The design of Red Dead Redemption II

Red Dead Redemption is a narrative driven game about the life of Arthur Morgan, and the end of the wild west. Everything about the game exists to support the narrative of the game. The game’s main focus is to be a good narrative experience. I think the game succeeds at constructing an excellent narrative that will stick with players even after they have finished the game. This article will primarily be focused on how the game constructs its narrative and the tools it uses to achieve it. I will spoil the entire game if you have not finished it completely, and I recommend that you complete the game before reading further. This is not a breakdown of the story, but rather an attempt to highlight why the narrative works by using examples.
A game’s narrative is built by using gameplay, presentation and writing (words spoken by characters or read by the player). Red Dead Redemption II is a very good example of how to design a game around all three elements. The writing and presentation is done very well, and is the highlight of the game. The gameplay narrative has a overarching design that works, but it is not implemented that well; I consider the gameplay aspects of the game, and by extension also the narrative told by the gameplay to be mediocre. You can learn something by looking at how Red Dead Redemption II has constructed its gameplay in order to tell a story, it does things well, but it also does things poorly. The rest of this article will split up the narrative into the categories of writing, presentation and gameplay.

Writing narrative

I would like to start with the writing of Red Dead Redemption II as this is likely the best aspect of the game. The game is one of the better written games I have played. The writers that worked on this game understands how writing works, and how to write good stories and characters.
The plot of the main story-line is ultimately about getting rich and getting away from the law. It is not very complicated as a story, and mostly serves as a springboard for the character narratives. It serves as a foundation for every other narrative of the story. The interesting part about the plot is how the characters behave in the different sections.
Red Dead Redemption II’s writing is what happens if you put a good TV-show and create a game out of it. The writing is incredible, but it is also extremely linear. While that is not directly a problem with the writing itself, it does create problems when you try to implement the gameplay to fit with the linear narrative.

The characters
The characters are likely the biggest strength of Red Dead Redemption II. What makes the characters in Red Dead Redemption II so good? The answer is very simple: they behave like real people. Every single individual has their own background, flaws, strengths, beliefs, struggles, desires and so forth. The characters do not exist to be puppets for the players to interact with. The characters have their own agenda and desires they will consider above giving the player what they desire. Every character is complex with many layers to them, and they are not simple cardboard character arch-types. You don’t have one dimensional “the gunslinger” arch-type for example. Arthur could be consider a gunslinger, but he is a very complex character.

Dutch is one of the major characters in Red Dead Redemption II, he starts out as a leader of a band of outlaws before he gradually turns into a cult leader obsessed with locality and grandeur. When you consider Dutch’s behaviour with his background as a cult leader his behaviour makes a lot of sense. He thinks very highly of himself. He is ruthless in order to get what he wants. He is willing to sacrifice anyone that stands in the way of his identity. What makes him so real, is that he is not very aware of a lot of his traits. He is portrayed as someone that believes they are doing the right thing, for the right reasons. He will always have a reason to justify himself. When he leaves John and Arthur to die he says he has no choice. What Dutch actually is like a person, and what he himself perceives himself to be are drastically different. This is very common with humans, especially cult leaders. What he does, and how he thinks of himself makes him feel incredible real as a human character. What he does is not logical, because cult leaders are rarely logical. Every failure is not his fault, but can be explained away.

Characters are set-up very well. Their background and experiences have formed them into who they are today, and their behaviour makes sense when you consider that. I think Sadie is a very good example of this. She is not an insane cold blooded killer because that character trope is fun, but becomes that way after having lost her husband and her previous life. Her willingness to take risks and to kill people that stands in her way is very high, and especially those that have wronged her. The obsession with killing O’Driscoll members is very real, it makes sense from a character perspective. The writers did the work of setting up her background and behaviour slowly before you as the player interact with the more insane and bloodthirsty version of her. However, even when she becomes more bloodthirsty, she is not consumed by it as the archetype character would be. She becomes empty and lost more than anything else.

