Rockstar dropped the second trailer to the keenly-anticipated Red Dead Redemption 2 on Thursday. Fans everywhere will doubtless be poring over the footage to pick apart all the details to the sequel to one of the most universally acclaimed games of all time. Well, we say sequel, but more on that in a minute…
You can watch the full trailer here but below are just some key takeaways from what we noticed, which might have to keep us going until the game’s teasingly unspecific ‘Spring 2018’ release date.
It still looks as beautiful as ever
The real star character of the original Red Dead Redemption was its rich and beautiful world, and RDR2 appears to be no different. In fact, with this game coming out on a generation of even more power consoles, photorealistic visuals should be expected at this point. But still, look how pretty!
First look at our protagonist
Here’s our first glance at, we guess, our character. Rockstar name him as Arthur Morgan, and he seems like a really swell guy. Here he is trying to collect some cash from this down-on-his-luck sap. Protection money? Debt? Or just a kind reminder of a loan between friends? It’s probably not that one.
Snow!
While the original game spent a lot of time in bizarro Texas and Mexico, we did get a little mountain gameplay. Rockstar seem to have doubled down on that here, with plenty of Rockies-like scenery, complete with deep snow you can see below. They might just be showing off, or this might tell us we’re in for more diverse world this time round.
Alligators?
More on that – we see here some poor hog being gobbled up by a gator. So we’ve got snow, we’ve got desert plains, and we get Bayou territory too? It feels like this game world is going to be vast and, therefore, full of all sorts of predatory terrors.
Great train robberies?
Actual proper heists were weirdly lacking in Red Dead Redemption but it looks like there’ll be ripe opportunity to do some actually villainous hijacking now. Also, if we could get one half as comedic as this legendary Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid scene, that’d be terrific.
A Strong Female Character?
Bonnie MacFarlane – a rancher ally of John’s in the first game – was a brilliant character, a woman trying to do the right thing to keep her family’s livelihood going against the odds. Rockstar doesn’t have a good track record of creating deep and complex women but given that Grand Theft Auto V had exactly zero positively-framed female characters, that we appear to have one in RDR2 is, we suppose, progress?
“Have you got my back?” … “Always, Dutch.”
This line from our presumed protagonist is, really, the big reveal of the trailer. Players of the first game will remember Dutch van der Linde as the former mentor of John Marston, and the ultimate baddy of the story, killed by John in order to get his family back. The presence of a (much younger) Dutch in Red Dead Redemption 2 tells us this is essentially a prequel to Red Dead Redemption, and might even include some story of how John Marston came to be the outlaw we knew in the original.
Whereas John was quite a morally grey character, Arthur pledging allegiance to Dutch shows that we might be firmly on the bad side in this one. Or maybe the game’s retained the ‘Redemption’ as a hint towards a conversion for Morgan?
Anyway, if we needed any more proof, in this one shot we see three outlaws doing that badass ‘walking slowly away from a burning building’ thing. The guy on the left? He looks very similar to secondary villain Bill Williamson from the first game.
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