Gamestop employees have been given an extended look at Red Dead Redemption 2, and some are reporting that the "boring" presentation put them to sleep. At the 2018 GME Conference in Indianapolis, USA, developer Rockstar showed off an all-new 20-minute live demo to the Gamestop employees in attendance. While there's - unsurprisingly - no footage of the event, an Instagram post by user undermined_productions, which has since been deleted, confirmed that a Red Dead Redemption 2 presentation did indeed take place (thanks, wccftech). Instagram: undermined_productions via wccftech Since then, people at the conference have been sharing their thoughts via a couple of Reddit threads. "Beautiful game, but mostly just saw horse riding simulator. Very difficult to stay awake..." said one commenter on Reddit, while another said: "There was a shoot out after a bank heist but before the heist we saw 15 minutes of meandering through some woods and some plucky guitar playing." When asked if the game looked fun, they replied: "Shootout looked decent, the bank heist was slowly paced. The game will be great and sell like mad but the demo they showed was really dry." "Don't get me wrong, I still think the game will be fantastic, just the demo was kinda boring to watch," added another. When two Gamestop employees commented that they'd missed the presentation and their colleagues told them they'd been "blown away" by the demo, other attendees responded to the post by saying: "almost put me to sleep", "Rockstar Equestrian Simulator 2k19", "that was painful to watch", and "I may have fallen asleep very briefly". It's not all bad, though. "I thought RDR2 looked great," said a Gamestop manager. "Definitely GOTY contender and I'm not going to judge by one mission. Anyone who enjoyed the first one is probably [going to] love this new one." Of course, it's rarely possible to assess an entire open world game on just a 20-minute demo, and a couple of commenters were keen to contextualise why viewers may have found it boring... and why they might have dozed off a little. "To give a little context, everyone was exhausted from the week and it's the last thing they showed us," explained another attendee. "I nodded [off] for a minute but the game is beautiful. The world looks so meticulously constructed and the demo was a flawless example of the mechanics, world, and physics the game has to offer. I didn't play the first one and had zero excitement for the game going into it but came out stoked on getting it." Red Dead Redemption 2 is due out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on 26th October 2018.<doc-sep>Arthur Morgan is standing in a general store, shoving cheese into his face and downing bottles of rum like an animal. We knew there would be a practical benefit to the stylish mutton chops we shaved into his face just moments before. He’d been trekking, murdering, and hunting his way across the frontier all day and was feeling a bit sluggish. His shoulders slumped, his gait changed, and everyone he passed told him he looked like shit. Cheese was the answer. Cheese and alcohol. Red Dead Redemption nailed what it felt like to be a gunslinger in the Wild West, but John Marston didn’t have needs – at least not outside of the story. He had character, sure, but he didn’t feel human. Red Dead Redemption 2 aims to simulate what life might have been like for an outlaw living off the land in the untamed American frontier. Arthur needs to eat, he needs to rest, and he needs to wear a jacket up in the cold mountains. If he gets covered in mud, blood, or some unholy mixture of the two, he needs to wash. If he doesn’t want to look like a yeti, he has to trim his hair and beard, which grow in real-time. If he eats too much, he packs on weight. If he runs a lot, his stamina increases. My demo begins with an early mission. Arthur and the Van der Linde gang are hiding out in the snowy peaks after a botched robbery in Blackwater. The plan is to lay low for a while, then head East once the heat dies down. That is, until gang boss Dutch Van der Linde gets wind of a money train passing through. Straight away, the attention to detail is striking. Red Dead Redemption looked phenomenal at the time of release, but it seems barren and flat in comparison to RDR 2’s world. There’s varied topography everywhere you look, landmarks pepper the horizon, and the world feels alive. Rabbits scarper out from bushes, birds soar overhead, and the wind sees snow swirl through the air like dust. The snow, Dutch’s jacket, the horses’ tails, and the little string tied around Arthur’s hat are all physically simulated. The Rockstar reps tell us each tree in the map was individually placed. We believe them. It’s up to you how you admire all these details, whether from third or first-person. The HUD is stripped back and fully customisable, too. You can choose between a couple of different-sized radars, or you can turn the radar off altogether and rely solely on the big map you can open at any time from the pause menu. Controller prompts only appear when you need them for contextual actions, such as tending to your horse or retrieving items from it. You can only carry what Arthur and his horse can physically carry – there are no bottomless, invisible pockets here – and you can switch between