Red Dead Redemption 2 Campaign Mode Reportedly Spans 65 Hours

As we inch closer to the October 26 launch date for the highly anticipated title Red Dead Redemption 2, more and more details on the game are coming out. We learned not long ago that if you ditch the minimap in the game, the NPCs will dish out directions to keep you on track. Rockstar also put out a second gameplay trailer to give us a look at what the game will offer earlier this month. In a recent story, Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser talked about Red Dead Redemption 2 and gave up some very interesting facts about the game.

Houser noted that the team working on the game put in 100-hour weeks several times in 2018 to get the game finished. Working huge amounts of hours isn’t that uncommon when it comes to getting games finished, and with something as massive as Red Dead Redemption, which is said to clock in at a 105GB install, the workload is no surprise.

Vulture reports that the final game has 300,000 animations and 500,000 lines of dialogue with claims that the campaign mode of the game spans 65-hours, and even that massive length was cut back. Rockstar is said to have chopped five hours from the game by scaling back one of the two main love interests for Arthur Morgan. Rockstar also ditched some missions, with Houser adding, "They were never going to work technically or be quite slick enough, or they felt superfluous."

One of those missions cut from the game saw Morgan fighting bounty hunters on a train; Houser said of that mission, "It was fun at first, but then it wasn't." Games like this tend to vary in time depending on how you play it and what missions you do or don’t do; the length could vary. Other interesting tidbits claim that the final script for the game's main story alone was 2,000 pages. Rockstar paid 1,200 actors to do motion-capture work on Red Dead Redemption 2, and 700 of those actors recorded dialog.

All those actors were represented by the SAG-AFTRA acting union, which had its members stop working last year during a strike pointing to one potential reason for delays in the game. Houser said, "We're the biggest employers of actors in terms of numbers of anyone in New York, by miles." Rockstar is open to Red Dead Redemption 3, but it wants to wait and see how Red Dead Redemption 2 does in terms of sales before committing. The online portion of the game, Red Dead Online, will be as robust as Grand Theft Auto Online according to Houser.