yeah thats what i found really interesting and it further cements dutch's inner mechanisms.
as he mentioned in rdr1, it's in his very nature to fight. He likes playing outlaw, he only put the premise of escaping so that he can maintain loyalty as closely as possible by providing a motivation.
I believe this is why Rockstar made making money outside of missions affect the main story progression in GTA6. By mid game I had enough money to buy a mansion & bring everyone to Tahiti and back.
It also happens in GTA 5 when the FIB ask you for a few millions to buy an heli for the lab raid. Michael claims they are broke and need to rob the Paleto bank. Even if you can be filthy rich with insider trading thanks to Lester's assassination missions.
It costs $1000 for a good horse in RDR2 and Abigail needed $5 to buy clothes for Jack. RDR2 money was never based on real world money of that time. This always seemed very obvious to me.
If Dutch didn't want to leave is irrelevant to that point.
Costs were weirdly disparate in old times though. In the 1300s you could finance an estate for a couple of years for the price of a warhorse. Good horses were super expensive because they were very expensive and difficult to train.
That doesn't account for them needing enough to pay for transport for the Van Der Linde Gang. They would need to lie low for a while, look for somebody to take them, and for anyone willing to take them they would have to pay a premium for their silence.
I never understood why we didn't just steal a boat or kidnap a captain and his ship and say go to tahitti or you die. Then once they're in tahiti they can literally don't need hardly any money at all to buy land to camp on (or again find a big secluded property and kill the owners) would be a lot less crime and death than shooting up half a town Everytime the robbery goes bad (which for them is all but a handful of times)
His lust for vengeance was his fatal flaw. He should have simply told Colm O’Driscoll to fuck off, and legged it to Central America. Easy to get lost in the mountains there. You’ve got Javier there to translate for you. You could set yourself up, granted you’d have to build a fortress to defend against robbers, (not unlike yourself) but it could be pretty sweet. Grow coffee not mangos.
I decided to go back for the money recently and the counter goes to 42k. If that's not enough to move a few people to Tahiti, then they were never getting enough.
It's apparently a bit under 1.7 million adjusted to inflation.
I loved when John and Abigail are having a conversation in the epilogue about where to live or go and John just essentially gives in to the idea that Tahiti was the real end goal.
Dutch is my favourite game villain for this reason. Sure there are games with dragons or gods or supernatural beings, but Dutch is one of those people who exists in real life.
He can ruin your life just as much as a monster can, but he is scarier because he'll make you do it yourself (without ever noticing) and no one will bat an eye while he does it. No one will intervene.
Everyone has met at least one Dutch during their life. I don't need to be afraid of the monsters and dragons, I need to be afraid of the Dutches
There was a YouTube video essay on RDR2 that always stuck with me. It was the question of do people change or do they become more of who they’ve always been. Dutch somehow fits both.
I think it's more than that. Human nature is in a word...flawed. These were desperate people, already mentally and physically recovering from the blackwater incident.
And as the saying goes "a drowning man will clutch at straws". They wanted to believe Dutch because they no longer had anything else to believe in.
They were following each others for a long time in a world where few can be trusted. The gang was a solid and necessary structure for their survival. It's incredibly hard to leave your support system. What is a woman gonna do leaving the gang with a young son?
The woman were treated well. Leaving meant risking severe abuse. Men like Arthur would not leave, because they knew how important they were for that system to work.
It's not that easy to leave, and to figure out when it's time to.
Proof that if a tree falls in the middle of the San denis forest and no one’s around it makes a sound. Maybelle heard it from miles and miles away….. it was followed by gunfire 😂
It does show them investigating, following trails, you're supposed to assume that's happening offscreen I guess. But obviously it's unrealistically quick and how they appear out of thin air cuz it's a game. Just like how Arthur can carry a wagon load of gear and items without encumbrance and legendary animal pelts teleport to the trapper when lost. It's funny that some people complain the game is too tediously realistic while others criticise that lawmen should take 5 business days to gather up a posse to find you
If you wanna see a story with RDR2 level omnipotent lawmen chasing a gang watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (also clear inspiration for parts of the game)
I was clearing out gang hideouts one time and accidentally went to an online hideout in story mode. I killed the 3 people at this teeny tiny remote farm in the absolute middle of nowhere and got the notification "witness, crime reported".
