“We’ve always tried to make these worlds places you can get lost in. Feel like they exist when you’re not even in them – like they’re waiting for you.”

That’s the kind of world Rob Nelson, co-studio head of Rockstar North, wants to build.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is Rockstar’s first original game in five years, and the first it’s built specifically for the current generation of consoles. It’s a fact that’s easy to forget with GTA V still dominating sales charts and amidst the constant updates to GTA Online.

Work on Red Dead 2 began eight years ago, as production drew to a close on its predecessor. “I think when we finished this one...” Nelson breaks off and gestures towards a screen behind him in his Edinburgh office; it’s running Red Dead Redemption on an old Xbox 360 debug console. “I always like to keep it close by, just to stay familiar with it and the feelings it evokes.” The TV displays the game’s title screen, which teases the player with a sliver of the game’s natural beauty.

“I think when we finished this one we decided what story we wanted to tell for the sequel,” he continues. I think that sort of informed where we wanted to go and set ourselves the challenges ahead. We always like to move to new hardware when we can go from the ground-up, because it let’s us push the core ideas we’re always chasing and playing with, and trying to realise much further. Every time. Every generation. We get to push those ideas further.”

We speak for an hour or so about those core ideas and self-imposed challenges – the fanatical pursuit of realism, how much freedom you can really give the player, and how you begin to wrangle the insane amount of detail needed to build an entire world from scratch.

In a World Without You

Underlying so much of what we talk about is one of those core ideas they’ve been chasing for a while - the notion of persistence. The ultimate goal has always been to create a world that feels like it exists independently of you, the player.

“It can’t just be like a lot of open worlds are – the feeling of life going on around you but if you stop and stare at it you’re like, ‘You’re just wandering forever. You’re just standing there.’ Flying past it at 100mph it holds up, but if you stop and stare at it, it doesn’t so much.”

Red Dead 2 unfolds at a different pace. The way in which you move through this environment is totally different – much slower and closer, whether on foot or horseback – and so the illusion of reality needs to be that much stronger. Rockstar not only wants you to observe the world its built but for you to immerse yourself in it, interact in new ways, and forge nuanced relationships with its inhabitants, and for that to feel authentic, it has to feel like it goes on when you’re not even there.

It all rests on a simple principle. “The real world runs on a schedule is the idea,” says Nelson, stripping it back. “If you’re going to have a gang that exists, they need jobs. Everyone has a routine they go through every day. [...] Once we decided it was going to be about living in a gang, working in a gang – they're going to live in camps, and these camps are going to move around as this group of people gets pushed through the world. Then they need to be believable. How are you going to make the camp believable? It can't just be random schedules or points in the area the people go to.” That’s maybe how it would’ve been done in the past, but with new technology the core idea can be approached in new ways.

The Van Der Linde Gang, from left to right: Dutch Van der Linde, Bill Williamson, Javier Escuella, Arthur Morgan, unknown, Micha Bell, Sadie Adler, unknown.

“So think about regular camping. It's actually quite a bit of work. It all sort of revolves around eating – so the fire, and the person preparing the food and who's going to prepare the food. So we've got a cook in Pearson. Who helps him prepare the food? He basically prepares the stuff, puts it in the pot, takes the pot, puts it on the fire, calls ‘Chow’, people go over, get some food, go sit down, eat it. So there's a food chain. Once you get that working a couple of times a day, you have movement that if you watch it it looks real. It looks like they live. Chopping wood…”

Nelson continues to tell me about all the household duties required to maintain the camp beyond lining stomachs, and how the principles of camp life can be scaled and applied to a town. The amount of detail suddenly becomes dizzying. But everything Nelson tells me can be traced back to a simple and elegant idea – “the real world runs on a schedule” – upon which complexity has been added gradually, layer upon layer. A camp becomes a town, which eventually grows into a city.

The endgame is to create a world inhabited by characters who exist independently of you. Like the real world. They’ll have conversations among themselves, which will branch and change depending if you’re nearby or get involved. NPCs aren’t there simply to give you missions or upgrade your items. This world doesn’t revolve around you.

If food and supplies are in abundance, spirits in the camp will be high. If people are hungry the mood will turn sour.

It also incorporates an idea Rockstar started to introduce in GTA V with Michael’s family. There was the sense he had a life that went on outside of the missions you spent with him. But Red Dead 2 is taking that much further. The hope is that by living beside these characters, experiencing their behaviour in a whole range of scenarios, breaking down the distinction between main- and side-mission content, Red Dead 2 will be able to create more nuanced relationships than ever before.

