Red Dead Redemption 2
From GameLabWiki
About the Game
Red Dead Redemption 2 is an action-adventure developed and published by Rockstar Games. When it was first released in October 2018, the game was available for Sony`s PlayStation 4 as well as for Microsofts Xbox One. Approximately one year later, in November 2019, a pc-version was released, furhtermore the game was available on Google‘s streaming platform Stadia. As it‘s predecessors, Red Dead Revolver (Rockstar Games, 2004) and Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar Games, 2008) and many of the closely related Grand Theft Auto titles, the game originally only featured a third-person perspective but was later supplemented by the possibilty of controlling the avatar though a first-person-view.
The setting takes place in 1899 and narrates the story of the „gunslinger“ Arthur Morgan, who is also representing the avatar controlled by the players, and his fellow comrades known as the notorious „Van-der-Linde-Gang“. As the „golden age“ of outlaws in the wild west is told to be over, the whole squad is now forced to move along the country in order to survive. To earn their keep, Arthur Morgan and his cowboy friends have to continue their criminal actions which leads to even further conflicts with the law.
The game world is designed as an open-world but can not be explored by the players from the very beginning: The successful completion of a wide range of story- and sidemissions is needed in order to narratively unfold progress to the whole open-world. Furthermore, the avatar can be developed and modified in several ways: The players are given the oppurtunity to equip the avatar with weapons, outifts and supplies as well as the character Arthur Morgan can develop a specific personality, depending on how certain moral decisions are made during the game. As they are several endings to the narrative storyline, the act of decision making becomes even more important regarding the whole game experience.
Research-Relevant Topics of the Game
Core Game Mechanics
Moving and Fighting
In order to play Red Dead Redemption 2 successfully, and successfully is hereby understood as exhausting the whole narrative storyline, the players have to move the avatar through the game world and accomplish a variety of different tasks which are arranged in several missions. In order to do so, actions like „walking“, „running“, „jumping“, „hiding“, „shooting“, „hitting“ or „riding a horse“ and many more have to be executed. Other activities just like upgrading and customizing weapons, the avatar‘s appearance or performing economic actions (e.g. „trading goods“) are also possible, but can only be carried out in visual interfaces (menus) that differ from the „regular“ third-person-view and it‘s common HUD („head-up-display“). The act of fighting by firing guns at opponents or battle them by hand or other weapons can also be regarded as an integral part of the game‘s mechanics, especially when it comes to accomplishing the storymissions.
Travelling and exploring
The act of travelling and exploring the game world is a key component of the actual gameplay in Red Dead Redmeption 2. On the one hand, the topic of travelling and migrating is displayed by the narrative storytelling: As mentioned above, Arthur Morgan and his travel companions are forced into situations where they have to flee from the law in order to avoid prison or even death sentence. Since this is a serious topic concerning all members of the crew, the game extensively takes up the topic of escape and migration in it‘s narrative design. As to be observed in other titles that can be related to Red Dead Redemption, especially it‘s predecessors or the more recent Grand Theft Auto games, it is not uncommom for the avatar to have a place referred to as „home“. This „home“ as a safe place to the avatar changes more than three times when playing the game until the story comes to an end. This means that the world „around“ the collective‘s camp, which is Arthurs home, has to be investigated and explored more than once because of the constant moving of the group.
In order to find new missions, saloons, merchants or gun dealers, the players have to move the avatar through the open world and explore these new places, which are often not even noted as icons on the virtual map until they are actually found. Because the game world’s relatively huge size, the map as a representation of the accessible world is an important tool to the players. It helps them to navigate from one place to another, also by the possibility of setting landmarks. The meaning of specific landmarks represented as icons on the map becomes clear when looking at the fact that not any action the avatar is capable of can be carried out at any place.
If the players want so change Arthurs appearance, for example his hair- or clothing stlye, they have to manoeuver the avatar to a place where these actions are actually possible: the camp, a barber, a tailor and so on. Every possibility of interaction has it‘s own place, but as already mentioned, not all of them find virtual correspondence in the map. Even when specific places that marks a certain possibility of interaction, for example a stranger person that asks for Arthurs help, the appearance of the icon on the map is not permanently given: If the players decide not to pursue the task and play other missions instead, it‘s possible that the icon vanishes from the map and is not playable at a later stage of the game, maybe because the person who offered a specific task died.