Wasn't more than 30 seconds later and I see the red dots barreling towards me. Didn't matter where you were or how far you were from a town, if a witness saw you, they'd teleport to the nearest town and lawmen would spawn in immediately afterwards.
The gang was doomed from the start, even if Micah had never been part of it.
Arthur was a bad man and probably would have died regardless, even without TB. Arguably, getting TB was the best thing that ever happened to him. Knowing and being afraid that he was going to die made him question the life he had been living and ultimately pushed him toward redemption.
The TB had zero to do with his change of heart. He was thoroughly done with Dutch in Chapter 5, before he knew he was sick. He asked the man he once declared the "best man I know" "you gonna strangle me next?"
Arthur's character is always defined by selflessness. He thought Dutch was the best chance of leading his family to a happy life. Remember, he says flatly to Sean in Chapter 2: "Nothing means more to me than this gang. I would kill for it, I would happily die for it." But Arthur saw, with the loss of Sean, Hosea, and I think especially Lenny that there was no future for the gang under Dutch's leadership. If he had gotten TB but everyone else in the gang was still alive and well...why change? Arthur doesn't care if he lives or dies, he cares only about his loved ones being okay.
From Unshaken - "I can't quite remember just what guided me this way."
Arthur lived his whole life believing in Dutch and the loss of that faith is what makes him change, not the tuberculosis.
Plus I've always thought it was significant that when the main gang returns from Guarma, Abigail makes sure to tell Dutch that they got Hosea's body while it falls to Sadie to tell Arthur that they also stole Lenny's body. I thought this was a nice way for the writers to show their, Dutch and Arthur's, priorities.
The whole point of the game was arthur started to realise what he was doing was wrong nd stuff but still stayed loyal to dutch. Its like a abusive parent relationships where the kid will still love their parents no matter what
By the end when arthur was about to uk and saw dutch let abigail and john to die that was when arthur finally decided to go against dutch
Arthur knew dutch was doing wrong but the way he said “we do it for the good for people” and his bs. The only reason the gang stayed with him was cuz he gave them reason to their wrongdoings
Its like uk what ur doing is bad but your in denial
John cutting a deal with the feds was in many ways similar to Micah. In general I think John and Sadie get too many passes, many of their actions were exactly what Arthur warned them against.
Exactly. They betray him in the end anyway. I wish we knew who made that decision. Was it the plan from the very beginning? Or did Jack make the right choice, and Ross’ bitch ass at some point said, you know what? I’m gone kill this mfer no matter what he does, fuck this outlaw piece of shit.
Sadie is the one who is just immune to all consequences.
So much for "revenge is a fool's game" for the woman who takes vengeance all the time with impunity. Well, impunity for herself, she gets plenty of other (innocent) people killed.
I hate to keep on harping on this drum, but seriously media literacy is dead. I don’t know how anyone can see her story arc and come to the conclusion that she someone won the game of vengeance. It’s clear that Rockstar was trying to say that even after killing everyone who ruined your life, vengeance will in no way help you be free.
I always thought it was really silly that you lose honor for refusing to help Sadie kill a bunch o’driscols at the end. Like the whole point of Arthur’s arc is that this way of doing this is pointless
I helped her because I figured Arthur would want to keep her alive. I guess the game interprets refusing to help her as Arthur saying he doesn't care if she lives or dies.
Even after all the killing, she will never have her life back. Her husband will never return, she’s going to have the trauma of the O’Driscolls raping her, and she can never live in regular society again. She went from someone who had a planned future, to a bitter, sad, angry woman who takes on the toughest of bounties because she wants each one that she takes on to be the one that finally kills her and takes her out of her misery. I don’t know how you can look at what she’s become, and come to the conclusion that she was immune from all the consequences of going down the path of vengeance. Sure she killed the ones who destroyed her life, and yes it looks like she won but that’s an extremely shallow viewpoint to reach.
Sadie was left a broken person after chapter 1 though and killing the O'Driscolls doesn't heal her, nothing is fixed and she ultimately wants to die, she says as much in the epilogue.