These are just two characters highlighted, but I could likely write similar things about every single character you meet. Every single one of them is very well written. Their background and personality always matches their actions based on what you would expect. Every character makes a lot of sense, and feels like a real person.

Narrative forks
My personal favourite writing aspect of Red Dead Redemption II is how the game is incredible good at using narrative forks. That is to say that the game is never predictable, but every decision makes sense. The writing sets-up a ton of realistic possible options for the different narratives to take. Certain things like Arthur’s death and the gangs decline are known pretty early, but you never know how exactly the story is going to unfold to get there. The story always leaves itself with several different paths out of a situation. The story never goes into a place where there is only one realistic option to resolve the situation it has created, the story always have multiple ways it can resolve a situation and progress the story.
The effect of this is that the story is unpredictable, but it is not unpredictable for the sake of being unpredictable. Things happens because it makes sense, and not because the story needs it to happen in order to progress.
The story is not always unpredictable, you understand that at the end of an chapter things are going to go to hell, and people are going to die. You don’t always understand who is going to die, and how things are going to fail though. The story needs something bad to happen in order for the overall story to progress, but it is flexible in how bad things happen.
My favourite example of the story’s use of narrative forks is when the gang realises that there is a mole among them. You are first told that Molly is the mole, but this is a pretty obvious red herring, and you don’t really believe that she is a mole. Even if you do believe that the story still tells you that there is another mole, and you can try and figure out who that mole is. There are a lot of characters that can have the motivation to be a mole. The reverend had just stopped drinking, and might want to turn the gang in to repent for his sins. John could have sacrificed the gang for his family’s safety. Micah is selfish and would easily sell out the gang for his own safety, even Dutch could have the same motivations here. There are so many options for who the mole could be, and all of them makes sense. The story can choose which to go with, be unpredictable, and still make sense.
This is one of the things I appreciate the most about the narrative. I frequently predict a lot of what is going to happen in stories because they don’t leave themselves with any options, and that creates a pretty boring narrative experience. It is very nice to have a story that is unpredictable, but still manages to make sense.

Arthur’s Journal
When you start the game the gang already has a lot of history. They have lost members, and they have gained members. The gang has had success and failures. They are essentially a big family of outlaws with Dutch as their cult leader. Most of this history is not directly told to the player through dialogue. The members will refer to the history even though the player does not know what they talk about. This makes the gang feel real. The game allows the player to get a better understanding of the gangs history by reading in Arthur’s journal. The recent history in Blackwater is written down, and the player can read it to better understand the gang and story. Because it is written down by one of the characters, the player gets to know the history in a very natural manner. It is not forced on to the player, but the player actively makes a decision to get interested in the history.

Arthur’s Death & The Epilogue
I love how the game handles Arthur’s death. The narrative of Arthur’s death is a central part of the game. In the first section of the game you simply live the wild and free life of Arthur and you get to know him. You have no worries at all. Then he gets gradually sicker before he collapses and gets diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB).
His death is now guaranteed. His sickness gets consistently worse, reinforcing the inevitable. You alongside Arthur now get the opportunity to contemplate mortality. What life choices has Arthur made? What can he do with the time he has left? The game asks a lot of questions about mortality through the lens of Arthur’s life and character. This is like the rest of the game a slow burn.
Then Arthur finally dies, and Arthur’s story is over. Things are not neatly tied up before his death. This makes his death feel a lot more realistic. Arthur would want to do more, but this is as far as he goes.