Interacting with the Game World
Another essential game mechanic consists in the interaction with objects within the open-world. The figure Arthur Morgan is able to interact with nearly every other human and non-human object like animals, for example. For every possible interaction, the game provides a set of different „modes“. For example, if Arthur Morgan is riding his horse through the open-world and he meets another person, the players have the possibility to greet (e.g. „Howdy Partner!“), to provoke (e.g. „Watch your way!“) or to just ignore the person by refusing to execute a certain command on the input device, which actually also can be considered a form of interaction on the part of the players.
Furthermore, the actions taken by the players can lead to very different outcomes: If strangers within the open-world are provoked for example, some of them might express a scared reaction to the players, while others will answer quite irritably and confrontative (e.g. „Careful now!“). In most cases, the avatar Arthur Morgan is able to answer to whatever the strangers replied. Depending on what was said before, the game now provides a new set of possibilities of interaction to the players, they now can either defuse the situation (e.g. „Calm down, I‘m just kidding!“) or continue provoking, which frequently results into a combat situation.
Another example of how decision making can have an impact on the game state is bounty hunting. To earn some extra money, Arthur Morgan can take particular side-jobs just like hunting serious criminals and hand them over to the local sheriff. As the well-known phrase „dead or alive“ implies, the players are given the choice wether they want to kill the target and only deliver the corpse (which often is a lot easier) or if they want to catch the villains alive and get a larger reward. The concept of bounty hunting also works the other way round: For example, if Arthur Morgan unnecessarily kills innocent people, a bounty will be put on his head too which causes other bounty hunters to appear from time to time, trying to catch the player‘s avatar.
Further Content of the Game
Related Research Approaches
Adventure - Programms, Mazes, Graphs (Pias, Claus)
As mentioned above, travelling and exploring the game world can be surely be described as one of the key aspects in Red Dead Redemption 2. The map and it‘s visual representation of places marking a storymission, a sidequest or other locations just like a barber or weapons dealer is an absolutely necessary tool for the players. The aspect of exploring not only is covered extensively within the narrative design of the game, it also makes up a large part of the open-world gameplay. As already said, the game world has to be explored by Arthur Morgan in order to enrich the map`s range of represented icons. At the beginning of the game, the visual representation of the map is veiled which could lead to the conclusion that, on the players part, the game world is actually „explored“. But following scientist Claus Pias and his work about adventure games, this does seem to be the case by no means. By comparing an adventure game‘s fictional „map“ to a maze, Pias points out that all the ways and actions a player could possibly take are integrated into the game‘s code from the very beginning.[1] From a scientific point of view and with reference to Niklas Luhmann, Pias states that the character isn‘t really exploring the world as well he is not developing himself at all.[2] It is rather the case that the game progress in an adventure game leads to an, as Claus Pias calls it, „double reconstruction“ of narrated story and the act of mapping.[3]
Meaningful Play (Salen, Katie/Zimmerman, Eric)
The relation between an input generated by the players and a specific outcome as described in the paragraph „Interaction with the Game World“ can be related to Katie Salens assumptions of „meaningful play“. In the so-called chapter of their book Rules of Play. Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman examine how meaningful play can emerge from a game designer‘s point of view. In order to give a valid definition of the term, two different kinds of „meaningful play“ are emphasized by the authors: a descriptive and an evaluative sense of meaningful play.[4] When applied to Red Dead Redemption 2, first of these two could describe the fierce reaction of a stranger when provoked by Arthur Morgan („You better watch your tongue!“). An action carried out by the players has an visible and noticeable outcome within the game state. The second sense of meaningful plays rather focusses on how the outcome of a specific action is integrated into the larger context of the game.[5] Here the bounty hunting example could be an appropriate illustration. If Arthur Morgan behaves unnecessarily violent by robbing, hitting or shooting innocent people, the bounty on his head will rise and accumulate. Once a certain ammount is surpassed, the outlaw will get hunted by bounty hunters himself at, and this is important, a later stage in the game, because the assassination attempts are designed to be a surprising element of the game. Thus, an action has no effect that is immidiately perceivable to the players, but triggers an outcome realised at a later stage of the game.