This review contains spoilers
Strongly characterized protagonists rarely give players much room for choice. The history and personality of the main character are just as relevant as the plot points themselves, so allowing players to potentially break character with their decisions doesn’t make much sense. However, Red Dead Redemption managed to strike a balance by leaving the details of the past a little mysterious. John Marston accepted a deal to exchange the freedom of his old gang members for that of his family, but whether he took it as a rat fleeing a sinking ship, or as a genuinely reformed man seeking redemption, could be informed by the player’s decisions. His introspective musings on the need for change could be referring to how the tamed frontier wouldn’t allow his way of life anymore, or to a personal recognition of his sins. The game’s honor system tracked how much each player’s version of John leaned into either perspective, but wasn’t used to affect major plot points or the ending, which were designed to work just as effectively whichever way players went.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on the other hand tries to have it both ways. Arthur Morgan has a lot of backstory and well-defined relationships, but players are given more room for changing the story instead of less. The honor system affects the tone of Arthur’s dialog and the endings, but not the major plot points, leading to constant contradictions regardless of playstyle. For high-honor players, Arthur’s repeated enthusiasm for robbing innocents will cause dissonance, especially on the smaller jobs unrelated to leaving the gang. Meanwhile, low honor players will wonder why he doesn’t try to split off a gang of his own or take command after losing faith in the gang’s leader, or why he doesn’t take a deal from the government to save his hide at the expense of everyone else. Both moral approaches end up in a motivational quagmire, since the logical paths for a selfless or ruthless Arthur would lead to such different outcomes. The first game didn’t have this problem, since both versions of John are in agreement; wanting to finish the job and get the family back as soon as possible. However, the only internally consistent version of Arthur would be one who sits in the middle as a murderous take on the gentleman thief archetype, removing the purpose of narrative choices in the first place.
Of course, this calls into question the biggest narrative choice players will get to make: the ending of Arthur’s story. They can either choose for Arthur to help John escape from an attack by the pinkertons, or to head into the fray to recover the gang’s money for himself. Obviously, these choices are meant to map to high-honor selflessness and low-honor selfishness, but the morals of each decision are meaningless when neither of them have consequences. In the low-honor ending, Arthur is attempting to fund a retirement he knows he won’t live to see, being on the brink of death from an incurable case of tuberculosis. Using his last moments to save John would be a compelling ending, but the impact of this choice is lessened by the way the “2” in the title spoils how John survives regardless. So, only one of the two decisions makes sense at all regardless of honor level, leaving one group of players with a nonsensical ending, and the other with a pointless one.
Arthur’s story is far from the end of the game though, which is another big question mark for what the overarching direction of this story really is. After Arthur’s death in either ending, there’s a sizable chunk of the game dedicated to setting up John’s life at the start of the first game. In this last quarter of the story, none of Arthur’s decisions have any influence, other than a handful of dialog lines. While there was an opportunity to have Arthur influence John as either a role model or a warning for what he might become, that opportunity was exchanged for telling an unrelated prequel story. What’s worse is how this retroactively diminishes Red Dead Redemption, and gives it the same player-choice dissonance of its sequel. Since the vagueness of John’s past was what made each player’s interpretation of the character equally believable, the revelations in this epilogue force only one version of John to be the correct one. So not only is the epilogue questionably relevant to the first seventy-five percent of the story, it actually detracts from the story it was attempting to expand. This problem extends to the gang members in the first game, with the best example being Dutch, the leader of the group. In Red Dead Redemption, he had the same sort of motivational elusiveness that John had, letting players wonder about who he really was. On one hand, he was charismatic, but at the same time, undeniably dangerous. He may have betrayed John many years ago, but he points out that he was a victim of circumstance just trying to survive, putting him on the exact same moral footing as John. They were meant to be reflections of each other, with the only difference being that Dutch never got a chance at redemption. However, since the engine of Red Dead Redemption 2’s story is Dutch’s consistent incompetency and spinelessness, his function as a mirror to the player character is broken, becoming an entirely unsympathetic manipulator instead. Since this same problem extends to all the carryover characters, the narrative’s intention remains questionable.
Since Red Dead Redemption was set at the final moments of the old west, what’s likely is that Rockstar knew that a followup game would have to be set earlier, and decided to do a direct prequel story without realizing how much damage would be done to the character building of the first game, or even how they made people care about a cast they had never met before. “Less is more” is a philosophy that could have improved this game in general, and a more restrained focus would have preserved the same imagination that gave the first game so much life. Without an epilogue, players can imagine what lessons, good or bad, John took from Arthur’s tragic life. Without wildly different endings, a consistent, logical narrative arc could have been confidently established from the very beginning. The confused clutter of being a character drama, prequel story about the gang, player-driven narrative with choices and consequences, and prequel about John’s life made none of the parts work as well as they could have. A wholly original, focused story would have been much more effective, and if the developers need a good example, I would recommend they take notes from a game called Red Dead Redemption.