What makes the experience of Arthur’s death so special is the epilogue. The game is not over once the character dies. If you want to complete the game you are forced to play several more hours. You play as John, and not as Arthur. This allows time for the player to reflect on Arthur’s death and life. It makes his death carry so much more weight, it allows it to feel so much more real. The world does not end with Arthur’s death as so many other games or stories would, it continues. It reminds the player that Arthur’s story is over, but the world continues.
This creates a narrative illusion of the player feeling like they died through Arthur as a proxy. They get to look at how the world continues even though they themselves died. You spent so much time as Arthur, that a part of you dies with Arthur. This is a fantastic narrative effect you can only get through games when you feel like part of the character. It can be quite an uncomfortable feeling, but it is incredible good.
You forget the details of Arthur while playing the epilogue. You forget how he sounds. You forget how his body language works. You forget how exactly he looked like, and the finer details of his face.
Arthur’s death hit me in the epilogue in a very different way than most other games manage. I don’t even care about Arthur that much as a character, and yet it still has an effect because death and mortality is a universal experience. You will always be forgotten, even if some parts of the person lives on in memory the nuances are often lost. I love how the game manages to highlight that aspect of death.
The epilogue relies on the player having spent a lot of time playing as Arthur, and feeling like Arthur is a part of themselves. This means that both the gameplay and presentation needs to excellent to enable this. You need to care about the character to some extent in order for this narrative technique to work.

Presentation narrative

The purpose of the presentation in Red Dead Redemption II is twofold. The first thing the game wants to do is to tell the narrative of the world through the audiovisual elements. The second thing the game does is to support the written narrative directly through voice acting, character animation and atmosphere building.

The western setting
The presentation does the heavy lifting in order to sell the narrative of the end of the wild west. The graphics are fine, but what makes the presentation fantastic in order to sell the western setting is the amount of details combined with the scope of the game. The game is incredible detailed from an audiovisual perspective. The game shines when it gets to showcase human influence on nature, settlements and technology.
My most memorable experience of the detailed world that surprised me was the architecture of the hotel in strawberry. The stairs have an architecture that is unique to that single location and is incredible detailed.

The game includes both overgrown ruins and buildings under construction. Every state of decay is included, both old and new buildings. This adds a lot of life to the game where buildings showcase the cycle of life and death, and the constant progress of time.
The shopping experience is quite unique due to how it is presented. You can browse items in the shops shelves and buy it directly from them instead of going through a menu. The best aspect is however likely the weapon shop where you have a catalogue you flip through in order to buy weapons and ammunition. Every page is dedicated to a single weapon and includes a lot of information about the weapon. They are really trying to sell the weapon they are selling in-game. This adds so much life and realism to the world for me.
Saint Denis is perhaps the best example of how good the game is at modelling cities and settlements. There is always something new to rest your eyes on. The city never sleeps, and feels very alive due to the incredible amount of details it contains.
The narrative of the western world is told so incredible well through this detailed presentation. The story of the world is told through the presentation of the game, and it does not need to use words to sell that world, the audio and visual elements are more than enough.

The voice acting
The voice acting in Red Dead Redemption II is ridiculously good. The delivery and direction of the written dialogue is incredible. The voice acting adds so much context to the written dialogue. The feelings that the voices carry when spoken communicates so much information very clearly. This is how you do voice acting in a game.
What really sets the voice acting apart is the little details; how Arthur will speak louder while on a horse due to the distance between the one he is speaking to. The small details in tone when characters speak is excellent as well. The characters convey so much information through tone of voice.

Character animations
The character animations in the game is incredible detailed. Everything from body movement to eye movement is included in the characters when they talk in a cut-scene. Like the voice acting, the body movement, facial features and eye movement communicates so much information to the player. There is so much that is not directly said that is communicated through these animations.

Atmosphere
The game is incredible good at setting the atmosphere for the narrative it wants to tell. It uses background music to perfection. The soundtrack can support everything from hopeless and dire situations to situations filled with hope and optimism.
Another thing the game does very well is the use of weather to amplify a mood. The game will have rain or thunder when it wants to be dramatic or sad. The game will also use mist and fog to amplify the feeling of uncertainty. Likewise the game uses dawn and sky-break to showcase hope or optimism.