firearms, knives, and throwables from a weapon wheel. Our mission sees us setting up TNT on the train tracks, but the thing doesn’t go off and we’re forced to leg it after the train and jump down onto the roof. Arthur and another gang member stealthily take out some lone guards, but things soon turn shooty. This is where we see the reworked Dead-Eye system in action, which can now pick out vital organs and slow down time when fully upgraded. A click of R3 sees the action slow to a crawl, Arthur paints his targets with R1, then unleashes a hail of bullets on a trio of enemies, dropping them with precision. Even outside of Dead-Eye, gunfights are brutal and immediate. A single shot to the head or the center mass is enough to put anyone down – don’t expect bullet sponge enemies here, even with all the new, RPG-esque systems. Particularly well-placed shots trigger a cinematic kill-cam so you can appreciate your handiwork. At one point, Arthur is walking through a carriage when a shovel hits him in the face, knocking his hat off with a clunk – an enemy was hiding in ambush. A fistfight ensues, complete with full facial deformation. Arthur beats his opponent to a pulp. Once the fighting is over, Arthur stops the train and the gang makes its way to the cart that’s packing the goods. Thing is, it’s locked, and the guys inside won’t open up. The outlaws shoot up the side of the carriage, place some TNT on the door, and crack it open like a vault. Arthur steps inside the grandiose, furnished carriage interior and picks the place clean, securing some bonds. It’s here where Arthur is offered a choice. The people who were in the carriage are on their knees outside, and Arthur can shoot them, let them go, or take them hostage. This section of the demo ends before he makes his decision. Time moves forward and we’re taken to a later point in the game. The gang has moved East, we’re out in the open world, control is passed to us, and we’re free to explore. The first thing we encounter is the sound of a man screaming. When we find him he’s writhing around in pain. Turns out he’s been bitten by a snake, just one of hundreds of random events out in the world. We decide to suck the poison out out of his leg. “Don’t tell anyone about this,” Arthur says as he spits the venom on the sand. Our horse takes a massive shit. This makes us wonder if you can mount the horse from the back, for some reason. You can. It looks badass. We wonder if this also means you can just jump onto your horse from a height. You can. It looks painful. As always with Rockstar games, the character physics have a realistic, satisfying heft to them. As we’re admiring that bit of procedural animation, a deer skits by. We pull out our rifle, aim, and tag it in the side. It limps off, wounded. We track it down and finish it off, hop off our horse, and interact with the creature to skin it. Arthur actually skins the creature: he digs his bowie knife into its stomach, cuts a line across, and unfolds its skin before rolling it up. It is grisly. We walk to our horse and stow the pelt on its rump. We then walk back to the fleshy carcass and throw it over our shoulder before tying that onto our horse and riding towards the nearest town. Once the meat and pelt are sold, we make our way to the general store for the aforementioned cheese and alcohol binge before heading back out into the township. Arthur breaks into song, emboldened by the rum. We lock onto a nearby NPC, and have the option to ‘greet’ or ‘provoke’ them. We’re a drunk cowboy, so obviously we provoke. “You smell like your shit took a shit,” Arthur shouts at them. “I don’t want any trouble, mister,” they reply. Arthur keeps at them until they eventually run away. This is when we notice he’s still covered in blood and looks like a serial killer. You can be friendly, aggressive, or hold up any NPC in the game. These conversations, depending on what choice you make, are all contextual, and they happen in-game, rather than inside static menus. NPCs take into account what you’re wearing, how rugged you are, whether you are visibly armed or not, where you are stood, your honor rating, what is happening around you, and, of course, whether you have animal blood all over your face. At one point, we are exploring a beautiful riverbank and we see a gold prospector draining water into a basin. We decide to see what he’s up to. Arthur greets him with a “Howdy,” and the prospector tells him to piss off. Obviously, we stand closer to him. “Would you mind getting out of my face?” He says. We choose ‘provoke’. “I’m mighty fine right here,” Arthur replies.