Wide, Wild West
I don’t see the outcome of that mission, but I’m told that it’s only shortly afterwards that the game’s second chapter begins. Rockstar says the world opens up in its entirety after that opening section is through - no locked-off Mexico sections this time around, it seems.
I’m dropped into New Hanover, looking directly at the Grizzlies Arthur just left. They’re on the horizon - it’s clear we’ve traveled a very long way. This area’s a stereotypically wild landscape dotted with a Cornwall company outpost, the town of Valentine and smaller points of interest. Plumes of smoke mark the pockets of humanity that live in the shadow of the local Twin Stack mesas. It’s here that I’m introduced to my horse, who will soon be dubbed Mahogany Boy.
It’s a relatively minor change amidst the scale of this game, but Red Dead 2’s option to name your horse speaks to the bond the developers feel you should have with yours. Every breed has different strengths and weaknesses, acts as an overflow inventory for anything Arthur can’t carry, even becomes a lost-and-found (if Arthur loses his hat or gets disarmed, the dropped item will reappear in the saddle). You’ll be relying on your animal - and the better you treat it, the better it’ll treat you. Feeding and grooming your horse builds its level of affection towards you, governing whether they’ll respond to your whistles, if they’ll buck at gunfire, even whether they can perform dressage.
Mahogany Boy seems to have been pre-leveled for our demo, and it’s a genuinely huge help. He stays close, enabling for quick weapon switching, doesn’t buck at the howls of a passing wolf pack (you’re not the only hunter in the wilderness), and controls near perfectly, unless I ask him to do something really stupid. Incidentally, Red Dead’s more finessed horse movement feels immediately natural, with various speeds treated like car gears, the player shifting up and down with single button presses as needed.
Travelling across New Hanover is done almost entirely at horse-pace, then - which is good, as even this single area is seemingly enormous. I don’t come close to exiting the demo space in the two hours. The center of everything seems to be Valentine, an appealingly muddy little town visible from the surrounding hills, and the only area bustling with NPCs that I come across. Most central buildings here seem to have a function - from posting your own bounty at the Post Office to call off a manhunt, or managing some of the frankly ludicrous amount of customisation of your weapons and horse in the Gun Store and Stables.
The Barbershop is closed, but I get a look at what personal grooming entails later on and, as you might expect, it’s above and beyond the usual. Arthur’s hair and beard grow naturally according to in-game time, and shaving is, if not entirely manual, then certainly close to it. You can shave down individual parts of Arthur’s face to various lengths, essentially creating totally custom beards. I didn’t know I needed totally custom beards in a game until I had one.
The Saloon in Valentine includes an opportunity to pick up another quest. Rockstar says it wants to steer away from the traditional idea of a side-quest, instead dropping more meaningful, lengthy stories alongside the tale of Dutch’s gang. I don’t get to see the full fruits of that, but our meeting with a historian at the Valentine bar suggests what it means. This stranger’s attempting to write a book about history’s greatest gunslingers, but his current subject - Jimboy ‘The Fastest Left Hand in the West’ Callaway - is a little the worse for wear. He hands you a series of photographs, asking you to head out across the land and meet their subjects, take new portraits of them with a camera he gives you (which acts like GTA V’s phone camera feature, including the ability to take ‘self-portraits’), and report back. It’s clear this isn’t a fetch quest.
Honestly, most of my time spent in Valentine was in talking to its residents. Ostensibly a new contextual menu for interacting with the game, Red Dead 2’s
new dialogue system is governed by two button presses at a time - look at any living creature with your guns holstered and hold L2, and a miniature menu of possible interactions appears.
If that’s your horse, you can check its stats, feed it, calm it, or groom it. If it’s possible hunting prey, you can study its breed, adding it to a compendium, and check what spoils it might offer, or call out to it to offer the moment’s extra confusion you need to loose an arrow. Friendly dogs can be patted and praised (or scolded, if you’re some kind of insane monster).
This system balloons in usefulness when it comes to human NPCs. Dialogue with any given person can be friendly or rude, creating flowing, surprisingly natural conversations between the two of you. You can threaten to rob passers-by, or surrender to lawmen. You can pretend to surrender to lawmen and then draw your pistol to keep them surprised. In the wide-open pastures of New Hanover, where people are few and far between, it turns every encounter into a treat - whether that’s embracing your Black Hat persona and robbing them blind, or just finding out what pleasantries they have to say as they pass by. In Valentine, I mostly teased the residents using the “Antagonize” option, until one of them drew a gun, I shot him in the street, and was chased out of town.
The Great Outdoors
There is, thankfully, plenty to do outside of civilization. Being left to your own devices in a Rockstar game will inevitably make your first port of call the combat, and New Hanover’s long winding paths make it ideal for a quick robbery (although rival gangs can also be stumbled across, whispering among the trees, waiting to take
your hard-earned money).
Gunplay immediately feels like a step up from even GTA 5 - reduced ammo counts on antiquated weaponry makes every shot mean more, and that’s matched by a real kick to everything in your arsenal, and a satisfying thump to the way your payload lands, whether that’s the stereotypical ricochet sound of old Westerns, or the horrible pirouette of an enemy hit in the shoulder. Rockstar wants to show its hard work here - Max Payne-like dynamic kill cams now show impressive shots in cinematic style before returning control to the player. The addition of multiple ammo types for your weapons - fire arrows, split-point bullets, and the like - also promises a level of invention to how you go about combat that hasn’t been apparent before.
I’m told hand-to-hand combat has been improved, but I didn’t let anyone get near enough to me for a punch-up, as the first game’s returning Dead Eye is still absurdly satisfying. The slow motion, target painting feature swipes your world into sepia, and can now be upgraded to show weak points like the heart or brain, aiming to make hunting easier.
Speaking of hunting, it remains a major source of income, but now gains extra importance because of new recipes and crafting options. Arthur can set up a personal camp for himself to cook his spoils - turning them into meals for either himself or his horse, or use loot from enemies and wildlife alike to make new ammo or items. That increase in usefulness comes with a new efficiency measure - Arthur Morgan comes with the Witcher-like ability to identify trails left by animals, following hazy tracks to his prey.
On a more base level, the way Arthur plays is tied to background stats in strength, dexterity, instinct and grit. It’s not clear how these stats are levelled up, but we know that his ‘Cores’ - the health, stamina and Dead Eye meters shown onscreen - will increase capacity through various means. For instance, getting better stamina is a case of getting off your horse and doing some running of your own. That said, your horse has its own Cores in health and stamina, so you’ll want to make sure they’re being increased too.
New Hanover’s rolling hills have their own dotted population. These don’t seem to be quest givers so much as ways to make the world feel alive, even markers of time spent in the story. At one point, I rode up to an old man watching two younger men building the frontage of a house. The old man told me how these were his sons, that he thought teaching them how to build their own home would build characters, and that, sadly, they were awful at it. As if to prove a point, the frame of the house promptly fell on and killed me. Unintentional comedy aside, Rockstar points out that, over time, this house will become more developed, and the old man will have more to say, emphasising how long you’ve spent with Arthur.
It’s not clear how long will pass in the course of the campaign, or how extensive those changes will be (could we see towns grow to reflect the progress of the 19th Century west?) but it seems that story missions will be what initiates a time jump.