Rockstar has built plenty of open worlds in the past, from the expansive, breathtaking cityscapes of its Grand Theft Auto series to the modest but charming schoolyards of Bully, but never has it attempted anything quite like Red Dead Redemption . There aren't any city streets crammed with cars or impenetrable clusters of urban sprawl in this game. Instead, you'll be facing the enormity of the American and Mexican wild near the beginning of the 20th Century, and Rockstar's got some interesting ideas about how to fill that virtual space to make it as engaging and entertaining as possible.

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We already brought you the basics of Rockstar's next big game, and now it's time for an information overload. In addition to our hands-off demonstration we were given, we got the rare opportunity to sit down with creative VP and co-founder of Rockstar Dan Houser, who's driving a lot of the production on this unique open-world Western. The marathon interview session was so long we had to break it into two parts, so don't forget to check back next week for more.Notions for building Redemption were whirring around even before Rockstar acquired the partially-built bits of first game, Red Dead Revolver, from Capcom. So with Revolver, Rockstar wound up polishing and completing the product, but the core wasn't what Houser termed a "Rockstar design." "It didn't fundamentally play like a Rockstar game," he said. For Redemption, the company had more freedom to maneuver since it wasn't tied to an existing design. "We still kept the best mechanics we felt from the first, but built…when we really go to town, the kind of games we really like to make."Work on the game is being done by Rockstar's San Diego studio, members of the core Grand Theft Auto team and folks from Rockstar Leeds. "We've had the current Rockstar setup since early 2003 with roughly the same studios we've got now. We've added a few since then and we finally in the last year or so got it working in an amazingly integrated way…It's a game that on the one hand has got a very talented team working on it, and on another got a lot of our very best experts helping guide them and making sure that we use the expertise we've got as a company on other, similar open world games from a tech and design standpoint to make as few mistakes as possible."The eventual decision to move forward into production on Redemption had a lot to do with the emerging technology at the dawning of the current console generation. "We were just starting to get wind of dev kits and the ideas about what would become the 360, what would become the PS3, we were beginning to get wind of some of the specs on that and thinking about things we'd want to do on the new hardware. Obviously one of the things that we decided we would love to do is a game where countryside was rendered beautifully, because that was very difficult on a PS2 to make these big, open environments that look fantastic. We'd done it in a couple of different games, but we'd never made a game that was to the countryside as GTA was to the city."During the beginning stages of production, Rockstar had to decide which elements from Revolver fit in with the drastically changed structure of the game world in Redemption. "We loved the mechanic of Deadeye and thought it was executed very nicely for the time…so we wanted to keep that and keep the Wild West theme, but beyond that I don't think there's much that's being kept. I think the way we came to see Read Dead Revolver as being about the kind of myths and iconic images of the Old West, the cowboy with the scar on his face, the Indian, or the iconic set pieces put together in a somewhat linking story but it was really about trying to show off these very iconic myths about the Old West. Then what we wanted to do with Red Dead Redemption Red Dead Redemption features a new character, John Marston, who players will control throughout the campaign. "He's a reformed bank robber and member of an outlaw gang who left that world and started to raise his family in more orthodox surroundings, then gets sucked back into that world by forces outside of his control to go and look for a character who used to be in a gang with him out in a different part of the world he doesn't know. As you play through the game, you start to uncover more about his backstory and his family life and these characters that he's looking for and how their relationships are entwined and what went down between them. I can't give you too much more without giving away major plot spoilers, but the setup for him is he's a guy who tried and for a few years succeeded in changing his life around and is coming to see that that is impossible."As Marston moves out into the world, he'll travel around a vast wilderness set in the southern United States and Northern sections of Mexico around the turn of the 20th Century. "There's three linked bits of map. You start in what we're calling the Frontier area and these are all counties or states or regions…meant to be one of the last wild patches still being brought under the yolk of modern America. Telegraph poles are everywhere, people are starting to play around with big telephones in their offices, but on the other hand people have hardly ever seen any other form of modernization. The trains have been there for a while, but it's still pretty primitive, and still pretty lawless, and still has a Marshall rather than a police force…Then you get sent to Mexico to a province that is on the point of civil war. You get to see some of the characters there including the local, somewhat overly zealous political leaders and there'll be rebellious leaders and some other people hiding out south of the border from life in America. Then you eventually end up back in the Northeastern part of the map which is a contrast geographically with the other two which are different styles of more desert and scrub, and this is much more verdant with pine trees and hills and mountains in there and also a bigger town which is a lot more modern…so you end the map with a lot more of the modern world in your face."The game world Rockstar is constructing is supposed to be massive, in a way that could be one of the largest worlds the company has yet created. Achieving this kind of scale was of critical importance for the type of game the company wanted Redemption to be. "The sense of scale, and the sense of riding across these big areas and exploring these weird corners of the map, that is part of the experience, just as much as having the shootouts and part of the story and adventure. The act of seeing these beautiful views and discovering them for yourself and feeling like it's enormous and I can go over there and see what's up that hill and see for miles in the distance, that is part of the beauty and fun of the game."