Gameplay narrative

The main purpose of the gameplay in Red Dead Redemption II is to tell a narrative; every gameplay element is centred around that goal. The gameplay is pretty good at telling a narrative, but the gameplay also has some pretty significant flaws. If you don’t notice or care about the flaws you will have a very good time with this game. The gameplay is designed in such a way that it is very good at telling a narrative, as long as you can overlook the gameplay’s flaws.

I do question why the game includes a mission recap with a medal. How many headshots did you get? How fast did you complete it? This entire medal thing seems like a gimmick that seems to work heavily against the immersion element by constantly reminding you that it is a game. I personally don’t care about it, and it is a very odd element to include.

Dissonance
The gameplay has a heavy dissonance with the narrative being told through cut-scenes and dialogue. The game requires you to do exactly what it tells you to do, the player has very little agency during missions. While these missions are great, and very well written, they are incredible strict and do not handle deviation from the script.
What this leads to is that the story being told often completely disagrees with what you are actually doing. This creates a massive dissonance between the gameplay narrative and the written narrative very frequently. The game should have been better at hiding that it is forcing the player to do something, or it needed to be better at adapting to player choice. You can still enjoy the missions for what they are even with this dissonance in the gameplay, but here are some of many potential examples.

• When you sneak into the kerosene factory you need to go through the factory to get to the managers office. If you go up to the roof and drop down besides the managers open window you fail. There is no narrative reason for you to fail the mission while doing this. Most stealth missions are pretty bad due to how inflexible they are due to this.
• In the last mission of the epilogue you need to shoot a sniper, but first you need to get close to him. He is immortal unless you follow the path laid out by the narrative. I shot him six times in the head, but needed to move closer before he could take damage.
• The gang is generally speaking immune to bullets most of the time. It does not matter how close the enemy are, how many enemies exist and how out of cover the members of the gang are. It is quite incredible how immune they are at times, to the point where you stop and just look at the insanity.

The port
I play on a PC with a keyboard and mouse, and that influences how I interact with games. The game is clearly created for a console with a controller in mind, but that does not justify bad ports. Red Dead Redemption II is a pretty good port, especially when it comes to the performance. There are still several odd control schemes and bugs that negatively affect the narrative as it pulls you out of the game, and I think it is important to highlight these.
The game has some minor bugs that pulls you out of the experience sometimes. The most persistent bug I encountered is that when the game pauses Arthur or the horse has a tendency to walk in circles when you press forward. This gets frustrating when you can’t chase the objective because your character spins in circles, I have failed the mission too many times due to this bug. (I make a lot of notes, so I have a tendency to pause the game)
Then there is the plethora of odd control choices that makes sense for a controller, but not so much for a keyboard and mouse. The base keybindings for fist-fighting with E, R and F is bizarre to me; most PC players would expect those to be at the mouse, and I can’t figure out why they are not. Going to the menus to change keybindings is incredible slow and tedious, and it seems like you lack the option to bind the same key to different unrelated actions for some reason.
Another good example of an odd set-up is the shops. While they are amazing from a presentation point of view, they are very odd from a PC controlling scheme. You need to turn the page with your arrows while you move with WASD to select things. In a sane world you would turn the page with the same button you use to select the items. When I play I have one hand on wasd, and another on the mouse. I don’t have any hands on the arrows, and it does not make sense to use them for this purpose.
These things are not major deal-breakers, but they are annoyances that reduce the narrative impact, and most of them are pretty easy to fix.

