This characteristic accommodates main story spoilers for Red Dead Redemption 2, pertaining to the tip of Chapter 6.
There’s been lots of speak in regards to the granular particulars in Red Dead Redemption 2. After all, this can be a game the place each merchandise in a basic retailer is manipulatable, completely different arrows penetrate wooden to contrasting depths, and your horse’s bollocks shrink within the chilly.
So it ought to come as no shock that protagonist Arthur Morgan’s look is topic to Rockstar’s great consideration to element. His hair grows in actual time and may be maintained and formed by visiting a barber; he will get soiled and might take baths to present himself scrubbing; consuming or ignoring meals impacts his weight; and quite a few layers of clothes permit you to costume him nevertheless you please. You may even select whether or not his sleeves are rolled up or his trousers are tucked inside his boots.
There are delicate gameplay advantages that accompany the kind of clothes you put on and the meals you eat, however Red Dead Redemption 2 by no means ventures too far into survival game territory. It’s all aesthetic.
I could be a little bit obsessive about character customisation in video games, and I do know I’m not the one one. It’s the rationale why the time period “Fashionborne” was coined for FromSoftware’s eldritch masterpiece, and it’s why we’ll typically ignore improved armour statistics in an RPG so we will put on that one significantly attractive pauldron. There’s no marvel Fortnite makes gangbusters promoting skins. If there’s one common fact, it’s that we love altering the way in which our characters look.
In my time in Red Dead Redemption 2, in addition to one exploratory journey of discovery the place I let Arthur’s mane develop to its restrict (each on his head and his face), I loved retaining my Arthur trying prim and correct. I took frequent baths, frequently slept, and made positive he was at a wholesome weight by consuming a few meals a day. I trimmed his hair, shaved his beard into a definite fashion, and acquired a brand new outfit every time I entered a brand new city for the primary time. Maintaining and altering Arthur’s look turned a ritual I used to be joyful to partake in. And then he contracted tuberculosis.
Leopold Strauss is the treasurer in Dutch van der Linde’s gang of outlaws. Or to place it in much less amicable phrases, he’s a predatory mortgage shark. Strauss’ enterprise dealings are carried out with the hopeless and determined denizens of 1899’s America. When these debtors invariably can’t pay, Arthur is the blunt instrument despatched to persuade them in any other case.
Predictably, it virtually by no means goes effectively, however there’s one encounter comparatively early on that has unexpectedly far-reaching penalties. Thomas Downes is a minor character you would possibly spot in Valentine earlier than Strauss asks you to pay him a go to on his ranch. When he can’t pay, Arthur beats Thomas till his spouse and son intervene, however not earlier than he fatefully coughs up blood onto Arthur’s face. It’s an innocuous second that isn’t significantly noticeable with out hindsight, however Arthur’s journal spells it out in refreshingly plain phrases: “All them bullets shot at me, all them horses threw me, all them fights and it was the beating of that pathetic little fella Downes that killed me, I reckon.”
Perhaps this shouldn’t be an excessive amount of of a shock. Tuberculosis was the main explanation for mortality within the United States through the 1800s. It was a dying sentence for anybody unlucky sufficient to be troubled, and whereas all of us knew Arthur wasn’t lengthy for this world – what with Red Dead Redemption 2’s standing as a prequel – it’s nonetheless an sudden method to go for a fugitive that’s consistently beneath fireplace.
What’s extra stunning, nevertheless, is the way in which every side of Arthur’s beforehand breezy customisation is reconfigured to shine an uncomfortable gentle on the futility of his state of affairs. The sense of management I had over Arthur’s look was instantly wrestled away, guaranteeing the affect of his deteriorating situation had a tangible and rather more profound impact over his gradual demise than it ever would have with out that non-public contact.
It didn’t matter how typically I bathed, or how often I ate, Arthur’s wheezy breaths and violent coughing outbreaks weren’t going away. His eyes had been bloodshot, his face gaunt, and his body steadily reducing. My ritual of sustaining his look was destroyed, forcing me to endure the illness with Arthur in a manner I wasn’t anticipating.
Rockstar took what was a seemingly small element – a superficial side in so many different video games – and redefined its significance. Maybe Arthur’s weight reduction wouldn’t have been as noticeable if I didn’t work to maintain him wholesome, however there’s no escaping the way in which his face modifications: he genuinely appears like a dying man.
Simply glancing at Arthur’s ailing body and death-riddled face is distressing, however the way in which Rockstar takes an idea as easy as character customisation and coalesces it with a pivotal, heartbreaking plot level is sort of sensible, and solely contributes to Red Dead Redemption 2’s stature as a marvel of open world game design.
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