YMMV / Red Dead Redemption 2

Both modes

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • A vaudeville singer in St. Denis sings "Hello! Ma Baby!", which seems out of place in the setting. However, the song was written in 1899 (when the game takes place), and was a Tin Pan Alley hit in New York that same year. So this isn't totally unrealistic. However, the arrangement contains blues elements, which wouldn't enter popular culture until the World War I time frame, and the singer's vocal style is more appropriate to the 1940s.
  • The presence of Guido Martelli in the 19th century Deep South seems ridiculous, perhaps Rockstar trying to inject more GTA into their Western. However New Orleans, which Saint Denis is based on, did in fact have significant Italian organized crime all the way back in the 1880s. Existing independently of their more famous Northern cousins, the New Orleans Mafia still exists today and is older than many of the more famous Mafia families.
  • While not available as chewing gum, cocaine was a commercially available stimulant in the 1890s and could be bought from drugstores.
  • Skinning a small animal quickly and cleanly with just your bare hands may seem ludicrous, but it's completely possible in real life.
  • Occasionally, when entering into camp gang members will greet the player by saying "Roll out the red carpet!". At first this might seem like a case of Anachronism Stew considering the Hollywood version of the red carpet would not come into existence until 1961, uses of red carpets to greet people of high-importance actually go back as far as Ancient Greece.
  • It may be anachronistic at a glance, but the remote-controlled boat that Marko Dragic demonstrates in his first mission is completely identical to one that Nikola Tesla actually demonstrated in 1898.
  • Charles Smith's dual heritage may seem like an attempt to score extra diversity points, but a number of Black Indians lived in the 19th century and even more today.
• Award Snub:
  • Many gamers were unhappy that RDR2 did not win Game of the Year during the 2018 Game Awards, with that honor instead going to God of War (PS4).
  • RDR2 also lost big to God of War at the 2018 D.I.C.E. Awards. It did win over it in Technical Achievement, though.
  • RDR2 was nominated for the BAFTA Awards but lost all of them, including "Artistic Achievement", which went to Return of the Obra Dinn.
• Camera Screw: Cougar and Wolf attacks cause the camera to follow them for a few seconds. Unfortunately, it overrides all other camera control (at least in free aim mode), so before you get the chance to fire back you'll probably be mauled by said animal or its friends.
• Contested Sequel: While scoring many perfect scores from outlets and earning praise for its open world and graphics, with Arthur and his character arc in particular earning praise, several outlets have condemned the game on a mechanical level for its strict mission structure and punishments for deviating from what Rockstar wants you to do, with Nakey Jakey even calling it "outdated". The increased realism impacting the gunplay has also led to some derision because it makes the game less fun than prior Red Dead games.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The catalogues include boastful ads for various products, and often include Deliberate Values Dissonance. However, one stands out: an advert for white lead paint that has a picture of one kid painting a barn wall... and an another eating it from their brush.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While the story of the game has received unanimous praise for its interesting characters and plot that properly fleshes out events alluded to in the first game, the gameplay has been more divisive. Many players enjoy the gameplay's slow and deliberate pace, which pairs well with the beautifully realized Wide-Open Sandbox and the story's maturity. A few other players think the game is overly obsessed with realism and detail at the expense of being fun to play.
• Epileptic Trees: Players have taken several small things as evidence that a RDR remaster on the RDR2 engine is on the works.
  • New Austin seems to be there for the sake of being there, and Mexico is not explorable (without glitches) but has a genuinely surprising amount of detail put into it. The players are guessing the latter will be added to the game as a playable area in the future, either in both SP and MP or only in Red Dead Online (a 2019 patch seems to have made changes to Sepulcro^note While the graveyard itself is still absent, there are now a few open graves where it should be, supporting this theory) New Austin does have a larger role in Online, however.
  • The discovery of a seemingly real glitch that gives the player adult Jack's voice - which is never heard in this game due to his age - with entirely new lines. The possibility of them being online-only have been dismissed since RDO takes place before II's story, meaning Jack may not even have been born yet. The fact that patches have added more lines with matching subtitles and proper lip syncing has only fueled the flames. This has since been debunked however.
  • Rockstar famously said that a remaster or a PC port of the first game would be next to impossible due to issues with the game's coding; they now have a new engine to recreate the first game on, allowing those who never played the first game to experience a (potentially slightly altered) version of the first game.
  • The limitations of the setting and a smaller playerbase mean that the game's online mode may not be as monetizable as GTA Online is has fans believing that there may be a traditional Single player DLC instead.
• Estrogen Brigade: The franchise as a whole has a small but exceptionally devoted female fanbase that only grew after the release of the second game. The introduction of a good many attractive male characters has certainly done nothing to dissuade them.
• Even Better Sequel: While Contested Sequel is also in play, the game does improve on the previous ones with its improved free-roam activities, the better ending to Arthur's storyline and a larger and more varied map. It seems to be a common opinion that this game has higher highs and lower lows than the first one.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Rootin' Tootin' Cowboy Shootin' 2" has been adopted as an affectionate nickname for the game by parts of the fandom, after the first game earned some similar nicknames.
    • Yahtzee often calls the game Har-De-Har-Hoo due to the silliness that is similar to that of the first game (which he calls Har-De-Har). Other nicknames he picks for the game are Red Dead Revolver 3, Grand Theft Auto With Angry Cowboys 2, and The Game Where the Horse Does Plop-Plops.