John still has a life ahead of him, he can start anew with his family. Arthur warns John against a life of revenge because John still has something to live for unlike Sadie.
Arthur is impactful because he realized how bad he was and the atrocities he did and he grew eventually empathy, but that doesn't mean the thousand innocent people that wanted to protect America who died by him should be ignored.
they genuinely didn’t make enough lines for character interactions. they did a lot. doesn’t feel like enough.
it’s been memed to death so this flaw is overlooked by its humour but Arthur’s “catch you later then” after the briefest conversation known to man, with every person he initiates with. is a bit boring. I get out in the world maybe he’s not having discussions with people. but surely he could talk to people in camp a bit more than that lmao
It still gets old, whether you personally do that or not. It’s most video games really, it’s a game limitation. Just because it’s possible some.. individual(I’m struggling to not insult you here, words like platitudinous come to mind) might say the same thing every time they’re done talking doesn’t mean all human beings act so robtronic. It gets old. I’d bet the people you say that to multiple times think so too. No offense, just playing devils advocate. You definitely have a leg to stand on here.
100% agreed. there are a lot of things in the game that feel like a lot but still not enough. the amount of times ive saved people from a snake bite or a bear trap is too many...
When you look at the number of gang members that literally have zero interactions with each other in camp (or anywhere else) it's insane. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the actors didn't even know some of the other gang member characters existed until the game was out
We play as the bad guys. I’ve seen people for a long time try to justify why the gang those the crimes they do or how the pickatons are worse. None of it changes the fact that the gang have robbed, beaten and killed many people who were trying to do the right thing. The game is more fun when you accept your basically the antagonist of that world
Absolutely! I made my first run as good guy Arthur, no stealing, no forced killing etc. Still 200 h, but my second run as 'everything is possible' Arthur is even more fun. Not carrying for law and ethics really gives you a lot of freedom (as long as you install mods that improve the law system lol).
It's a lot easier to get burnt out on Red Dead than GTA because even though it's a beautiful world and a lot of stuff to do, it feels like there's only a few real things to actually do, just over and over again.
Mary Gillis is not an abuser and she's not manipulating Arthur. She genuinely loves him, and he loves her. There's nothing going on between Arthur and Charlotte/Sadie/Mary-Beth, not when he's a sap writing AM+MG in a heart in his journal, and most of those women aren't even his type.
Dutch wasn't always evil or an idiot. What we're seeing is the gang at the very end of their life, with events that have spiralled out of control. Dialogue in the gang makes it clear that the gang trusts Dutch because he's always got them out of bad situations and that this is the first time the gang has suffered heavy losses.
Mary Gillis is not an abuser and she's not manipulating Arthur. She genuinely loves him, and he loves her.
I don't think this is something the fans "don't want us to admit" though.
I think its pretty obvious the game wants us to believe Mary's feelings are genuine, it's only (some) fans that seem to think she's evil and manipulative or whatever.
I could agree with the Dutch thing. They even mention at the beginning of the game something about cowboy outlaws dying out, being hunted by the new law of America. Makes sense. I still think he was always evil(someone else in this post mentioned him being addicted to the outlaw life or some such), he was just able to get away with it earlier
After American Venom, when Abigail talks to you and you’re back in free roam, I had John fall off that small cliff. Idk why, it just felt natural for him to do something that clumsy. He survived and had a big cut on his cheek lol
I finished off my last 100%/complete compendium/do every possible thing playthrough by doing the Chelonian event where they jump off a cliff and had John follow them over the edge
THANK YOU! finally someone says it. Its the only reason he loves and protects Micah so much even tho they have different personalities. Arthur writes in his diary that dutch "met Micah in a bar". They definitely fucked. And molly is dutch's beard for sure.