Nelson tries to illustrate some of this through a character we know well from the last game, Bill Williamson. “What was this dude like several years before the last game? What was he like? Is he a bit more of a slob? Does he not change often? Does he sleep in? Does he not do anything... are people bitching at him for it? You get to see lots of these little interactions between members of the camp that give you more information about who they are as characters and hopefully make you feel like they're real. So when you're going into big gunfights with them or whatever sort of jobs and adventures you get into with them you feel like this person beside you is actually a person you live with and know better than game characters you've known before. That's a real goal for us.”

Creating more complex, independent characters was one step, but Rockstar also had to change the way in which it allows players to engage with them. Nelson explains how they started to play with this idea in GTA 5 by including simple comments, but by mapping them to the d-pad it meant players would have to stop what they were doing to interact. Red Dead 2 evolves this concept, reappropriating the lock-on system which was previously only used to aim and shoot. Now it is used to interact with other characters in ways much more complex than shooting them.

When you lock-on, each of the face buttons on the controller will offer contextually-defined behaviours. One minute you may be able to greet, antagonise, or even rob a stranger on the open road all without drawing your weapon. If things escalate, one of those options may change, allowing you to defuse the situation and move on without resorting to violence. “We basically took this [Nelson uses the d-pad on a Dualshock 4], which was a binary action potentially and opened it up to give you a greater range of possibilities. That just gives the player more choice, concerning how they want to behave in the world. There's more ways to interact with the world than down the barrel of a gun.”

When Things Get Too Real

Arthur Morgan is Dutch’s right-hand man, and it’s clear from the 45-minute demo we saw that many of the gang’s members expect him to provide, whether that’s money to fill their pockets or food for the table. Rockstar wants you to feel the responsibility of Arthur’s position within gang but at the same time it never want it to feel onerous. One of the recurring tensions when creating a world of immense detail is striking the right balance between fidelity and fun.

“We’re constantly playing with that,” says Nelson. “Trying to make sure it’s not too realistic to the point of being laborious. All the time.” He’s talking specifically about the weapons in the game, which show a fastidious attention to detail: the way they reload, their rate of fire, the difference between single- and double-action weapons, whether you need to cock it after each shot. “[We’re] constantly playing with the timings and speeds of those things so they feel realistic, but they’re not necessarily one-to-one realistic as that would be annoying in practice.”

Similarly, animals you kill will rot over time. If you carry a dead animal around on your horse for too long, it will begin to decompose, but small kills – skinned squirrels and rabbits – those are preserved and kept in your satchel because it became too annoying to have these small kills constantly going rotten. Realism began to encroach on fun, and so had to give way. They don’t want to ever annoy the player or to constantly be throwing up menus, taking you away from being Arthur.

But sometimes the balance lies in the other direction. As Nelson tells me all about the new bonding system that exists between you and your horse, I ask what happens if your horse dies – for many, one of the most traumatic experiences in the last game. Surely with this new bonding system your horse can’t die? Surely we’ve move to an Epona-like situation? No, unfortunately not.

Nelson hints that death isn’t instant and that your horse may become seriously injured, but maybe you’ll have the right tools to nurse them back to health. But I seem to have stumbled upon a painful memory.

“A year ago or something like that,” Nelson recalls, “my horse got hurt, fell over a cliff, and he was sort of just laying there. I thought I had something to get him back on his feet, but I didn’t have it on me. So I was then running to town to get him some medicine.” He pauses. “Anyways, it didn’t work out.”

Larger animals you’ve hunted and killed are carried on the back of your horse. They’ll decay over time so make sure you get them back to camp as fast as possible.

Imagine sprinting to the local town, hurriedly buying the medical supplies, frantically running back to your horse only to find it has died alone. Without you.

But something went wrong. Something that didn’t feel right. “I think there was a bug on that [so when I] whistled, he magically came back to life [...] and he appeared. We were playing it, and I was like ‘that sucks’ because I was about to have a real moment here. So we’re doing that. A lot of times you're just playing and the game tells you what it needs.”

Sometimes realism adds far more to the experience than something that would offer convenience to the player, like magically summoning a new horse with the same stats. It allows for heartbreaking memories that last way beyond finishing the game.

“Things have to cost something to mean something,” says Nelson.