The shooting
The shooting is that of a third person shooter, which is fine. What is not fine is that it is still a third person shooter even when you play in first person. I would have loved to have a proper aim down sight on the weapons in first person. That is one of my biggest wish-list items for the game, and one I think would have massively increased my enjoyment of it. The amount of immersion it would have added to the combat encounters would have been massive. I can however live with only a third person shooting mechanic, but it seems like wasted potential. The overall shooting is by no means awful, but it leaves a lot to be desired.
The shooting revolves around revolvers and other weapons with single shots as you would expect from the setting. The game uses a mechanic where you have to empty the cartridge manually by pressing the shooting button between shots. This is a great element to add some more flavour and immersion to the shooting experience.
What is not so great is how the shooting relies on deadeye to buff the fire rate and accuracy of the weapons. I love the aspect of deadeye that allows you to play the gunslinging god of the westerns with the slowed time. That aspect is fantastic. I would however love better fire rate and accuracy on the base weapons in order to not have to rely on deadeye to overcome enemies instead of my own skill. I think the game sacrifices the option for the player skill to tell a narrative in order to tell the story of a overpowered gunslinger. I prefer to tell a story through my own skill. This might be a personal preference, and other people might prefer the overpowered dead eye to the more player skilled based narrative. I would have felt more like the gunslinger if I was the one that shoot well.
The weapons themselves are very similar with only minute differences. I believe that the balance of the weapons could have been significantly better. The current implementation means that fast firing weapons are by far the best as the fire-rate means you can shoot more frequent headshots, which means having a higher DPS.
On top of this you have the annoying way in which the game handles horse weapons. You can store weapons on your horse, which is a very good for immersion. The problem is when you don’t have control over which weapons magically appear during a firefight in a mission. It seems that the developers have not figured out how to give the players weapons when they did not bring them from the horse first, and decided to magically teleport weapons to the player. Even if the player did bring a weapon, the game often forces the player to use the provided weapon regardless, even if it is a downgrade. The best example here is when I brought a shotgun for a close quarter mission, and I got a worse shotgun forced on me without a option to use the one I brought as it vanished.

The cover system
The cover system is a core mechanic that the shooting encounters are designed around. There is nothing wrong with cover systems as a design, and I think that using one makes a lot of sense in a game like this. However, it is poorly implemented.
You have very little control of how you move behind cover, and almost every movement or action in cover feels clunky. You frequently get stuck in odd angles where you don’t have a good shot on the enemy, but it is impossible to make small adjustments to your position while in cover. You frequently can’t fire weapons from cover as expected. The overall control of the character while he is using cover and shooting is really poor.
The cartridges cannot be ejected while in cover for some absurd reason. This leads to a very weird sequence where your character needs to aim at the enemy before he can eject a cartridge, which makes no bloody sense. You will always be out of cover, and not go back and forth as you might expect in some situations.
When you use combat equipment, cover and objects also has a tendency to get in the way, and I have frequently had Arthur throw a firebomb underhanded right into a cover instead of over it.
This system is probably the worst implemented system in the game, and needed a lot more polish.

Movement in the world
How you move throughout the world is my favourite aspect about how the gameplay tells a narrative. A significant portion of the game is simply you riding your horse between locations. I love how this allows the player to just exist in the world. The riding is the primary way in which you interact with the open world, an open world which is full of great details that tells a narrative. It is important that the game creates incentives, and in some cases forces the player to slowly travel to the world. The slow pace is a key part in how the narrative manages to pack a punch.
Riding is also a key part in how the game manages conversations. Riding from location A to location is one of the primary mechanisms the game uses to tell the player about characters, the world, the history and everything in-between. It is a really good way to allow the game to have a lot of dialogue without it feeling stale or boring. Distracting the player with riding while they talk is a very good way to keep the pace going at a good rate.

Fishing and hunting
The game allows the player to both fish and hunt for food and achievements. This is something that an outlaw living in the wild west would do, and is an important pass time that changes the pace of the game. It is a great idea to add fishing and hunting to the game, but I am uncertain if I like the implementation of the hunting. The amount you get from a successful kill, and the value of the fur and animal parts seems laughably low. I would much have preferred a system where the animals you wanted to hunt were a bit harder to kill or catch, but that provided a lot more resources. This would have allowed you as a player to occasionally feel like it is worthwhile to go hunting.