    • Thanks to Yahtzee calling the two sides of Cole MacGrath from inFAMOUS 2 "Cole MacGallant" (good) and "Cole MacGoofus" (evil) (after the titular duo of Goofus and Gallant), those who have watched his review of that game before playing RDR2 can refer to the high-honor Arthur as "Arthur McGallant" (after his first name), while the low-honor Arthur can be referred to as "Morgan le Goofus" (a surname mixture of Morgan le Fay and one half of the Right Way/Wrong Way Pair of the 1948 series).
  • "Orthur" for Arthur, due to the very emphatic way that Mary and (especially) Dutch say it.
  • "Arthur Marston" for 1907 John, because of his hair being a Palette Swap of Arthur's hair.
  • "Sandy Knee" for Saint Denis, due to the way most characters pronounce it.
  • The mountain John is rescued from in the second mission is often called "Mt. Marston" due to the absence of any official name.
  • The out-of-bounds explorers have these for the cut and/or unreachable off-map areas, such as "Canada" for anything north of Ambarino and "South Elizabeth" for the area south of WE and east of Mexico.
  • Micah Bell is best known as "the Legendary Rat".
• Friendly Fandoms: With fans of Grand Theft Auto IV since both are incredibly dark and gritty open-world games about outlaws by the same company, more serious in tone and tragic in their narrative than the usual Rockstar work.
• Goddamned Bats: Snakes. Not too hard to kill, but they can poison you if they bite you, forcing to to eat Ginseng or some other herbs to stop it. What makes them really annoying is that they're found almost always in grass, making them nearly invisible, and they can scare your horse, which will cause it to buck you off if you don't calm it down. Oh, and if you want to get perfect skins off them, you have to hit them in the head with a Small Game Arrow (body shots ruin the skin), which you can only do reliably if they stop (their movement is really erratic), which they only do if they are coiling to attack, which they will only do if you get to about biting range. Have fun.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Snakes have an odd tendency to spontaneously die while you're tracking them, leaving an undamaged skin and carcass to collect.
  • Birds are programmed to instantly die the moment they collide with anything mid-flight, no matter the speed or the obstacle. They can even die if they crash into you less than a second after they take off, your character being completely unharmed. This leaves behind fresh bird carcasses to pluck and store.
  • Similarly, fish will sometimes beach themselves. If you stand next to any body of water for long enough (with the swamp being an especially good area for it), you'll be able to collect some pristine fish carcasses as they swim ashore.
  • There are several ways to glitch into Mexico (Glitching up certain cliffs, drinking and passing out inside caves outside map borders so the game would respawn you on top of the cave), but they tend to be patched out pretty quickly. The glitch can also be used to reach Guarma, although the latter is now impossible in multiplayer (the game teleports the players away when they get close).
  • The "vomit rope" glitch is not only grossly humorous, it's also practical for getting off of mountains safely since it negates Fall Damage. While the glitch can be done in both Redemption 2 and Online, it sees more use in the latter, especially for players who are really invested into the Collector role.
• I Knew It!:
  • The map that was leaked before the game was even announced includes locations later mentioned in previews. While it has changed since the leak, it was more or less accurate to the final map.
  • A lot of people correctly guessed that John Marston is playable in the epilogue.
  • The PC version was correctly guessed months before the official announcement due to various signs including a mention in the social club's source code, one programmer listing the PC port on their resume, and the simple fact that the PC version of GTA 5 was too profitable for Rockstar to miss out on the PC market.
  • Those who assumed that capturing the legendary channel catfish wasn't actually possible were later proven correct. PC game files eventually revealed the model is unfinished.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The shooting mechanics are the exact same as those in the first game with little change or refinement, meaning players are generally still highly reliant on the built in autoaim and Deadeye system to carry them through gunfights.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Among the high-tier horses, the Arabian, while having the best all-around stats, is notoriously skittish, scares easily, often bucking the player off even with maximum bonding, and is smaller compared to other horses making them less visually appealing for some players. For these reasons, players tend to gravitate towards either the Turkoman (comparable stats and doesn't scare easily) or the Missouri Fox Trotter (a bit faster than the Arabian) when they become available. With fixes to various glitches/exploits that allowed players to access high-level horses early, Arabians are now the only practical go-to for any player looking for a fast horse early on.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Leaked Red Dead Redemption 2 screenshot.^ExplanationWhen Rockstar first announced that Red Dead Redemption 2 was being made, it took a long time before they released any official media. It became a common Image Macro to proclaim that a screenshot from another Western is actually from Red Dead Redemption 2 - usually something silly from the likes of Blazing Saddles or The Town with No Name.
  • Photoshopping the teaser image.
  • Realistic horse testicles ^Explanation The September previews revealed that horse junk is uniquely affected by your surroundings, shrinking or enlarging depending on the temperature. People find this detail to be both insane and hilarious.
  • Editing the character artworks to have random characters and things.
• Misaimed "Realism": A common point of criticism by the game's detractors is that the game's design and themes seem to be at odds with themselves at points, especially with its gun mechanics; the game has the same larger-than-life, fast-paced enemy encounters as its predecessor and sister series, but also comes with sluggish gun mechanics that severely slow you down during them - the result being a game that seems to both want Hollywood-like, idealized fights with an One-Man Army protagonist, and realistic-feeling gritty life-or-death battles for survival at the same time.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The Pump-action shotgun's pumping sound. While the need to pull the hammer back after each shot is annoying in slow, single shot weapons, the Pump-action shotgun is powerful and fast enough to make the system actually satisfying to use.
