In the week since its release, Red Dead Redemption 2 has smashed it out of the park in every single aspect and has pretty much everybody singing its praise.
Disclaimer: I’m not a gamer in the slightest so if you clicked on this article expecting to see technical gaming terms throughout you’re going to be sorely disappointed. I promise you we’ll have a laugh though.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know the game – the latest from Rockstar Games – has taken the world by storm and critics are rallying together to describe it as a ‘masterpiece’.
In particular, the visually stunning graphics are making players double take as they are transported back in time to the Wild West. Now this is something I can work with.
The immersive quality of the game means players are more than happy to explore the gorgeously imagined wilderness at their leisure, as well as visiting the barbers from time to time (beards actually grow in real time in this game).
The attention to detail throughout the 100 hours of playing time is truly something else and players have been getting to work fast, making the most of the detailed graphics.
Which, of course, means drawing d*cks in the snow:
To the tech artist who worked multiple late nights on the snow deformation technology, know that you've brought much joy to the world. pic.twitter.com/UwH8sJuGLv
— petermolydeux (@PeterMolydeux) October 26, 2018
A truly excellent work of art, I think we can all agree. Moving on though, the incredibly detailed graphics of RDR2 have also been the source of much confusion for some gamers recently.
After seeing one image that had been posted to Reddit, people were left wondering if it was a real-life picture or if it was, in fact, from the game.
Reddit user Kelleykrider16 posted a picture of three horses standing outside a barn earlier this morning (November 2).
The picture was captioned:
The horses were standing so still that their shadows still have frost
Like I said, I’ve not played the game but even I realised that this looked very much like the scenes from RDR2, so immediately I was thinking to myself how impressive the graphic was.
And the people of Reddit agreed, with one person commenting:
These red dead redemption 2 graphics are amazing!
While another wrote:
Red Dead 2, really killin’ it!
And yet another exclaimed:
Is this RDR2?? Holy sh*t it’s good.
For the game designers to have gone into so much detail that they would have thought about how the level of frost should correlate with the amount of time the horses had been standing there is pretty bloody impressive.
Mind = blown. Except, maybe not because it turns out that this picture actually has nothing to do with the Rockstar game.
Turns out, it’s just a real-life picture of three real-life horses standing outside a real-life barn. Sorry to disappoint folks.
It’s not surprising so many of us thought that it was a screenshot from the game though, as its graphics really do appear to leave no stone unturned.
With the characters’ beards growing in real time and the fact that when you clean the main character you have to navigate to scrub each part of his body, it’s understandable why we believed the game would think of a detail as niche as the frost on the ground.
Or maybe I’m just saying that to make myself feel better about thinking the picture was from RDR2… Who knows.
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A Broadcast Journalism Masters graduate who went on to achieve an NCTJ level 3 Diploma in Journalism, Lucy has done stints at ITV, BBC Inside Out and Key 103. While working as a journalist for UNILAD, Lucy has reported on breaking news stories while also writing features about mental health, cervical screening awareness, and Little Mix (who she is unapologetically obsessed with).