Red Dead Redemption 2 has a 60-hour campaign with 1,200 actors

Red Dead Redemption’s single player campaign features approximately 60 hours of gameplay and 1,200 actors contributed to the game, 700 of which were narrated. Dan Houser, co-founder and screenwriter of Rockstar, said so in an interview.

According to Houser, the script for the primary storyline is about 2,000 pages, but with all the optional missions added, it would make a paper stack about eight feet high. Rockstar is by far the largest employer for actors in New York, according to the co-founder.

It took 1200 actors to provide all characters in the games with movement through motion capture. For comparison, Houser reports that only five actors were used for this in GTA III. It is unclear how many actors have been deployed for GTA V, for example. Red Dead Redemption 2 contains a total of 300,000 animations and 500,000 lines of spoken dialogue. Houser details the making of Red Dead Redemption 2 in an extensive interview with Vulture.

Rockstar makes the motion-capture recordings in its own studio in New York. The developer no longer works with well-known actors for both the movements and the recording of text. According to Houser, well-known voices in a game are too distracting and he also has bad experiences working with celebrities “because of their egos.”

When finishing the game, 5 hours of the story were cut at the last minute. The campaign was supposed to last 65 hours, but some parts “didn’t work,” Houser said. For example, the main character Arthur Morgan originally had “two love interests”, but one of them has been removed from the game. Missions were also scrapped because they weren’t fun enough or felt redundant.

Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out on October 26. The game will be released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It is not yet known whether there will also be a PC version. The first part never appeared for the PC, but only for the consoles of Microsoft and Sony.