Read the big Red Dead Redemption 2 reviews back to back and two critics reach for the language of theater to describe opposite problems. At Kotaku, Kirk Hamilton wrote that steering Arthur Morgan through the world "is less like controlling a video game character and more like giving directions to an actor." At PC Gamer, James Davenport found the story missions so rigid that it felt like "following stage directions rather than roleplaying the life of a vagabond in the old west."
Hamilton was reviewing the 2018 console release and complaining about controls, and Davenport was reviewing the 2019 PC version and complaining about mission design. But put the two lines together and you get the odd shape of Rockstar's 2018 western. On the road, you're a slightly exasperated director. Inside a mission, you're the actor, and someone else has already blocked the scene. My argument, and it is an argument rather than a fact, is that the first job is where the game's real story lives. With Grand Theft Auto VI, which Rockstar lists as coming November 19, about two weeks out, it's a good moment to look at how that split works.
The ride is the script
Davenport's review is a useful catalog of what happens between objectives. Hillbillies might hold Arthur up after he makes camp. A couple might invite him to dinner, then try to rob him. A man with a snakebite might stumble out of the woods and ask him to suck the poison out. Davenport didn't treat these as filler. "These random encounters depict the brutal life on the fading frontier," he wrote, "as nature pushes back against the interlopers who seek to transform it."
His best example is a small one. Arthur finds a woman stuck under a horse and gives her a ride to town, and the two talk about the troubles of working for rich, ungrateful men. No plot marker asked for that conversation. Davenport says side missions, activities and random events "all inform Arthur's character and the setting in subtle, enriching ways."
That's what I mean by the real story. The campaign tells you who Arthur is. The ride shows you, often without warning, and it can only do that because the player chose to take that road at that hour. A cutscene can be better written, but it can't feel found.
A world that notices you, maybe
The second piece of the trick is that the world seems to be paying attention. Davenport lists the sort of detail that makes it feel watched and lived in: animal carcasses that decompose over time, NPCs who react to a muddy or bloody outfit, and a burst through a doorway that scares everyone on the other side.
Hamilton has the better anecdote. Outside the town of Valentine, he hit a prompt to search a saddlebag, not realizing it belonged to a stranger's horse, and got kicked for it. Arthur walked into the post office caked in filth, and a woman remarked, "I hope that's only mud on you." Hamilton later noticed the hat had come off, so he rode back and found it lying in the mud. Was that fun? "Not exactly," he wrote. But he was clear that it was memorable.
Here's what I find most interesting: Hamilton couldn't always tell how much of this was real. "Did this character in town really remember me from the last time I visited, several hours ago?" he asked. "Or was that just the result of a clever bit of scripted dialogue?" Rockstar hides the numbers that would settle it, or as he put it, opts "to obfuscate numbers at almost every opportunity."
Most modern games, Hamilton argued, lay out their progression in a spreadsheet for you to fill in. By his reading, this one "does not want you to achieve dominance over it," only to have you exist in it. I'd go further and say the uncertainty does the storytelling. If you can't see the system, you start assuming there's a person there.
Then the mission marker appears
Which is what makes the missions so jarring. Davenport's description is blunt: "ride to a destination talking all the while, do a tightly scripted albeit amusing thing, ride and chat to a final destination to finish up." And the leash is short. "Step out of line in these missions and it's a failstate," he wrote. His PC review, published in 2019, gave the game 88 and summed it up as "a monumental work straining against stubborn mission design and stability problems."
So the game spends hours teaching you that your curiosity matters, then asks you to stand on your mark. The same review that flags the rigidity is also full of praise for what the missions deliver, though. Davenport's favorites include shoveling manure, getting drunk with a friend and a hot air balloon ride, and he calls Arthur "one of the most deeply human characters I've played in a game." That arc needs control. You can't guarantee a slow, sad ending if the player is free to wander off in the middle of it.
Dan Houser, the Rockstar co-founder who served as a producer and narrative lead, touched on the same split at the Tribeca Festival in June, speaking about open-world games in general. "The whole point of an open world game is we provide guides," he said, as reported by GamesRadar+. "We want you to experience the story." Yet he also said, "The most fun thing about the game isn't any rubbish we write, it's the systems that we make," and called the story side "just the icing on the cake."
That's a striking line from someone who spent years trying to get more players to the credits, and to my ear it's the Red Dead 2 problem in one breath. The people writing the play seem to know the audience might prefer wandering around backstage.
Two jobs, one game
I don't think the missions are a failure, and I don't think the critics who love them are wrong. What I'd say is that Red Dead Redemption 2 asks you to hold two jobs at once, and it never fully reconciles them. You take stage directions to learn who Arthur Morgan is. Then you ride out alone, give directions to a difficult actor, and find out for yourself.
When the next big open world arrives, the question I'd ask isn't how large its map is. It's what happens on the way to the next marker, and whether anything out there seems to notice you passing through.
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