• Older Than They Think: The weapon degradation system, where a weapon's stats decrease with usage, is based on the one from Red Dead Revolver.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Like GTA Online, people can (and have) bought Red Dead Redemption II solely to play Red Dead Online, whose story length is only a small fraction of the single player campaign's. RDO started getting sold as its own game from December 1, 2020 onwards at US$4.99 to lower the bar of entry to people who don't really care for and/or have already played the story mode.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: While not a full Scrappy Mechanic, RDR 1's deadeye upgrades were criticized for removing an useful ability from level 1^note At level one, you could shoot as many times as you wanted without deactivating the effect; level 2 and 3 deactivate as soon as you shoot, and level 2 was considered to be a massive Power-Up Letdown that did more harm than good^note The game automatically tagged anything the cursor touched, wasting bullets and potentially harming something you didn't intend to. The automatic tagging of Level 2 is now your starting level so it actually makes sense it's the worst one to use, and max level allows you to both manually tag enemies and shoot as many bullets as you wish without deactivating the effect, combining the best parts of level 1 and 3 from the previous game.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The new weapon wheel. Unlike the first game, you have to select the weapons you want to carry with you manually from your horse each time you are not carrying any. Furthermore, the game will sometimes automatically equip weapons to you at the beginning of or during certain parts of missions. This can even overwrite weapons you manually chose just a moment before. The most hated part is that the game also occasionally removes weapons from your inventory after you disembark your horse, and in worst cases get killed because the game removed the gun you were just holding before getting off the animal.
  • The new law mechanics can be a serious headache. For starters, it's almost impossible to commit a crime without having a random witness pop up regardless of where you are and bring the law down on you. Wanted bounties are now much more expensive, and with how much less everything pays (except for dangerous activities like robbing banks or trains) it can become difficult to pay off said bounties. In addition, the game makes it really difficult to exist in areas that have bounties posted, as lawmen patrol the trails and will attack on sight. If your bounty is high enough, super persistent waves of bounty hunters will spawn in to track you down while resting, making it almost impossible to stay in one place while in a bounty zone. The bandanna also does nothing, it seems – in spite of equipping it well out of sight of NPCs, citizens will still seem to be able to know that it's Arthur Morgan specifically who robbed them and not one of the dozens of other crooks in the area. As mentioned in Guide Dang It! on the main page, there's actually a lot more steps required for a complete disguise than the game deigns necessary to tell you. All of this wouldn't really be a problem, since it adds to the fun of committing crimes and having to deal with the consequences for doing so. The problem is that the game will force bounties on the player in certain story missions. The absolute worst example of this is the mission to rescue Micah, which slaps a whopping $300 bounty on the player once the mission is complete. At such an early stage it can be difficult to pay off, and the player may divert many dollars to freeing up their forced bounties over the course of the story rather than buying more interesting things. Furthermore, when certain crimes are committed by someone other than the player (such as a wagon running over an innocent civilian), blame is put on the player for the crime.
  • The need to manually cycle the action on manual repeating weapons and/or re-cock the hammer on single-action revolvers, or in the case of the Spencer carbine BOTH!^note The Spencer is the only lever-gun featured in the game to have a hammer that isn't tied to the lever-action, requiring the shooter to perform the additional step of re-cocking the hammer before/after cycling the lever-action to chamber the next round in order to put the weapon into a fireable state again. In game, however, both actions are performed with one button-press, by pressing "fire" again after shooting. This works most of the time and is not exactly intrusive when it does, but if you wait too long to cycle the action/re-cock the hammer, when you go to actually do it, your weapon will fire IMMEDIATELY after the re-cock, which can lead to a wasted shot if you weren't actually ready to fire at that time. The mechanic has also been noted to clash with the games' large-scale gunfights, and causes the gunplay to feel sluggish as a result.
  • Hunting:
    • Obtaining perfect skins from small animals gets frustrating very quickly. Most small animals need to be killed by either the varmint rifle or the bow equipped with small game arrows, the latter of which must be crafted. However, not only do some animals spawn already damaged, if you do find a perfect specimen but need to use more than one bullet or arrow on the thing you've already ruined the skin. Even if you do kill them with one attack, there's a good chance the skin is damaged unless you hit them in the head. And just as a reminder, you're hunting animals shorter than most grass and which are usually running away from you, meaning that more often than not their body takes the blow you meant for the head. It's slightly better with the legendary buck trinket, but not by much.
    • Big game is only marginally better: Bears, cougars, panthers etc. have very few spawn locations, and like everything else, can spawn already damaged. As a result it's possible to run around their spawn points for several real hours, hoping that A) The thing even spawns, B) It's a 3-star specimen, C) It doesn't get you first, and D) You manage to kill it with one shot.
    • Hunting in general has gotten some flack, since you can't track an animal unless you've already laid eyes on it, despite the hunting mission with Hosea hinting that you'll be able to find leavings and tracks to hunt with (this only applies to legendary animals). Whether or not a given animal spawns in its given "habitat" is also random, unless we're talking about deer and pronghorns which are everywhere. One of the worst offenders is the American Badger, which is small, hard to see and nocturnal, so we hope you're hunting the little buggers at night! The worst offender is the moose, which only appear in certain locations making them even harder to find than the legendary animals themselves - even the legendary moose is easier to find than a regular moose!
