Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 promises to be absurdly detailed, but that detail won’t just be limited to the game’s world— it will also extend to how the player interacts with the game’s story.
Speaking to the Official PlayStation Magazine (November 2018, Issue 154), Rockstar North’s Art Director Josh Bass explained that the developers have aimed to make the decisions faced by players over the course of the story less binary than they were in the original game— by adding hundreds of choices for players to cumulatively make over the course of the game.
“While there’s an overarching story, the game is filled with choices for Arthur to make that will allow you to decide what kind of outlaw Arthur is – whether he’s an honorable outlaw or someone less honorable is up to you,” Bass said. “The world will respond to these choices in ways both big and small, and hopefully when players begin to share their experiences they’ll start to realise just how different they are from one another, depending on the hundreds of decisions they made across the course of the game.”
In a way, this to me sounds not dissimilar to how CD Projekt RED handled choice and consequence, alongside morality, in The Witcher 3, which to this day remains the most lauded game for its realistic depiction of those concepts. If Rockstar can achieve even half of what CDPR did, I daresay they’ll have a masterpiece on their hands.