Red Dead Redemption 2 is set to release in just over a month. Art Director Josh Bass and Director of Art Aaron Garbut recently sat down with The Hollywood Repoter to discuss the upcoming, and highly anticipated, sequel.
With Grand Theft Auto V, the studio's last game, being an unfathomable hit as well as the power of the current generation of consoles, Rockstar felt like pushing boundaries with Red Dead 2. Bass explains that the team has been hard at work one-upping their previous efforts:
Red Dead Redemption 2 is our first game for the latest generation of hardware, and was an opportunity for our teams to upgrade every single aspect of our approach to game design at once, from graphics and lighting to AI, to weather, sound and score, facial and body animation and more. We have used that power to create a world that goes far beyond anything we have ever done in terms of depth, interactivity and persistence.
Much like Grand Theft Auto V, Garbut goes on to tease that essentially every nook-and-cranny of Red Dead 2's open-world will feature an awesome scripted event, side mission, or interesting character. The art director also explains what it is about the game that impresses him the most, that being its "sense of life" - the feeling that, you're playing within a living and breathing West-world.
It’s the sense of life the game has that most sets it apart. When you first enter a town and you see the townspeople going about their business, building houses, selling papers, hanging out, you can instantly tell that we’ve never experienced this detail in an open world game before.
Where you see a shack on a hill and you know there is something interesting for you there, maybe you will break in and stumble onto a mystery, or meet the owner and end up getting tangled in something. I think that’s when you can tell that it's new territory, when you are not even sure if what you’ve done was a mission or not. When all the systemic parts of the world come together with our scripted content in the right ways, it’s kind of incredible.
What do you think of Bass and Garbut's comments? Are you looking forward to Red Dead Redemption 2? Do you think it will accomplish the challenging task of being even better than its predecessors?
Red Dead Redemption 2 releases on October 26th for PS4 and Xbox One.