Red Dead Redemption 2 game: three hours with the most anticipated game of the year

My own devices with the game Red Dead Redemption 2 for a few hours, I was waiting to see sweeping plains interrupted by mesas, dusty frontier towns with swing-door saloons and wary inhabitants, and a gang of tough outlaws sharing stories around a campfire , then walking through the woods on his way to a gunfight. This surprising virtual West is modeled on the classic Hollywood image of the time, the same fantasy described in Westworld . What I didn't expect in my brief preview was a city, Saint Denis, inspired by turn-of-the-century New Orleans.

Saint Denis is just as detailed as the modern American cities Rockstar previously created for the Grand theft auto.series, full of period details. Addressing the city as outlaw barrier man Arthur Morgan, I suddenly felt like a tragic anachronism. A tram passed by, and I hitched my horse to board the next one, riding along wide tree-lined avenues, past busy docks and the grand train station, past industrial areas where chimneys belched smoke and workers marched back and forth to factories. and houses. Going out into the streets, I saw kids running aimlessly through the water, people buying and selling things in the market, hundreds of simulated people going about their pretend lives. Drawn by the lights outside an ornate theater, I went in and bought a ticket to a vaudeville show and watched a virtual crowd cheer the virtual actors for a good five minutes before remembering that this was a video game and I could leave. any time.

I became mildly obsessed with testing the limits of its realism, heading into tobacco fields to see if there were people working there (there were), switching to a first-person view to scrutinize characters' faces and the insides of drawers (I discovered some ointment there, greeting each character I passed to see if they would respond differently (they did). What's different here is the verisimilitude. You can hunt animals in many games, their useful materials disappearing into your inventory, but here, you kneel, skin the animal, throw its skin over your shoulder, return to your horse, and attach the skin to it, before entering. city ​​to sell it. There are animations for all of this. Eight years of work from hundreds of people working across Rockstar's various studios were required to achieve this level of realism.

This is what the Game Red Dead Redemption 2 wants to offer: a simulation of a time and place in history, so vast and detailed that it is quite difficult to believe, where you can rob a train or hunt for a bounty, but also enter a store and examine the cans of beans on the shelf, or pay for a bath at an inn and make small talk with the young woman washing you, or collect 30 different saddle horns for your horse. In three hours, I hunted rabbits and men, practiced dressage on a mountaintop, shot at a bunch of rival gangs hiding in the woods, walked through perfect snow with some friends, and made stew. I was able to do all of this without the game setting me up for its own set path.

No open-world game can avoid the unexpected things that happen when a disobedient player goes off course. These moments are part of what makes them fun, if the game can accommodate them. The world of Red Dead is impressively robust once you start testing it out, seeing where you can go or what you can do: the sticky situations I got myself into didn't end with death or a “mission failed” screen, but with adventures.

When I took my horse for a spontaneous swim in an unexpectedly fast river instead of following a hidden trail around its bank to find a fugitive, I ended up about 100 yards downstream on the wrong side of the water – but that turned into a opportunity for a scenic detour off a cliff as the sun set, heading over a rickety wooden bridge back to the other side. When I wandered the private grounds of a plantation mansion on the outskirts of Saint Denis and began to be shot at by guards, I escaped on horseback, only to find myself at the bottom of the swamp with a skittish steed, alligators strangely still in the water.

Saint Denis impressed me the most. I don't think I've seen more than maybe a quarter of it, and it's there on the edge of the modern world that I hope Red Dead Redemption 2 tells its most interesting stories. This gave me more than one vibe of Cormac McCarthy than of Westworld, hinting at the death of the Old West, the consequences of rapid American industrialization and the death of a way of life, rather than a straightforward romanticization of the frontier and its outlaw heroes. . Players' stories will be as interesting as Rockstar's when RDR2 launches later this month: with millions of people seeking out their own frontier experiences, we'll see just how vast and flexible this extraordinary game is.