With players having to juggle a multitude of relationships and the gang’s well-being throughout the game, director Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is most likely the film that will have some of the largest thematic ties to Red Dead Redemption 2 . The plot of the film will likely sound familiar to Red Dead fans, as The Wild Bunch focuses on a gang of outlaws around 1913 led by the aging Pike Bishop (William Holden), who is seeking one final score in a massive train robbery.
No small detail is overlooked. It is the collection of countless minor details that makes _ Red Dead Redemption 2 _ so captivating. It is unbelievably satisfying watching horses trudge through miles of deep snow en route to a mission, only to find the same player-made snow trail upon returning to the mission’s point of origin. Throw a corpse into the river, and the body will continue on until it gets stuck, or flows into a lake at the mouth of the river. And last, but not least: hats. Hats easily fly off in the heat of a shootout or during a bar fight, but any hat can be picked up and worn by Arthur. Collecting hats across the western frontier might be one of the most satisfying, unofficial mini-games within _ Red Dead Redemption 2 _ . In fact, as of this writing, the topic of hats was actually trending for the game on Twitt
Outside of that, Rockstar has created an engaging system that allows you to rob shops, stagecoaches and even trains full of people at any time. All you need to do is put on mask (if you don’t want to get caught) and start demanding the goods. If you do most of the story, you won’t need to do this all that often as you’ll be rolling in dough, but it’s a fun way to de-stress. The Wanted system is also back, as the more heinous of crimes you commit and people witness, the higher the bounty is put on your head. You can change your disguise or grow your hair and facial hair out to avoid being recognized, but you’ll probably want to pay it off the fee to avoid bounty hunters coming at you in the wild. Alternatively, if you catch up to a witness, you can threaten them, or if a police officer sees it taking place, you can defuse the situation if it’s not too damaging of a crime. Occasionally it can be a confusing why you’re immediately pinpointed as the perpetrator, though, as we’ve had a number of instances where we killed someone, a pedestrian comes across the body while we’re nowhere to be found, and yet a bounty is set on our character. Overall, though, the system works fine and can even be entertaining to chase witnesses down as they plead for their lives.
Though the heist is intended as a way for Bishop to ride off into the sunset and leave his former life of crime behind, a turn of events ends up revealing that the heist is a setup by Bishop’s former partner in crime – a turn that certainly echoes that of John Marston’s later circumstances in the original Red Dead Redemption .
In the story sections that we played of Red Dead Redemption 2 , it’s already clear that Arthur’s relationships with the members of the Van der Linde gang will play a crucial role across the whole game, on larger and more personal levels. Right at the beginning of the demo, those relationships came into play as Arthur and the gang were preparing to rob a train under the ownership of the oil tycoon Leviticus Cornwall, which started with Arthur assisting Bill Williamson to blow up the train tracks and derail the car. Naturally, after that plan went awry, Arthur and several other members of the gang instead raced to the top of the nearby mountain path to hop on top of the train. In the midst of the action, we saw that Arthur can issue commands to the fellow gang members as they pushed towards the conductor car, making the action feel that much more involved when executing the heist alongside his other fellow gang members.
One of the biggest ways that Rockstar accomplishes this in Red Dead Redemption 2 is by integrating a new „Focus” ability for Arthur to interact with virtually any object, person, or animal that he comes across. By holding the L2 button (as we played the game on PS4 Pro) without a weapon holstered, Arthur can choose from a variety of ways to engage with oncoming travelers, shopkeepers, and other NPCs in the environment, whether that’s to greet them, antagonize them (likely resulting in a violent conflict), rob them, and more.
As a modern Western in the vein of recent classics like 3:10 to Yuma , The Proposition takes the essential elements of the Western genre and invigorates it with more contemporary filmmaking techniques and some particularly striking violence that pulls you into the experience. Aside from those similarities though, the mood and atmosphere that The Proposition captures feels very much in line with the way that Rockstar depicts its Western open-world in the red dead redemption 2 legendary fish Dead games, and that feeling will only be expanded with the ways that Red Dead Redemption 2 (so far) seems to be delivering an even more striking and dynamic world to explore.