Red Dead Redemption Shouldn't Have Worked

Technical Difficulties Persist

This brings us to the second problem, making all these systems work with the developer's RAGE engine. As opposed to a handful of features in the Wild West setting, Red Dead Redemption aimed to recreate all of them simultaneously. From the animation on using a lasso to the erratic behaviour of horses, this posed an immense technical challenge. Animators and artists were constantly working with a wide array of textures while also ensuring the game ran smoothly.

Just about every aspect of Red Dead Redemption went through these kinds of complexities. To produce realistic horse movements, motion capture teams recorded a real horse for example. Then, they came to the music; Rockstar's crack team of music lovers had previously licensed classic tracks from past and present to generate a backdrop for the GTA series. But for Red Dead, they chose to write and perform a wholly original soundtrack.

Comparisons such as "Grand Theft Auto with horses" would have been far more prevalent if Rockstar hadn't used the talents of Bill Elm and Woody Jackson.

With their efforts combined, RDR possesses a phenomenal soundtrack that both perfectly complements the events of the story while heavily relying on the traditional instruments seen in classical westerns like the jaw harp and trumpet. As one of the first Rockstar games to use its own soundtrack, the outcome was better than anyone expected.

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