  • Naming horses. For some reason, profanity is not allowed. In a game where you can decapitate or dismember a man with a shotgun and already has profane dialogue, you cannot name your horse "Fucker" or "Shithead". While that is an odd inconsistency, it’s at least understandable on some level. What isn’t understandable is the fact that the filter also disallows seemingly-innocuous names like “Fritz.” This baffled players until they did a bit of research and found that “Fritz” is a relatively obscure and archaic slur against German people. They were at a loss for why other names such as “Brad” and “Jerry” would also be filtered out, though.^note  Like with "Fritz", "Jerry" is an archaic yet anachronistic anti-German slur. Hilariously, even attempting to name your horse after Sarah Jessica Parker triggers the profanity check. This led fans to joke that the reason the game took so long to come out was because Rockstar was spending all that time looking up every single obscure profanity.
  • Item crafting is considered an excessive chore by many for several reasons. First, you must craft an item one piece at a time, you don't have the option to tell the game to craft ten Improved Arrows at one time, you've got to select Improved Arrows in the crafting menu, then click nine more times. Second, many crafting items require materials that are hard to come by, like Animal Fat, which inexplicably can't be purchased and must be harvested from animals like wild boar, bears, or ducks. And third, the amount of a given crafting material that you can carry at one time is extremely limited. Flight feathers (needed to craft most arrows and throwing knives) max out in your inventory at 10 feathers, while only five jars of moonshine can be stored at once. While there are upgrades that improve how much can be carried at once, this still makes for an extremely annoying and unnecessary bottleneck.
    • The most egregious example of this is the crafting of split point rounds. These rounds, which are superior to regular ammo, are also crafted from regular ammunition and require no extra components, making them easy to craft. Like every other crafted item, you have to sit through an animation and can only make one at a time. The problem is that unlike almost every other crafted item, Arthur can carry up to one hundred and fifty rounds of split point ammo. This means that, if a player wants a full load of split point ammo for all available ammo types, they have to sit through this animation over three hundred times. Naturally, it's easier but more costly to simply purchase High Velocity or Express ammunition from the gun stores in bulk. The only saving grace for this is that holding the button repeats the animation, so you don't have to press the crafting button 1-400 times.
  • Several buttons are context sensitive, which can lead to frustration when the function of that button suddenly changes depending on the circumstance. To note:
    • The same button is used for both grappling and mounting your horse. Many players accidentally grab some random bystander while attempting to mount their horse, resulting in a fight and the law coming down on them.
    • The same button is used for both punching and manually topping off the ammo in your gun. You may be going to reload when a NPC (or, commonly, your horse) gets close, resulting in you throwing a punch instead.
  • Unlike Rockstar's other games, the in-universe clock is inconsistent - each in-game day takes about 66 minutes, but instead dividing day/night time at 33 minutes, at nighttime time passes noticeably faster only to slow to a crawl between 6-12 am. It may have been intended as an Anti-Frustration Feature since shops are closed at night time, but the game also allows you to skip nights entirely if with a few button presses both in towns and in the wilderness. As a result, each night feels like it's over way too quickly, leaving the player with less time to hunt nocturnal animals, take in the scenery, and makes the world feel more artificial.
  • You wouldn't think that an Autosave feature would be annoying, but this game manages to do it. If you load from a manual save, the game will constantly halt the game to warn you if you want to overwrite your autosave. There is no option to set a default to this, or to avoid the screen.
• Sequel Displacement: Not this game, but very few knew that Redemption was a sequel to the 2004 title Red Dead Revolver. Those who knew this didn't like when people called the potential third game Red Dead Redemption 2, as it would be the third game in the Red Dead series, not the second game in the Red Dead Redemption series. These fans preferred to use names like "Red Dead 3", "Red Dead (fitting R-word)" etc. Then this game was revealed and was titled Red Dead Redemption 2.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Mexico is recreated to a genuinely surprising degree... but with the exception of El Presidio, none of the towns, settlements or other buildings exist. Considering Rockstar's devotion to details like this and that you can just use the binoculars to look into Mexico, it's odd that there's not even low-poly versions of them. In fact, datamining the unpatched PS4 version reveals that low-poly versions actually exist(ed) in the game files as late as June 2018. However, as Mexico seemingly gets minor upgrades in patches, there's a good chance that the buildings were omitted for time restraints and may be added in later.
  • The landscapes are one of the game's strong points, as is its rendering of snow...except that trees covered in snow tend to look strangely flat and angular like something out of a PS2 game.
  • The game's HDR settings have been frequently criticized, to the point where a patch including more options was added a few months after release. Even with these improved settings, some players still feel turning HDR on does more harm than good, as while colors do improve slightly the game's contrast takes a heavy hit, giving the game an oversaturated, sometimes grey look. For those interested in learning the exact nature of the issues, Digital Foundry did a 2-part series on the subject matter.
• Squick: At random moments in the game, you can see horses unloading their solid waste. And yes, that includes during cutscenes.
