I kept thinking back to Andrew Dominik’s 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford , which I’ve been presuming was the most prominent visual inspiration for Red Dead Redemption 2 for a few reasons. For the most overt example, look no further than the major train robbery sequence from early on in the story, and compare it to one of the first scenes in Dominik’s film . From the foreboding music, the light in-between the trees as the gang members await the train, and the point man standing on the track to stop the train, the two scenes are nearly the same beat-by-beat.
As on any big game with an interconnected plot and multiple side missions, things can get pretty complicated. And just because I think Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best game to come out this year (take that God of War ), does not mean I can’t recognize its flaws. Read on if you want to learn about the many plot holes and unanswered questions that RDR2 left hang
There are 30 bone locations to find and you can’t entirely complete the quest until Chapter 8! That’s like at least 40 hours of playtime. Plus the reward is just a knife made from dinosaur bone, neat sure, but worth all that effort? Absolutely
No gaming world has ever felt as real as the world in Red Dead Redemption 2 does. There are literally hundreds of open world games out there, and almost no open world has ever been this fully realized or fun to play around in. Even the bigger games have nothing new to do after the first ten hours. But not Red De
I kept imagining that this was the type of story that Houser wanted to tell, and while Hell or High Water might have its own set of problems, it never needed to reduce anything to caricature the same way that Red Dead Redemption 2 does. This is a game that tries to desperately to show its maturity, that it’s past the simple morals of fantastical and escapist gunslinger movies, and more along the lines of a “prestige” film like those of Sheridan or Dominik. Yet somehow, old Houser habits have a stubborn refusal to die, creating a product that is in odds with itself.
Throughout the game, it’s established that the gang can never go back to Blackwater due to their notoriety and the insane prices on their heads. So, why couldn’t they just pay off the bounty and walk back in? It seems that everything has a price in this game, including morality. You can wipe out an entire city, pay some money, and walk right back in like nothing ever happened. Well, that’s just what the Van der Linde gang did in Blackwater, yet apparently, their crimes were so foul that they went beyond bounties. Why is destroying Blackwater so much worse than destroying Saint De
When you’re playing as Arthur Morgan, you can bet that at some point, you are going to get into trouble. Whether you harm a person on purpose or accidentally run over them on your horse, eventually, a bounty will be placed on your h
At first, shaving and changing outfits and needing sleep and food seemed like an annoyance. It really did. But once you got into a rhythm with Arthur, somehow that insane level of micromanaging actually became enjoyable. No idea how, really, but it
Why didn’t the gang just eliminate both men then and there? Why even bother having the discussion in the first place? Sure, it wouldn’t have solved their problems, but it certainly would have given them enough time to get out of do
Every time the black bars letterboxed the screen during Red Dead Redemption 2 , I knew that the “video game” portion of this experience was on hold. I couldn’t help but feel frustrated that Rockstar (and the game’s writers) were plopping a movie in front of me instead. It is relatively obvious that Rockstar’s recent games are meant to invoke the feelings of familiar films, but reading and hearing the thoughts from my peers had me realize that many of us—the Housers included—simply have it wrong when analyzing this game’s relationship with the Western film genre.
They’re actually poetry, and all have the same central theme of blood. Once you find them all, a black “X” will appear on your map. Wait to visit it until around midnight. You’ll then stumble across the so-called “vampire”. I won’t spoil the encounter, but you can expect nab a neat little melee weapon from as w
This meta-acknowledgement that Arthur is, after all, just a video game character for the player to control her comment is here also a signal that Arthur desires a different life. In his journal , Arthur writes about the conflict of good and evil within him, and envies how easy it seems to be for others, like Charles, to be good. However, the Arthur who exists in those small conversations and in the journal is a separate entity from the one in the game that you control. That Arthur won’t help strangers without the promise of payment. Main missions continually task you with destroying others for your own potential benefit. Arthur will sometimes offer limp verbal disagreement to the actions and decisions of the gang, but it is not until late in Chapter 5 that he actually begins to actively pursue altruism: helping others simply for the sake of it.