Red Dead Redemption 2 has campaign of 60 hours with 1200 actors

Red Dead Redemption’s single player campaign contains around 60 hours of gameplay and 1200 actors have collaborated on the game, 700 of which with spoken text. Dan Houser, co-founder and scriptwriter of Rockstar, says in an interview.

According to Houser, the script of the primary storyline covers some two thousand pages, but with all optional missions added, it would be a paper stack of about 2, 5 meters high. According to the co-founder, Rockstar is by far the largest employer for actors in New York.

1200 actors were needed to provide all the characters in the games with movements by means of motion capture. For comparison, Houser reports that only five actors were used for this in GTA III. How many actors are used for GTA V, for example, is unclear. Red Dead Redemption 2 contains a total of 300,000 animations and 500,000 lines of spoken dialogue. Houser gives details about the creation of Red Dead Redemption 2 in an extended interview with Vulture.

Rockstar makes the motion-capture recordings in his own studio in New York. The developer does not work with well-known actors either for the movements or for the insertion of text. According to Houser, well-known voices in a game distract too much and he also has bad experiences with working with celebrities ‘because of their egos’.

When finishing the game, 5 hours of the story was deleted at the last moment. The campaign would actually take 65 hours, but some parts ‘did not work’, says Houser. For example, the main character Arthur Morgan originally had ‘two love interests’, but one of them was removed from the game. Missions have also been canceled because they were not fun enough or felt unnecessary.

Red Dead Redemption 2 will be released on 24 October. The game appears for the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Whether a PC version comes, is not yet known. The first part never appeared for the PC, but only for the consoles of Microsoft and Sony.