• Tainted by the Preview: The fact that a multiplayer mode was announced at the same time as the game had some fans nervous. This is because many felt that Rockstar's previous game, Grand Theft Auto V, suffered because of the multiplayer as its success led to Rockstar breaking its promise to deliver single-player DLC. Since Rockstar keeps putting out new multiplayer content, including some content that was originally intended for single-player like the Doomsday Heist, their promise to give singleplayer was abandoned because of how much money the microtransactions in online were bringing in, making people feel that Rockstar never gave a damn abut the singleplayer mode to begin with, and created the game only to get extra cash. People are afraid the same will happen to the Red Dead series. Not helping matters at all is Take-Two's CEO saying that they want "recurrent consumer spending" in EVERY game from now on.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: There is a group of people who refuse to update the game from their preferred version^note Usually either the release version 1.00 or the 1.15 version for including the PC content and having no major glitches, due to each patch having a bad tendency to break something. 1.14, 1.16, 1.17 and 1.18 have been especially criticized - 1.14 for adding an impressive amount glitches and other issues, and 1.16-1.18 for reintroducing some glitches fixed in 1.15 without seemingly fixing what they claim to fix.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Guarma appears to have been planned to act as a secondary hub, as the island is much larger than it seems and the terrain is largely finished — the normally unreachable areas have animal spawn points and the animal A.I works there^note On the main map animal A.I breaks as soon as they leave the map, meaning the Guarma wildlife is fully intended to spawn there, and unused coding suggests you were originally able to go back to the island in the epilogue. Many who've explored the island with mods and exploits feel that there was a lot of potential for the area, but in the final product said potential is wasted entirely because of how linear, limiting and brief the Guarma segment is.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The game is gorgeous. From the beautiful, colorful graphics to the huge amount of detail in both the environments and character models, the game looks awesome all around.
  • And then the PC release hit, which boasts of the removal of the 30 fps lock in the consoles, along with several enhanced mods by Rockstar released following its initial glitched launch, which is saying something when even the lowest settings look absolutely gorgeous given the proper PC specs.
• Win Back the Crowd: The sheer amount of content and details mentioned in the September previews turned many not interested in the game.

Single-player, # - E

• Accidental Aesop:
  • You may not be able to finish everything you started in life. Some collectibles, plants and animals can only be found in New Austin, so while Arthur can start whatever quest/challenge requires them, he can't finish them without exploits.
  • Once you beat the epilogue, you can do various farming chores to fill a wagon with various animal products, and earn money selling it. Thing is, a full day's worth of chores is worth 8-10 bucks. It's much more profitable to be an absent father/husband who gambles with his (family's) money, goes around robbing and possibly murdering people, or spends his days in the woods hunting very dangerous animals. The only real benefit is the boost in honor for every chore you do. Hard Work Hardly Works, indeed.
  • Robbing people and businesses is one of several things that can lower the player's honor level substantially, but donating money to your camp's till is one of the things that can raise it. This means that you can suffer diminished honor for stealing money, but you can get it back if you give that money to your comrades instead of keeping it for yourself. In other words: stealing is wrong, but doing it to help other people is still much better than doing it for personal gain.
  • Similarly: committing robberies (and various other crimes) during story missions doesn't decrease your honor; you only suffer decreased honor for stealing and killing of your own volition during free play, when you're free to make your own choices instead of following orders from Dutch along with the rest of the gang. This ends up carrying the implication that good people can still be influenced to commit immoral acts as a result of peer pressure and unhealthy relationships, and that those acts reflect less on their moral character than the choices that they make for themselves.
• Accidental Innuendo:
  • The mission where Arthur teaches Jack to fish is full of this. Jack pointing out that something is tugging Arthur's fishing rod is just one example.
  • In the same mission we also have Agent Milton informing Arthur that "there's five thousand dollars for [his] head alone".
  • The scene in the epilogue when Rufus gets bit by a snake while John and Jack are fishing is a tough scene, especially if you haven't played the first game and thus don't know that Rufus will be fine. Understandably, poor Jack is terrified, but when John is trying to suck out the venom, the drama is distracted by undercut when Jack yells "Suck it, Dad! Don't swallow it!"
• Adorkable:
  • While he initially comes off as mildly pathetic, slimy, and jumpy, Kieran's ambient dialogue and actions consist of caring for horses and doing chores and his conversations and Mary-Beth and Karen are absolutely adorable. His fetch quest is just some herbs for the horses and he seems genuinely shocked and touched that you went out of your way to get him what he asked for.
  • Mason is infectiously (somewhat suicidally) enthusiastic about wildlife and his photography and generally comes off as an incredibly endearing nerd.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Herbert Moon from the first game is disliked for his racist attitude, yet you can't help but feel a little sad for him when it's revealed that his racism caused his personal life to fall apart as a result of a Deal with the Devil.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The final showdown with Micah can be this. You're supposed to use dynamite to flush him out so Sadie can get the drop on him but nothing in-game tells you this. But likely as an Anti-Frustration Feature, he eventually moves into position on his own without you having to do anything, and the rest of the "fight" consists little more than a Mexican Standoff that's more about convincing Dutch to shoot Micah before John gets the opportunity to pump him full of lead. As a result, Micah's earlier fight with Arthur may seem harder by comparison as you're required to put more effort.
• Anvilicious:
  • The game pulls no punches when it comes to the awful treatment Native Americans had to go through.
    • Hosea brings up the subject while the gang relocates to Horseshoe Overlook, mentioning that the natives "here" have been horribly mistreated, to which Charles responses by pointing out that it's been happening everywhere, not just in New Hanover.
    • The Arc Villain of Chapter 6 is a corrupt military official trying to provoke the Wapiti tribe into attacking the so the government can seize their land. The guy is shown to be an irredeemable asshole who refuses them their basic human rights and considers their real names to be "silly", showing how he has no respect for their culture. Although he is clearly meant to be a Hate Sink, he still reflects the actual attitude many white Americans had at the time, believing that the native way of life is "savage" and needs to be erased and replaced with Euro-American culture to "save" the natives.
    • Likewise Agent Milton often talks about how much he despises the Native-Americans and wants them eradicated, showing that he's no better then Dutch's gang despite all his talk of maintaining "law and order".