The crafting system
The crafting system is a mixed bag. In some aspects it is pretty good. It allows you to live of the land, and use what nature provides. I love how you need to spend time to cut split bullets while you sit at the campfire. It is slow enough that it feels like a commitment to do it, but not so slow that it feels like a complete grind. It allows you to sit with the characters while nothing is happening. It is a powerful narrative tool.
On the other hand the crafting recipes and costs are insane. A single fire arrow needs an entire boar to be created, this seems very excessive to me. It means that you need to grind for a single item like you are playing an MMO instead of a heavily narrative driven RPG. It is incredible out of place as a mechanic.

Chores
Arthur needs to do the chores we all need to do in order to live. He needs to eat, sleep, bath and take care of his equipment and his horse. None of these things are the focus of the game, but you need to do them regularly to prevent the decay of equipment or Arthur himself. Arthur looks really bad if he has not bathed, shaved or slept in a long time. Your acts of cleaning Arthur and maintaining his equipment is a big part of how you feel attached to the character and it makes Arthur feel alive.

Games
The game allows you to play several games such as poker and the stabbing hands with a knife game. These games slows down the pace of the game, and allows you to just exist as Arthur in the wild west. You can just chill and play some poker with some dudes at a train station. It is a great way to add immersion to a game. It also allows you to get a break from robbing and shooting people while still playing the game. This is such an important way to make you connect with Arthur and make you feel like you live his life. You get a break when he gets a break.

Bounty system and honour
You get good honour from doing good things and bad honour from doing bad things. This is a reasonably good way to allow the player to mould Arthur slightly based on gameplay choices. The narrative follows the same path, but dialogue and cut-scenes might change depending on it. The honour system serves as a way to reduce the dissonance between the gameplay and story being told. If Arthur slaughters hundreds or behaves like an outlaw saint the story should be different. The honour system is the game’s way of trying to accommodate this player freedom, but still maintain a coherent narrative.
The bounty system serves a similar narrative purpose. When you do bad things the law is going to try and stop you. I don’t like the way that the game implements the bounty system and the law. The law feels way too trigger happy and unreasonable. Surrendering is too hard. The law will start shooting at you even if you defend yourself from an attack, which is sort of ridiculous from a narrative point of view. The best way to stop the bounty system from getting big is simply to quit the game, and not talking your way out of the situation (when the situation is reasonable). The law often also seems to know you have committed some crime much faster than they should have. The game needed a bounty and law system, but I don’t think it is very good, neither the gameplay portion of it, or the narrative portion of it.

Summary of the Design of Red Dead Redemption II

Red Dead Redemption II is for me as an elitist gamer an incredible narrative achievement that fails to do what the gameplay design wants to do. Initially I struggled to get more than a single hour into the game during a single session due to how frustrating I found the gameplay and control scheme to be. I find that the port and general control scheme for the PC severely hinders the gameplay from telling a good narrative. The game provides a lot of good mechanics to tell a narrative through the gameplay, but it does not matter if the gameplay feels clunky and bad to play. I had to force myself to play through the first 10 hours of this game, and I am glad I did. The gameplay is not good, especially not in the beginning when you don’t understand how the controls and interfaces work. It takes far too much time to get to grips with the controls and interfaces of the game considering how simple they should be. Gameplay is not something that you want to replicate in this game in my opinion, but you may take inspiration from some of the gameplay design, but attempt to implement it better.
What the game really does exceptionally well is the details in its presentation and writing. The presentation and especially the character animation is phenomenally good. The best part of the game, and what I think the game has to teach everyone is the writing. Everything from characters to how the plot uses narrative forks is a masterclass in how to do game writing. It is incredible rare for a game to have an actual impact on me due to its narrative, but Red Dead Redemption II has managed to achieve that. The death of Arthur Morgan and and how the game forces you to think about death and mortality is fantastic. I love the use of the epilogue especially.
There are a lot of things I have not mentioned, both good and bad, but I hope that what I have mentioned is good enough to get a lot of the important points across. Overall the game is very solid, and I hope that you found some of what I have written here interesting. I am glad I spent the time playing the game, even though I find the gameplay to be draining at times. The narrative makes up for it for me. Thank you for reading.