<doc-sep>Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. Things were going great in my first preview of Red Dead Redemption 2, the big Wild West game from Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive coming on the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One on October 26. Until I accidentally shot a dog. Yes, you can do that in this game. On more than one occasion, I accidentally pulled the R2 trigger in the PlayStation 4 Pro version, rather than the L2 trigger. In this case, I was supposed to pet the dog, who was sitting on a wooden sidewalk. Instead, I shot it by accident. (Let it be known I would never intentionally do this, in real life or in a video game). When I did this, we all screamed in shock. This turned out to be my window into in how far Rockstar is pushing forward the boundaries of what video games can be when it comes to immersive gameplay and complex storytelling in open worlds. Grand Theft Auto 5 set a high bar, but that was built for the PlayStation 3. This one is meant to be persistent, immersive, and intimate using the best console technology today, according to Rockstar. It’s out to prove there doesn’t have to be a conflict between an open world and a scripted narrative. After I shot the poor little pooch, I learned animal cruelty was a crime. I was branded an outlaw in the fictional town of Valentine, as people witnessed the event and one of the bystanders ran to get the sheriff. The lawman came over and asked me to leave town. I started walking away, but not fast enough. So he started shooting at me. I fired back, and that was another mistake. The crack of gunfire was deafening, and it was all really unnecessary. Image Credit: Rockstar Games I took down the sheriff, but then a bunch of other gunmen came out. I fired at them and used my “dead eye” focus, which slows down time and so you can target a bunch of enemies more easily. Then slow motion turned to quick and I took down a couple more. I took down the whole posse, and then I looked for my horse. I couldn’t figure out which one was mine. And during that delay, another instant posse formed, and a dozen more gunmen came at me. They finally took me and my horse down. I was reborn, but still had a large bounty on my head. At the advice of my fellow Rockstar observers, I went to the post office and pay the bill. So I went there, paid $225, and lifted the bounty. We noticed there were bullet holes in my leather jacket. I figured that would be enough. But as I walked through town, the townspeople reacted negatively to me. One said, “We remember what you did.” Even though my weapon was holstered, I wasn’t welcome at the stable in that town. “Oh, it’s you,” said the stable owner. If I had walked through that town with my gun drawn, the townspeople would have been on edge. If I had only just pet the dog, it would not have barked at me the next time I saw it. And that, in a nutshell, is the Red Dead Redemption 2 experience. A game with a memory Image Credit: Rockstar Games Red Dead Redemption 2 has a persistent memory. I was hoping for a rewind button. But it doesn’t have one. Heck, even my horse’s hooves left footprints in the mud, and while they didn’t persist, I thought about that and was surprised to come upon footprints in the mud at another location. Rockstar has worked on this for years, with some people on it since the previous game debuted in 2010. The original Red Dead Redemption was an epic experience and my favorite game of 2010, and this one is a prequel to that story. It’s fair to say that I, and perhaps a 100 million other gamers, have been waiting anxiously for a long time for this. In Red Dead Redemption, you play John Marston, a partially reformed outlaw who hunts down the surviving members of the Van der Linde gang. That took place in the dying days of the Wild West, around 1911. The new game also takes place in the waning days of the American West, but it places you in Dutch Van der Linde’s gang at the peak of their notoriety. This is the beginning of that end, where as the original was really the end. It is set in a fictional place, New Hanover, which is one of five states in the game. You play an unrepentant outlaw, Arthur Morgan, the lead enforcer of the Van der Linde gang. Morgan was adopted by the elder leader, Dutch, as a child, and so grew up with the gang. But fractures within the group start gnawing and creating pressures on Morgan. Arthur trusts Dutch to make the right decisions, and he will put the plans in motion. Arthur is as loyal to Dutch and the gang as can be, and honor is a big part of his personality. There’s a big cast of characters, some that you meet by chance on the trails and towns along the way, and many that you’ll find in the outlaw camps. One of Dutch’s decisions is to do a robbery in the city of Blackwater, where things go wrong. They lose a few gang members and run from the law to the Grizzly Mountains of the East. They’re barely surviving, and the members of the gang are starving in their camp. Then Dutch decides to rob a train. The train robbery Image Credit: Rockstar Games That’s where my demo picked up. John Marston is gravely wounded. His wife and son come to visit him and then leave. And so he is left behind. Others are recruited to join the fight. One of the elder gang members objects, asking Dutch why they are breaking with their plan of hiding out in the woods and lying low. Robbing this train, he argues, certainly isn’t lying low. But Dutch senses the discontentment in the camp, and he rouses them to take to their horses. The cinematic finishes playing as the horses make their way through the beautiful woods and mountain passes. Riding a horse is simple and fluid, almost like driving a car in Rockstar’s other epic game, Grand Theft Auto V. I was amazed to see the footprints in the mud and the wildlife all around me, like the deer running in the trees and the hawks in the sky. It’s no joke. The world is as deep and expansive as Rockstar says it is, and I can see how all of