• Arc Fatigue: Beaver Hollow. Many of the objectives consist of little more than attacking the U.S army and/or the Pinkertons over and over again, and the overall toxicity of the Van der Linde gang, combined with Arthur constantly suffering from tuberculosis really dampens the satisfaction of completing any missions you do in the chapter. Then again, that's kinda the point of the chapter: everyone in camp, Arthur included, are absolutely done with Dutch's bullshit and are just pushing along out of survival.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Unshaken", sung by D'Angelo, is absolutely beautiful. A haunting, stripped down, vocal heavy, guitar-backed tune that plays during the gang’s lowest point. Perfectly encapsulating Arthur's thoughts to remain strong after losing so much while making the long trek back to Shady Belle. A reprise of the song, called "Crash of Worlds" by Rocco deLuca, plays in both High and Low Honor endings in which Arthur dies fighting Micah Bell, though depending on the tone, making it a Tear Jerker.
  • Robin Koninsky (who along with her band is played by Postmodern Jukebox), a singer who works in Saint Denis' theater, is quite a good singer and has a number of songs if you visit the theater, including a cover of "Hello! Ma Baby".
  • "Cruel World", sung by Willie Nelson, which kicks off the start of the return to the open world in John Marston's storyline in the post-game chapters, as John decides to try and officially quit the gunslinger life.
  • "My Last Boy", the theme as Arthur and his allies charge down the hill to take on the US Army to save Eagle Flies, which is considered by many to be one of the most memorable scenes in the game.
  • "That's the Way It Is" manages to make Arthur's last ride an even bigger tear jerker than it already was.
  • "Jim Milton Rides, Again?" and "American Venom", both of which play in the Epilogue as John Marston goes One-Man Army, are triumphant remixes of "The Shootist" from the first game.
• Awesome Video Game Levels: Several.
  • "A Quiet Time", where Arthur and Lenny get absolutely shitfaced, resulting in a good dose of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy and Interface Screw. The mission is absolutely hilarious to watch.
  • "Blood Feuds, Ancient and Modern", where the entire gang storms the Braithewaite Manor to rescue Jack. It is easily one of the most epic missions in the game, feeling like it was ripped straight from an epic Hollywood movie, especially with the massive body count that will be accumulated by the end. And it is beyond satisfying.
  • Both "Red Dead Redemption" and "American Venom" for providing memorable climaxes to the game's two story arcs.
    • In the former, Arthur rescues Abigail from the Pinkertons and rides his last ride to tell Dutch who sold the gang out, John returns from Disney Death, they both escape the camp and the law and Arthur dies to his wounds and disease but not before beating the traitorous Micah to an inch of his life. While the exact details of Arthur's last moments depend on his honor, every option results in more or less the same fate.
    • In the latter, John, Sadie and Charles hunt down Micah. The latter two are wounded in battle, so John has to fight his way through a mountaintop full of Micah's flunkies alone while the aforementioned "American Venom" track plays in the background. After the backstabbing bastard is dead, the game ends with John and Abigail getting married. Even better, both Sadie and Charles survive their wounds and move on to live better lives.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Mary Linton, Arthur's former sweetheart. Some think that she's a heartless monster who uses and manipulates Arthur into saving her brother and confronting her father on her behalf. Others think that she's a misunderstood former love interest who clearly wants to be with Arthur as much as he wants to be with her but can't bring herself to run away from everything she's ever known. It's abundantly clear that Mary doesn't want to have to resort to asking Arthur for help and does acknowledge that it's painful for the both of them to dig up old memories, but whether or not she's a genuinely sympathetic character depends on how you view her motivations. There’s also a contingent of people who stress that as a woman in the late nineteenth century, she has no good options and recognize the Deliberate Values Dissonance at play and think it’s unfair to hold her to modern standards.
  • Molly O'Shea. Some fans claim she's an Alpha Bitch who clearly hates not being the center of attention and does practically nothing to help the rest of the gang. Others point to her as a depressed woman who's clearly in over her head and feels justifiably ignored and despised by her lover and the others at camp. There's evidence for both sides, and her "betrayal" in Chapter 6 does nothing to help clarify these feelings.
  • Dutch. Some view him as a misunderstood Robin Hood-type fighting against the rising tide of civilization with his rag-tag family. Others see him as a manipulative bastard who strings Arthur, John, and many other members of the Van der Linde Gang along only to lose control and damn most of them by the end of the game. Other factors (stress, mental illness, Micah's influence) certainly help to sway the public opinion more towards the former, but player's opinions usually depend on how much of those factors, particularly towards the end of the game, justify any of his bad choices and actions. The reason for this is that Rockstar clearly intended to drop hints that point to either interpretation of Dutch being valid, with several pieces of dialogue in-game concerning this very topic. It also doesn't help if you played the first RDR game where, despite the atrocities he commits, R* was clearly leaning more towards making Dutch appear broken-down and more sympathetic than Bill or Javier.
  • Sadie and Charles, while like during the main story, have caused some division over their actions in the epilogue. This is because they convince John to go after Micah, which indirectly causes John's death yet they face no consequences for it. While many at least appreciate Charles's genuinely helpful role, Sadie's character arc is over by this point - she got her revenge in Chapter 6 - so she doesn't really need to even appear, and the fact that most of her appearances in the epilogue consists of her ordering John around on overcomplicated bounty missions doesn't do her any favors. As such, their inclusion is either a nice send-off, or borderline unnecessary.