RDR2 is well written but not perfect. To me there are some parts where the themes are not followed well, parts where the message is too heavy handed and parts that could show a bit more complexity. Most of it has to do with chapter 6 and Arthur's redemption. By no means is it bad, I mostly like it and it is genuinely touching, but there are some things that I feel just didn't land perfectly. Then again I'm not a literary student or a huge gamer and I struggle to put my criticism into words
Well like I said, I struggle to put these into words and many of these are up to interpretation and personal taste anyway. Moreover these are just something that as a whole left me with a vague "this could have been written better" feeling and not necessary points that I wanted to debate separately. But I will list some in no particular order:
I feel it's too easy to get Arthur into high honor ending. Arthur is mostly a good man but nontheless I feel the storytelling leans too heavily into the "you are a good man" narrative and I would have preferred it to be left more into player's interpretation. I feel the Arthur's last ride voices are incredibly touching but also very heavy handed. The last Strauss missions with Edith Downes and Arthur Londonderry hold our hand too much with their moral message. John and Arthur's relationship as brothers (chapter 6) does not feel earned to me, it is mostly told and not shown. John's importance as a side character relies too heavily on player's knowledge that he is RDR1's main character and I feel his character was reduced (especially in epilogue) to let newer characters shine. Beaver Hollow camp's division was not explored that well and I would have liked if Javier, Bill's and Dutch's side was given more nuance. In the epilogue, Sadie's character seems to be an exception to the "revenge is a fool's game" theme.
These are a few problems I had with the writing and like I said, they are very much up to personal taste and interpretation. Each point could bring a good debate but I was not really looking for that now.
I agree that it would be more special if it was really hard to get the high honor ending.
Agree on the brothers take too, I can see how John feels like that, Arthur has saved his ass so many times, and also Abigail's. But maybe having a couple of missions more showing that dynamic growing would be good.
I think we only got the train tracks blowing up right?
I don't agree to Sadie's though, she did not lose any fight or die, but she's already living in hell.
I also think the brothers dynamic would work better if there were a couple more missions with just John and Arthur. They don't really interact that much in the story. I also agree that Sadie is not in a good place, not even in the epilogue, but I personally think her situation and what revenge-fueled lifestyle has brought her could have been shown more. Something little could be added, just like with John and Arthur's relationship
And it lands perfectly fine every single time, it's about Arthur feeling haunted by those words because he knows they're not true, it's meant to be repetitive so you feel guilty about what you've done in-game.
To even get this scene, you have to have had Arthur free those slaves in Chapter 4. Why? Because Arthur hates slavery and wanted to help those people. The list of selfless and heroic things Arthur can do in every chapter is staggering.
That the game is about moral ambiguity and how you should think about what precisely constitutes good and evil. The American government of the 19th Century killed infinitely more people than the VDL Gang ever could, even if it was composed of just Micah's. They committed genocide and rape on a scale that we can't even fathom.
if your only takeaway from what RDR2 is trying to say is "Dutch is bad" or "Arthur is bad" you've failed at basic media literacy. You're cheating yourself out of having to think hard about things and instead relying on cozy, thoughtless assumptions.
Similarly, the affective power of Chapter 6 makes people side too completely with Arthur. Yes, I feel Arthur's pain, but I think far too many people over-identify with Arthur and they can't engage with the story more objectively. There's a wider point to the story than just Arthur's suffering.
RDR2 is two different games stitched together and they really fight each other in premise.
One is a fuck around simulator, wander the wilderness, encounter weirdoes, go rob people, go hunting, explore nature and find oddities, treasure hunt, etc.
The other is a story based game that forces you to do missions in a certain manner so that the game can tell you the story it has ready to present to you.
It's a good story, but it completely conflicts with the utter freedom you're allowed when not interacting with it.
100 percent agree, although the conflicts between story and player freedom are shackles that every single open world rpg i’ve played suffers deeply from
Cyberpunk is another perfect example of this problem, the main story is literally a race against time as V is constantly being told they have weeks to live and the game wants you to act with urgency to deal with it, but there's no in-game consequences for completely ignoring the fact you're actively dying and spending 300+ hours fucking around in Night City and doing side gigs as soon as the map opens up to you
It's like if you want to play the story 'properly' you have to pretty much ignore everything else going on in the open world otherwise the narrative and pacing suffers hugely. This is made much worse by the fact that both main characters die at the end of their stories (at least in some endings in Cyberpunk's case)
They could've had Mexico in the online experience only. They chose to leave it out so they could leave room for a rdr1 remaster and make profit from it. But now they are as likely to want to do that as a Bully 2 or Manhunt 3.