Rockstar’s studios had to pitch in on it. It took a long while to ride through the terrain, but the camera shifted to cinematic shots of our six horse riders. Dutch talked through much of the ride, and twangy music accompanied his soliloquy. Dutch was kind enough to recite the names of the outlaws, like Javier Escuella, who played a role in the first game. Image Credit: Rockstar Games We arrived at a cliff overlooking the railroad tracks, where one member of the gang was already laying dynamite under the tracks. Arthur helps out and ties the wire to the detonator. But the detonator doesn’t work when the train chugs past, and the riders have to chase down the train. Arthur and Lenny, another gang member, manage to make it aboard, and then they start the treacherous journey to the engine. Gunfights ensue, and the guards start falling. The action is cinematic, with Arthur throwing the last engineer of the train in a spectacular struggle. During the fighting, dramatic music played, highlighting the sense of danger. The music from Woody Jackson flows seamlessly during the action, and the game has 192 separate pieces of original interactive score. Arthur stops the train, and the rest of the gang catches up, but then other cars empty and more Pinkerton agents come out and fight. The gang has to take them all down.<doc-sep>
The ride up the gorgeous, sunlit mountain on horseback has been uneventful, almost peaceful, which is a rare occurrence in the lawless Wild West. My steed moves at a meandering pace, up a grey, rocky path where tufts of dry grass jut out from the craggy ground. It’s quiet, and I don’t encourage the horse to move any faster so we can enjoy the moment, fleeting as it might be. But as the path becomes steeper, I realize we have to speed up, and I dig my heels in to get the horse to switch to a flat-out run. Only, I haven’t been paying close enough attention to my surroundings, and so the poor creature bursts full-speed into a dense tangle of trees. The horse is knocked backwards while I fly 10 feet forward in the opposite direction. By the time I scramble to my feet, the horse is already standing, seemingly no worse for wear. But I stroke its head reassuringly, mostly to say sorry. I’m a lot more careful for the rest of the ride. I’ve played countless hours of Grand Theft Auto and the rest of Rockstar’s impressive catalogue of games, which has involved speeding across Los Santos and Liberty City in everything from sports cars to speedboats to long-haul trucks. But I’ve never felt a connection to any of those vehicles. Certainly nothing approaching the way that I felt for my horse after recently playing two hours of Rockstar’s upcoming Western epic Red Dead Redemption 2. The game, which is a prequel to the original RDR, is the biggest thing the developer has ever made, the product of eight internal studios working together. It’s the first time Rockstar has created an open-world game from the ground up for the current generation of consoles, and it shows; the game is absolutely gorgeous with an immense sense of scale. But what struck me during my all-too-brief time with the game wasn’t how huge it was. It was how deep it felt. The way I could walk up to any soul in town and strike up a conversation, or how if I wandered into camp at the right time I could catch all my friends waking up for breakfast, and pour myself a coffee and join them. I saw it most in my horse. Even in just a few hours, we bonded, and I felt terrible when my mistake caused her pain. Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t just present a world you can get lost in — it gives you one you’ll become attached to. Red Dead Redemption 2 takes place before the events of the original, and puts you in the role of Arthur Morgan, an outlaw and part of the infamous Van der Linde gang. John Marston, star of the first Red Dead, is just one of 23 members of the group, who are as much of a family as they are a criminal organization. When I wandered into their camp, which is out in the wilderness, a good long ride from civilization, it wasn’t what I expected. It had a family feel. Lunch was just being served — some kind of stew — and everyone was coming together to share a communal meal, greeting me as I walked past. A woman scolded me for not putting enough coin in the communal donation box, while others invited me to join in a song around the fire. As I headed to my horse to leave the camp, Arthur just kept singing, the tune stuck in his head. It felt like an actual place, one that both acted independently of me but also responded to me in ways that seemed natural. The idea of creating a living, breathing virtual world is something game developers have been striving toward for a long time; it’s ostensibly the goal of every open-world game, Rockstar’s included. What makes RDR2’s so convincing — at least during my time with it — is the depth and detail of the world. Here are a few of the things that stood out to me the most. Horses, guns, and beards The steed I had during my time with the game had a white body with a grey mane and tail, which gave her a distinguished look. More importantly, she was incredibly easy-going; according to Rockstar, you build a bond with the animals over time, and this one apparently already had a great relationship with Arthur.