    • Even before the epilogue, some people take issue with Sadie's reckless, temperamental, impudent, and foolhardy nature, her overly violent tendencies, and her grating voice. It doesn't help that she's a mirror of Micah Bell, one of the most hated characters in the game (although in his case it's intentional).
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The option to upgrade John's tent with a boar rug comes off as this. The other camp upgrades are either for the entire camp to enjoy or for Arthur himself, and given that Arthur and John aren't the closest of friends until chapter 6 there is no story justification for it. And since camp upgrades don't carry over to the epilogue, it's never seen again when John becomes playable. It may be intended for Abigail since Arthur feels bad for her, but the game never explains it^note According to Roger Clark, Abigail was supposedly intended to be a romantic interest for Arthur so the rug could be a remnant from that time, but unless Rockstar explains things it's just speculation.
  • While some random events can come off as this, Sonny's encounter, despite the implications, never comes up outside of one camp discussion with Bill. This one is seen as particularly odd (and slightly divisive), since while the game doesn't shy away from Arthur's inner thoughts, conflicting loyalties, trauma and terminal illness, the implied rape is brushed off almost immediately.
• Bizarro Episode: The entirety of the Chapter 2 mission "A Quiet Time" is essentially this. After hearing the report that Micah has been arrested and imprisoned in Strawberry, Arthur is told to take Lenny to Smithfield's Saloon in Valentine to calm down with a beer or two. They end up drinking way more than two beers however, with both characters getting completely wasted. This results in the player being treated to a nonsensical Drunken Montage that includes a Bait-and-Switch Bar Brawl-turned line dance, Arthur and Lenny slapping each other, and at one point Arthur hallucinating that everyone is Lenny. The two of them then wake up the next day completely hungover and only mention it a few times in passing. Because of the mind screwiness throughout the whole mission, many people consider it to be one of the best missions in the game, even if it doesn't advance the plot much.
• Broken Aesop: The game rather rightfully goes out of its way to portray Native Americans as realistically as possible to make up for the previous game's rather unfortunate depiction of them. Then you find the O'Driscolls, who lean on all of the offensive stereotypes the first game used when portraying Irish people before, except even harder this time.
• Broken Base:
  • Which half of the game is the better, Chapters 1-4 or 5-8? On one hand, the first half has a happier atmosphere and better mission design, but doesn't really contribute that much to the lore and spends most of the time Developing Doomed Characters - on the other hand, the second half adds drama, leads up to the first game and sees Arthur go through major Character Development, but the mission design takes a hit and the epilogue is seen as a Disappointing Last Level. Interestingly, players who either skipped or didn't care about the first game tend to lean towards the former while fans of the first game lean towards the latter.
  • The games tries giving the cutscenes a more cinematic feel with a smaller aspect ratio, which includes horizontal black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Some feel this adds to the experience, while others feel they're distracting instead - PC users quickly made mods to remove them. Then there's the fact that Rockstar openly boasted about deciding on the change mid-way through production and how they chose to re-record every cutscene to fit within the smaller image, which some feel was just unnecessary regardless of their feelings on the end product, and that their time could have been better used on polishing other parts of the game.
  • John being made the main character in the epilogue. While John is near-universally beloved, whether or not his two chapters measure up to Arthur's story is hotly debated, especially given the contrast between the explosive end of Chapter 6, and the large amount of mundane busy work included in John's story. There are also a lot of people that would in theory be fine with John taking over, but are dissatisfied with the botched version of John that is playable.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Colm's status as a Cutscene Boss is mitigated by his facial expression when he realizes that his escape plan has been foiled and that he is going to die.
  • Former gunslinger Emmett Granger spent his entire appearance bragging of all the people he's killed, being an unpleasant Jerkass towards Arthur and making the latter shovel up pig manure for him. It's extremely satisfying once Arthur has had enough and showers Granger with said pig manure before proceeding to unload his gun into the asshole's body.
  • After slowly suffering Sanity Slippage and becoming a worse and worse person, becoming more and more insufferable and eventually abandoning Arthur to die, Arthur (in the "help John escape" ending) gets Dutch "I have a speech for everything" van der Linde to finally shut the fuck up! Dutch pops in after the fight between Micah and Arthur to try and end it, still in the Van der Linde character, still with his usual demeanor of superiority; Arthur shuts all of that down with eight words. “I gave you all I had... I did.” All Dutch can manage is a weak “I...I...” before slowly walking away, clearly defeated.
  • After spending years getting away with selling out the gang to the Pinkertons, to see Micah Bell finally get what's coming to him in the epilogue is as absolutely satisfying as it is awesome, to say the least.
• Character Perception Evolution: At the time of release, Sadie Adler was originally beloved by fans due to her being a tough, no-nonsense Action Girl who was capable of kicking just as much ass as the rest of the men in the Van der Linde gang, which was a nice change of pace compared to the more passive roles that most of the women in the franchise have had. As time went by, however, opinions of her became more polarized as she attracted a lot of criticism for her Ax-Crazy Leeroy Jenkins Jerkass attitude that often causes more trouble for the gang than it solves (traits that ironically mirror Micah Bell in some respects, but unlike Sadie, you're supposed to dislike Micah). Her involvement with John's life in the epilogue is similarly disliked since she essentially strings John along on several bounty hunter missions, and her decision to let John help her track down and kill Micah despite fully knowing the danger it posed really alienated fans, who saw her as a Karma Houdini that essentially doomed John to die at the FBI's hands while she got off scot-free with a fortune despite her selfishness and recklessness. Though Sadie isn't outright hated by any means, her actions throughout the game make her far more of a Base-Breaking Character than before, with some wishing for a DLC where she was killed or arrested by John sometime between the games.