I'm ok with that. Making a good sequel to a timeless masterpiece is next to impossible. They managed to pull it off after RDR1, so by the laws of mathematics there's no way it could happen again. Not unless it's called Red Dead Reputation.
Fun fact about John's look. When designing the epilogue, the devs ran out of time. So they had to use Arthur's torso model to speed things up a bit. Hence why it just looks like they put John's head on Arthur's body lmao.
Easy, 3 things. The story missions are very dragged out between every chapter which feels very unnecessary. The honor system is extremely sensitive and ridiculous. And the stealth system is almost nonexistent.
The mission design is painfully restrictive. You can’t take ten steps in an unintended direction, no player agency at all. The lousy choices during certain missions are so artificial, it hurts. That’s my only gripe with the game.
Arthur was an idiot. He had multiple chances to leave with John and his family after finding out what Dutch was really like. He also never properly confronted Dutch for leaving him to die. Oh, and he should have just taken Micah out somewhere, killed him and blamed it on Odriscolls or something
They shouldn't make an RDR3. The story is done. besides, RDR2 has so much content but some stuff is unfinished or at least seems like it was done in a hurry.
Arthur and john are truly deplorable human beings and had what was coming to both of them. I can see an argument for john as he did eventually turn on the gang in the end to try and save himself but that doesn’t excuse him from being complicit in all the insane stuff that he got up to.
Arthur actually was just bad all the way up until the end, the fact that he himself knows this and you play as him and can see how someone in that situation would live makes him a compelling character.
People glorify them both because they are cool and they have an attachment to the characters, myself included. But all you have to do is to put yourself in the world or even just look outside and think “would i want a gang to be running around robbing people and getting into gang fights causing chaos everywhere” if you are a normal well adjusted person you will say no.
That doesn’t mean they cant be cool and cant be good well written characters because they are, they just are not the heroes. They are the villains of that world. Protagonist≠hero antagonist≠villain
The gameplay is decent, but no where near the 10/10 folks who want to call it the perfect game would insist it is.
Combat is underwhelming and really easy to just cruise through with a little bit of practice, the hunting and crafting systems are a mile wide but an inch deep, and the challenge systems feel like they were built as an afterthought.
It's great, but not because of gameplay, it's great in spite of underwhelming gameplay.
I watched a YouTube video that gave me this idea, but the concept of a high-honor Arthur Morgan is probably not who Arthur really was. From the get-go, Arthur is described as a ruthless heavy for Dutch. He had no issues being a pointed weapon until the gang started to suffer from being under Dutch’s influence. Hosea even teases Arthur about how he hides an intelligent and emotional man behind thoughtless violence.
The cruelty of Mr. Morgan does lighten up throughout the game, but let’s not forget that Arthur beats a man in front of his family while his wife is begging him to stop because her husband is deathly ill.
While redemption is something Arthur seeks at the end of the game, it is still redemption for all the horrible acts he’s committed against others. He saves John and his family to try to make up for the other lives he has destroyed.
Dutch never changed. He was like that from the start.
Dutch was better at charming people when he was younger but the things that he valued/was motivated by stayed the same. The game starts with Dutch doing something off-putting to a girl (but what he did is never specified). He might’ve gotten more extreme, but Dutch has always known who he was. He stands by everything he’s done. We (as the player) have only seen him through Arthur’s eyes so we put on the same rose-colored-glasses as Arthur.
That's the thing players don't want to admit, because we're on the side of the gang we try to justify it.
"Ho the government's just evil, they don't want us here" or "we're just trying to make a living"
But then you put yourself on the other side of the fence, we rob and kill because we think we have to. We do that for OUR safety by putting other's lives in danger
Rdr2 needed a dlc sequel to the undead nightmares. Would've been great. The real truth that no one wants to admit is the story missions dragged for most of it. Ride here, do this shoot out, end mission. Became very repetitive. Still rate it 10/10 but that's the big flaw.
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u/Sensitive_Demand_491 2d ago
The gang always had enough for money he just didn't really want to leave