Red Dead Redemption 2 on the other hand tries to have it both ways. Arthur Morgan has a lot of backstory and well-defined relationships, but players are given more room for changing the story instead of less. The honor system affects the tone of Arthur’s dialog and the endings, but not the major plot points, leading to constant contradictions regardless of playstyle. For high-honor players, Arthur’s repeated enthusiasm for robbing innocents will cause dissonance, especially on the smaller jobs unrelated to leaving the gang. Meanwhile, low honor players will wonder why he doesn’t try to split off a gang of his own or take command after losing faith in the gang’s leader, or why he doesn’t take a deal from the government to save his hide at the expense of everyone else. Both moral approaches end up in a motivational quagmire, since the logical paths for a selfless or ruthless Arthur would lead to such different outcomes. The first game didn’t have this problem, since both versions of John are in agreement; wanting to finish the job and get the family back as soon as possible. However, the only internally consistent version of Arthur would be one who sits in the middle as a murderous take on the gentleman thief archetype, removing the purpose of narrative choices in the first place.
Of course, this calls into question the biggest narrative choice players will get to make: the ending of Arthur’s story. They can either choose for Arthur to help John escape from an attack by the pinkertons, or to head into the fray to recover the gang’s money for himself. Obviously, these choices are meant to map to high-honor selflessness and low-honor selfishness, but the morals of each decision are meaningless when neither of them have consequences. In the low-honor ending, Arthur is attempting to fund a retirement he knows he won’t live to see, being on the brink of death from an incurable case of tuberculosis. Using his last moments to save John would be a compelling ending, but the impact of this choice is lessened by the way the “2” in the title spoils how John survives regardless. So, only one of the two decisions makes sense at all regardless of honor level, leaving one group of players with a nonsensical ending, and the other with a pointless one.
Arthur’s story is far from the end of the game though, which is another big question mark for what the overarching direction of this story really is. After Arthur’s death in either ending, there’s a sizable chunk of the game dedicated to setting up John’s life at the start of the first game. In this last quarter of the story, none of Arthur’s decisions have any influence, other than a handful of dialog lines. While there was an opportunity to have Arthur influence John as either a role model or a warning for what he might become, that opportunity was exchanged for telling an unrelated prequel story. What’s worse is how this retroactively diminishes Red Dead Redemption, and gives it the same player-choice dissonance of its sequel. Since the vagueness of John’s past was what made each player’s interpretation of the character equally believable, the revelations in this epilogue force only one version of John to be the correct one. So not only is the epilogue questionably relevant to the first seventy-five percent of the story, it actually detracts from the story it was attempting to expand. This problem extends to the gang members in the first game, with the best example being Dutch, the leader of the group. In Red Dead Redemption, he had the same sort of motivational elusiveness that John had, letting players wonder about who he really was. On one hand, he was charismatic, but at the same time, undeniably dangerous. He may have betrayed John many years ago, but he points out that he was a victim of circumstance just trying to survive, putting him on the exact same moral footing as John. They were meant to be reflections of each other, with the only difference being that Dutch never got a chance at redemption. However, since the engine of Red Dead Redemption 2’s story is Dutch’s consistent incompetency and spinelessness, his function as a mirror to the player character is broken, becoming an entirely unsympathetic manipulator instead. Since this same problem extends to all the carryover characters, the narrative’s intention remains questionable.
Since Red Dead Redemption was set at the final moments of the old west, what’s likely is that Rockstar knew that a followup game would have to be set earlier, and decided to do a direct prequel story without realizing how much damage would be done to the character building of the first game, or even how they made people care about a cast they had never met before. “Less is more” is a philosophy that could have improved this game in general, and a more restrained focus would have preserved the same imagination that gave the first game so much life. Without an epilogue, players can imagine what lessons, good or bad, John took from Arthur’s tragic life. Without wildly different endings, a consistent, logical narrative arc could have been confidently established from the very beginning. The confused clutter of being a character drama, prequel story about the gang, player-driven narrative with choices and consequences, and prequel about John’s life made none of the parts work as well as they could have. A wholly original, focused story would have been much more effective, and if the developers need a good example, I would recommend they take notes from a game called Red Dead Redemption.