Rockstar is in a unique position, however. (He later clarified that the figure applied only to himself and three other senior writers, with other developers working 42 to 46 hours in an average week, according to the studio.) The resulting game is the result of more than 1,600 people’s labour over seven years and will have cost hundreds of millions of pounds – enough to bankrupt almost any other developer. Indeed, in the past few weeks, Rockstar has had to defend itself from controversy about its staff’s welfare after one of its co-founders, Dan Houser, said they were working “100-hour weeks”. This realism – not just in the way the world looks, but also in how it behaves – would have been technologically out of reach only five years ago and a phenomenal amount of money and work has gone into its creation.
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Like the fictional proprietors of Westworld (the cowboy amusement park staffed by unnervingly human-like androids in HBO’s TV series), Rockstar aims to provide players with a wild west fantasy so authentic that you can forget it is not real. Its simulation is so detailed that, at first, it is difficult to believe.
You can call out to anyone you pass on the road or in a dusty town and they will look up from a newspaper or turn towards you to respond. Its characters are modelled so exactly on real people that it looks like a film. As a player, you can see rainwater dripping from the trees after the sun breaks through clouds and hear deer moving softly through the woods.
The game’s virtual world is extraordinarily detailed. But lawmen and enemies keep chasing players across an astonishing recreation of the old west, from the mountains to the plains to the hot, soupy air of the bayou.Įven something as simple as a lifelike tree takes several people months to make In classic western style, the dream is to make enough money from robberies and other jobs to give everyone in the gang a fresh start somewhere new. A turn-of-the-century tale of the US frontier, it casts the player as a gruff outlaw riding with a band of other miscreants, living off the land and trying to outrun the advance of modernity. If you still think of Pac-Man or Space Invaders when you hear the words “video game”, take a look at Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 and you will see just how far they have come. In the distance, you can see the train you are about to rob. Eventually, arriving at a ridge, the gang leader pulls up his horse and you slow to a trot as railroad tracks come into view below. One of your number breaks into song and you choose whether to join in. You can see your horse’s muscles moving beneath its flanks, hear its grunts as you veer off the track and push it through the snow, leaving deep gouges in the untainted white. There are other outlaws with you, chatting as they ride, guiding their horses around frosted trees.
I n the pale sunshine of a winter’s day, you ride along a trail in the shadow of pristine mountains.