Dan Houser, the co-founder of Rockstar, told Vulture a few severe details about Red Dead Redemption 2‘s development.

For example, he revealed that during the game’s creation, some people had had 100-hour working weeks (which means 14 hours without a day off on average, or with one day off per week, 16+ hours per day!). As in 2010, Rockstar San Diego devs’ wives wrote that their husbands were overworked during Red Dead Redemption‘s development, history might be repeating itself. Also, Rockstar has responded then that they were „saddened if any former members of any studio did not find their time here enjoyable or creatively fulfilling and wish them well with finding an environment more suitable to their temperaments and needs.”

Red Dead Redemption 2 has half a million lines of dialogue, as well as over three hundred thousand animations. The game takes about 65 hours to beat, and this figure doesn’t even include Red Dead Online, which launches in November. It could have been even more, as Rockstar has cut out five hours of content! One mission line would have involved one of the love interests of Arthur Morgan, but Houser said it didn’t work. A few missions were also cut because „they were never going to work technically or be quite slick enough, or they felt superfluous.” One such mission would have had Morgan killing bounty hunters on a train.

Red Dead Redemption 2‘s final script for just the main story is 2000 pages, and Rockstar allegedly hired 1200 actors for motion capture to digitalise their movements to be used in the game. 700 of them were also employed to do voice-overs, and they were all part of SAG-AFTRA. We don’t know if their 2017 strike affected Rockstar‘s production for the audio or not.

Houser also said that he’d gladly do Red Dead Redemption 3 if „[Red Dead Redemption 2] does well enough and we think we have other interesting things to say.”

Red Dead Redemption 2 is out on October 26 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One – the latter has shown up on the Microsoft Store, and we learned that the game would require 88.57 GB to be installed. The PlayStation 4 version will likely need a similar free disk space size. We should start cleaning up our consoles…

Source: GameSpot, DualShockers