Red Dead Redemption 2 has all sorts of little details that the vast majority of players will never see, and that’s part of what makes Rockstar games so special, says former Rockstar designer Ben Hinchliffe.
Hinchliffe worked at the studio from 2009 all the way to 2022, at which time he was a game designer on GTA 6. He recently appeared on the GTAVIoclock podcast (timestamped here), and at one point got on the topic of Red Dead Redemption 2, describing a mission where you’re tasked with ransacking a moonshine wagon. While most folks are happy to simply do what cowboys do and shoot the thing up Wild West-style, Rockstar went the extra mile to ensure that the wagon’s lore continues for pacifist Arthur Morgan.
“There’s a moonshine wagon and you’ve got to meet it in the middle, and you’re supposed to ambush it on the bridge. And if you ambush it on the bridge, cool, you get it, I think you’ve got to take it to the professor,” Hinchliffe said. “If you don’t ambush it on the bridge where you’re told to, and you follow it along the road for quite some time, it’ll end up at a bandit camp.”
Hinchliffe went on to describe a scene full of enemy NPCs “doing their animations, the guys get off the wagons, they go to their tent.” He reckoned “99% of people never saw that, because they would ambush the wagon where they were told on the bridge. But again it was that thing of ‘where’s it going, what’s the story behind it, why is it going from here to here?’ So it was always that extra narrative that you have to put in.”
It’s not uncommon for NPCs to have alternate programming for unlikely player interactions, but it’s also true that Rockstar sandboxes are revered for their realism and hyper-interactivity. Hinchliffe said the amount of “‘What ifs?'” in particular is part of “what makes Rockstar’s games so good – all that additional detail and content that they put into everything that players aren’t even aware it’s there. They just don’t know it exists, but it does, for the people who just play it a little bit different.”
Baldur’s Gate 3 boss Swen Vincke shared similar comments last year, highlighting developer Larian’s investment in “things that maybe 0.001% of the audience will see.”
Hinchliffe founded his own studio, Just Add Water Development, in May 2022, and is preparing for the November 14 release of its debut title, DIG VR.