Red Dead Redemption 2's camp is a brilliant narrative tool in a genre that needed it the most
Rockstar Games’ narratives up to this point have been a slightly troubled bunch. Owing to the lofty ambitions of Dan and Sam Hauser on display since Grand Theft Auto IV, the stories they’ve told so far were very cerebral, with the characters, dialogues and radio/TV shows all in a painstakingly deliberate manner providing various answers to the pompous question “what is America?”
Feelings was just something Rockstar didn’t do well. For all the fond memories of the original Red Dead Redemption, its emotional impact owes a lot to story beats and scenes lifted from The Proposition and the gripping ending that touched the only character in RDR the player had any emotional attachment to: the protagonist. Realizing where their strengths lie, when making Grand Theft Auto V Rockstar even went so far as to eschew attempts at emotional jabs and focus instead on pure entertainment, settling for social commentary through satire — and the game was all the better for it.
That’s finally changing with Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s the first game by Rockstar where they succeeded in making the players feel the main theme of its story, instead of beating them over the head with it. And what a complex and delicate theme it is: camaraderie.
One big camping trip
The most important tool in Rockstar’s narrative arsenal is the player base. As the Van Der Linde gang travels through the country going about their business, they set up a few tents, park their wagons, light fires and call that their base of operations. The player can choose to donate their accumulated goods to the camp and improve it for gameplay benefits, as well as just stroll around, interacting with fellow gangmembers.
It’s the latter aspect of this feature that makes the base so impactful for the narrative. Open world action games usually operate in an “adventure of the hour” format, where the player moves the story along by performing predefined activities for (and sometimes with) non-player characters. The effect is a narrative experience in which NPCs take turns riding shotgun with the games’ protagonist for the duration of their respective missions. It’s as if it was a road movie littered with hitchhikers, we neither know nor care what happens to them once they leave our side. They cease to exist both technically, in the game world, and narratively, in the player’s mind. Narrative designers struggle to make the player believe those characters have their own persistent lives, but it’s an uphill battle, as we can never actually meet key NPCs in the game world outside of their dedicated activities. The best they could do so far was to have them call the protagonist at the most inopportune mom — NIKO! LET’S GO BOWLING!
Placing most of the game’s characters in the demilitarized zone of our camp means that they feel alive, while they’re not in danger of being ran over or shot by the player. When I’m off on an errand for Dutch, I know the greasy John Marston is somewhere there, probably fighting with Abigail over Jack again. Furthermore, it gives the writers a great non-invasive tool to flesh out those characters in an absolute way. As NPCs interact with each other, their characterization isn’t forced to be relative to the player: their entire existence doesn’t revolve around Arthur Morgan. We learn parts of their tales as they talk with other characters, we discover more details while rummaging through photos, letters and newspaper clippings stored in tents. This way the story isn’t forced on us, it’s the player who owns the process of exposition instead. When you’re deciding how much time you invest in getting to know the gang, you don’t even notice how attached you become by the time it all pays off.
The Van Der Linde company retreat
Around 10 hours in, a tender moment in the story sees it all come together and even though I’m sure Red Dead Redemption 2 has grander things in store, this early payoff sent shivers down my spine and inspired me to write this piece. It wasn’t even a surprise, as the trailers for RDR2 were very clear about the camp being a social space for the characters, yet when the gang throws a shindig you can’t help but feel the game pulling at the strings it stealthily wrapped around you up to this point. There’s a lot to be said about the unifying power of music, song and dance, that you can’t really know about until you actually feel it at a campfire or a music festival. Like a lot of things in Red Dead Redemption 2, the interesting thing is not what’s there, but rather how it’s portrayed.
Obviously, every character gets hammered. If you remember Niko and Roman hitting the clubs back in GTAIV you should know that Rockstar might just be the best in the industry at writing their characters drunk. They’re not just smashed for comedic effect, they get increasingly more intoxicated as the party goes on, turning into slightly bumbling, but also more transparent versions of themselves. No matter your feelings towards them before the event, every member of the Van Der Linde gang has another side to them that you can glimpse if you’re lucky to walk in on their heated discussion with another NPC at the right moment. In fact, if you listen in on the right conversation at the right time, you can discover the nature of Arthur Morgan’s disdain for John Marston. It’s rather neatly foreshadowed and there’s very efficient buildup before the reveal, but there’s no better time to learn it than just as the feeling of belonging to the Van Der Linde tribe is at its strongest.
The shindig, considered as an in-game event, is dynamic and not uniform. As the celebration goes on, various people just do what they feel like. At one point some characters will be singing by the fire, others dancing near Dutch’s tent, and a few people might group around Javier playing melancholic tunes on the guitar. Then they’ll get bored, walk off somewhere and do something completely different. Just like during daytime, the camp and the characters in it feel authentic and alive.
The players are of course free to participate in the event however they like. That one’s pretty obvious, but the secret here is that no matter what we do, we glean something about the characters, including Arthur Morgan. For one, we learn that he can’t sing. But even this has details that stir our imagination. It’s comedy gold how Arthur substitutes song verses he doesn’t remember with phrases like “fiddlee-dee-doo”, but then there are songs and verses he knows by heart, where his gruffy drunken voice bellows strong and sure, that make you wonder whether this ballad comes from his heart instead of memory.
Players are nothing if not curious, so sooner or later we grow bored of just listening to the Van Der Linde gang talk and sing and search for other things to do within earshot. This is where the aforementioned narrative tools come into play. Some NPCs are loners that prefer to observe the proceedings from the fringes, some just want to take a walk, just like during daytime in the camp we can interact with them and hear quips and dialogues that are unique to this situation. The personal effects of our fellow gangmembers are still there, waiting to be discovered, so we can stumble upon a dark secret of the resident alcoholic while we hear him talk war stories in the background. Effective in their own right, those storytelling tools are even more powerful during this event.
The morning after
Finally, as the attendance dwindles and the first rays of sunlight break through the clouds, your brothers in arms and sisters in outlaw life either walking or crawling to their tents, you can’t help but think that for each and every one of these virtual people, you’d break them out of prison for virtual murder, no questions asked. It’s no longer a question of morality, of good versus evil, at this point Red Dead Redemption 2 transcends those simple criteria and successfully turns its story into one of loyalty and camaraderie, of us versus them. You are Arthur Morgan, member of the Van Der Linde family, one of Dutch’s children. And God help anyone who dares to stand between you and where you belong.
