Why Arthur Morgan Is The Best Video Game Protagonist Of The Generation
3. The Life Of An Outlaw
From the big to the small, you're always motivated to do something in RDR2 because Arthur is, but the game plays on this connection between player and character in some pretty unusual ways. It's established early that Morgan, while an outlaw, has a moral code. He doesn't enjoy killing for the sake of it, and while he might have a warped definition of who deserves to be murdered, his discomfort with needless violence is reinforced in the first hour by his reaction to Dutch needlessly killing a bystander during the botched Blackwater job. Likewise, it's revealed he loathes the work campmate Strauss partakes in, selling loans to the impoverished and then bullying them into paying them back. Still, that belief doesn't stop him - or the player - from helping Strauss out in quests for the benefit of the camp.
Unlike the other missions though, where blowing the faces off goons with shotguns comes with a sense of satisfaction, the violence is far uglier despite being far tamer. You're essentially just beating people up, but the power dynamics make it clear there's no glory in it. The only real crime the people you're bullying committed was giving in to desperation in order to provide for themselves or their families. Consequently, you wailing on them, in some cases in front of said families, feels... wrong. There's an incongruity between your actions and what both you morally feel about the situation. In one of the first missions, Red Dead Redemption 2 gets you thinking about the consequences of the violence you're inflicting as Arthur, a theme that becomes the entire focus of the story in the final chapters.
However, it takes a while to get there to that point, and your connection to this character, for potentially tens of hours, is built around the freedom of this outlaw way of life. At every turn you're encouraged to do whatever's necessary to make money and contribute to the camp. Hold up this settler, rob this farmer, bring in these bounties. Most crimes seem like fair game, and Arthur is the best in the business when it comes to completing these tasks. It's all justifiable because it's not needless - everything benefits either Morgan himself or the camp.