a video game). When I did this, we all screamed in shock.
This turned out to be my window into in how far Rockstar is pushing forward the boundaries of what video games can be when it comes to immersive gameplay and complex storytelling in open worlds. Grand Theft Auto 5 set a high bar, but that was built for the PlayStation 3. This one is meant to be persistent, immersive, and intimate using the best console technology today, according to Rockstar. It’s out to prove there doesn’t have to be a conflict between an open world and a scripted narrative.
After I shot the poor little pooch, I learned animal cruelty was a crime. I was branded an outlaw in the fictional town of Valentine, as people witnessed the event and one of the bystanders ran to get the sheriff. The sheriff came over and asked me to leave town. I started walking away, but not fast enough. So he started shooting at me. I fired back, and that was another mistake. The crack of gunfire was deafening, and it was all really unnecessary.
I took down the sheriff, but then a bunch of other gunmen came out. I fired at them, and used my “dead eye” focus, which slows down time and lets you target a bunch of enemies more easily. Then slow motion turned to quick and I took down a couple more. I took down the whole posse, and then I looked for my horse. I couldn’t figure out which one was mine. And during that delay, another instant posse formed and a dozen more gunmen came at me. They finally took me and my horse down.
I was reborn, but still had a large bounty on my head. At the advice of my fellow Rockstar observers, I was advised to go to the post office and pay the bill. So I went there, paid $225, and lifted the bounty. We noticed there were bullet holes in my leather jacket.
I figured that would be enough. But as I walked through town, the townspeople reacted negatively to me. One said, “We remember what you did.” Even though my weapon was holstered, I wasn’t welcome at the stable in that town.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the stable owner.
If I had walked through that town with my gun drawn, the townspeople would have been on edge. If I had only just pet the dog, it would not have barked at me the next time I saw it.
And that, in a nutshell, is the Red Dead Redemption 2 experience.
This game has a persistent memory. I was hoping for a rewind button. But there wasn’t one. Heck, even my horse’s hooves left footprints in the much, and while they didn’t persist, I thought about that and was surprised to come upon footprints in the mud at another location.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has been in the works for years, with some people on it since the previous game debuted in 2010. The original Red Dead Redemption was an epic experience and my favorite game of 2010, and this one is a prequel to that story. It’s fair to say that I, and perhaps a 100 million other gamers, have been waiting anxiously for a long time for this game.
In Red Dead Redemption, you play John Marston, a partially reformed outlaw who hunts down the surviving members of the Van der Linde gang. That took place in the dying days of the Wild West, around 1911.
The new game also takes place in the waning days of the American West, but it places you in Dutch Van der Linde’s gang at the peak of their notoriety. This is the beginning of that end, where as the original was really the end. It is set in a fictional place, New Hanover, which is one of five states in the game.
You play an unrepentant outlaw, Arthur Morgan, the lead enforcer of the Van der Linde gang. Morgan was adopted by the elder leader, Dutch, as a child, and so grew up with the gang. But fractures within the gang start gnawing and creating pressures on Morgan. Arthur trusts Dutch to make the right decisions for the gang, and Arthur will put the plans in motion. Arthur is as loyal to Dutch and the gang as can be, and honor is a big part of his personality. There’s a big cast of characters, some that you meet by chance on the trails and towns along the way, and many that you’ll find in the outlaw camps.
One of Dutch’s decisions is to do a robbery in the city of Blackwater, where things go wrong. They lose a few gang members and are chased by the law into the Grizzly Mountains of the East. They’re barely surviving, and the members of the gang are starving in their camp. And Dutch decides to rob a train.
That’s where my demo picked up. John Marston is gravely wounded. His wife and son come to visit him and then leave. And so he is left behind. Others are recruited to join the fight. One of the elder gang members objects, asking Dutch why they are breaking with their plan of hiding out in the woods and lying low. Robbing this train, he argues, certainly isn’t lying low. But Dutch senses the discontent in the camp, and he rouses them to take to their horses.
The cinematic finishes playing as the horses make their way through the beautiful woods and mountain passes. Riding a horse is simple and fluid, almost like driving a car in Rockstar’s other epic game, Grand Theft Auto V. I was amazed to see the footprints in the mud and the ambient life all around me, like the deer running in the trees and the hawks in the sky. It’s no joke. The world is as deep and expansive as Rockstar says it is, and I can see how all of Rockstar’s studios had to pitch in on it.
It took a long while to ride through the terrain, but the camera shifted to cinematic shots of our six horse riders. Dutch talked through much of the ride, and twangy music accompanied his soliloquy. Dutch was kind enough to recite the names of the outlaws, like Javier Escuella, who played a role in the first game.
We arrived at a cliff overlooking the railroad tracks, where one member of the gang was already laying dynamite under the tracks. Arthur helps out and ties the wire to the detonator. But the detonator doesn’t work when the train chugs past, and the riders have to chase down the train. Arthur and Lenny, another gang member, manage to make it aboard, and then they start the treacherous journey to the engine. Gunfights ensue, and the guards start falling. The action is very cinematic, with Arthur throwing the last engineer of the train in a spectacular struggle.
During the fighting, dramatic music played, highlighting the sense of danger. The music from Woody Jackson flows seamlessly during the action, and the game has 192 separate pieces of original interactive score.
Arthur stops the train and the rest of the gang catches up, but then other cars empty and more Pinkerton agents come out and fight. The gang has to take them all down. When they finally do, there are a few holdouts in the final armored car. And like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one of the guards locked inside the car with the safe warns the gang that it belongs to an oil magnate, Leviticus Cornwall. I got an inkling that Cornwall was going to seek his revenge, just like in the Butch Cassidy film, later on in the game. Cornwall has some loyal guards who won’t open the door, even when faced with threats from the gang.
The gang shoots up the car and then plants dynamite to blast the doors open. They take out the last guards and search for a safe. Inside the car, there’s a wealth of detail that Arthur can discover, like letters with secret notes, and a pile of bonds that worth a big pile of money. At the end of the train robbery, Arthur faces a decision about what to do with the prisoners. And that, of course, is where the story gets interesting.
While the train robbery was a scripted story, the world is as open as you’ll find in a video game. I took the reins on the game with my horse in the grasslands. I pet my horse, and I was reminded that the horse is a character as well. You can bond with your horse.
Just standing in place and watching the wind blow through the grass, you can see how much work Rockstar put into things like shadows, lighting, ambient sound, music, weather effects, and facial and body animation. You can swap between first-person or third-person views as you wish.
If you lose your horse, you lose its unique personality and some of your abilities. You can carry three weapons, and everything else you carry can be seen on you, from your canteen to your saddle bag. The horse can carry additional inventory and weapons. By tapping X, the horse started moving, and each time I tapped the button, the horse picked up speed until it was running fast.
