Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 is a massive title. Then again, its predecessor and even Rockstar’s last big open world epic, Grand Theft Auto 5, were also big titles. What sets the current title apart, aside from the wide array of activities, its dynamic NPC interactions, and the sheer breadth of its living world? If you need numbers, then Rockstar co-founder and VP of creativity Dan Houser has a few of those for you.
An in-depth feature by Vulture revealed that the game is 60 hours long, though whether this includes side-mission content or was simply for the main story wasn’t confirmed. However, several hours of content were removed near the end. “The acting for Red Dead Redemption 2’s story mode is now complete,” a particular section of the feature reads, “but as release day approaches, five hours of the 65-hour game are dumped.”
According to Houser, “They were never going to work technically or be quite slick enough, or they felt superfluous. We removed a mission on a train where you had to deal with bounty hunters, because it was fun at first, but then it wasn’t. This part of the process is always about compromise and horse trading. Everyone always loses bits of the game they love.”
Other interesting figures include 2,200 days of motion capture; a main story script that’s nearly 2000 pages; 500,000 lines of dialogue; and a whopping 300,000 animations. Motion and performance capture started in 2013, despite development beginning in 2010. More than 1,200 actors were involved, with 700 of them having dialogue. The result is that each NPC has roughly 80 pages of dialogue.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is out on October 26th for Xbox One and PS4. We only recently learned that its file size would be around 88.57 GB, at least according to the Microsoft Store Page.