• Complete Monster:
  • Micah Bell III is a deranged but clever member of the Van der Linde gang and an informant for the Pinkerton Detective Agency. At first appearing to be nothing more than a cruel thug, he shows a glimpse of his true colors when arrested for murder in Strawberry; after being broken out, Micah forgoes a clean getaway to go on a killing spree, culminating in the murder of an old friend and the man's wife, all to get his favorite gun back, leaving half the town dead. Micah takes advantage of Dutch's eroding sanity to commit more immoral and destructive acts, and sells the gang out to the Pinkertons, nearly killing everyone in the gang, including the non-combatants. When exposed, Micah kills Miss Grimshaw and, depending on the player's actions, may personally murder Arthur Morgan as well. In epilogue, Micah is running a gang of his own, and wanted for murdering an entire family. When confronted by John Marston, Micah threatens to go after John's family too. A bloodthirsty maniac who only cares about winning and living, Micah is every negative stereotype of the savagery of the Van der Linde gang given life.
  • Leviticus Cornwall is a corrupt businessman who embodies the worst excesses of American capitalism. Forcing his workers into nigh subhuman conditions, Cornwall has his fingers in almost every corrupt pie imaginable. Backing Alberto Fussar's horrid regime, Cornwall keeps the people of Guarma in torturous bondage to profit while laundering Fussar's reputation. Making a corrupt bargain with Colonel Henry Favours, Cornwall plots to see the Wapiti Tribe ethnically cleansed so he can claim their land. With countless dead in his quest for power, Cornwall is a man who not only kills and robs, but annihilates everything in his path.
  • Colm O'Driscoll, head of the O'Driscoll gang, is a notorious criminal and the arch-foe of Dutch van der Linde. A sadist who relishes pain in others, Colm uses his many, many gang members as disposable Cannon Fodder while wreaking a trail of murder and rape across the West, engaging in much of it himself. When first encountered, his thugs have destroyed the Adler ranch, killing Sadie Adler's husband and raping her—a wholly unique practice for Colm and the O'Driscolls. When Kieran Duffy leaves the gang for the van der Lindes, Colm later gruesomely tortures and murders him. Responsible for the death of Dutch's beloved Annabelle in revenge for Dutch killing his brother, Colm flatly admits he never cared for his brother at all, gleefully summing himself up as "I been a bad man!"
  • Alberto Fussar is the dictator of Guarma who turns the entire little island nation into a sugar plantation to satisfy the robber barons and his own endless greed. Keeping his people enslaved, Fussar regularly works them to death and murders anyone who might even think of resisting or striking. With a dearth of workers, Fussar secretly brings in slaves from America or Haiti to work until their bodies give out.
  • Chapter 6: Colonel Henry Favours is an elderly US Army commander facing retirement at the end of a long and completely undistinguished career. Seeking to erase his deserved reputation for cowardice and incompetence, Favours realizes a way to win glory. Stationed as the liaison to the Wapiti Lakota tribe, Favours begins to attempt to antagonize the tribe by having them assaulted, sending their children to reform schools, burning down their sacred shrines, and taking their horses so they cannot hunt, dooming them to starvation. Favours even withholds vital vaccines and medicine to kill their children and infirm, hoping to provoke them into a war so he can gain the "glory" of wiping them out and taking their supposedly oil-rich lands (which later turn out to have no oil deposits at all). Favours also provokes an attack at supposed peace talks and frames the good-hearted Captain Monroe for treason to execute him, willing to stop at nothing to murder an innocent tribe of natives simply to enjoy his undeserved glory.
• Contested Sequel: Ignoring the gameplay-related issues discussed under "Both Modes" folder, some fans (long-time ones in particular) have some issues with the main story - while usually seen as good as a stand-alone story, it has divided players on whether it's a good prequel. In particular, the liberal use of Remember the New Guy?, the changes made to pre-existing characters and the occasional retcons of previous lore have proven divisive.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • Any paranormal entity that appears in the game tends to feed the curiosity of the players for obvious reasons: A humanoid creature in a laboratory, UFOs, a vampire, a ghost woman...
  • Some of the most twisted and disturbing characters in the game such as the Murfree Brood, the Skinners Brothers, the Aberdeens and Edmund Lowry Jr. have had an approval for how insanely terrifying they are. The fact that their missions are incredibly scary—even by the standards of the game—certainly helps.
• Cry for the Devil: Surprisingly of all people, this game reveals that Bill Williamson had one hell of a Trauma Conga Line before he became the Ax-Crazy monster John faced in the first game. From the bits and pieces of his backstory that we hear, he is a Shell-Shocked Veteran who had to experience some awful shit while fighting the Native Americans, for his troubles he he was discharged from the army by his supposedly corrupt superior. He had a rough year or two before Dutch came along and gave him a reason to keep going. Then in a botched robbery he has to witness at least 3 of his gang members die (if none had already died up until that point). The gang also constantly reminds him of his failures despite his best efforts to pull his own weight. His father lost his mind to dementia and he fears that he's inherited that from, so he's basically aware that he's going crazy due to a genetic disease. Finally he witnesses Dutch's descent into madness and the deaths of most of his gang members, including Lenny and Sean who were at that point in their early 20's at most. This is all on top of the implication that Bill is gay or bi in a time when his existence was effectively a capital crime. Bill may be an absolute monster of a man in the first game, but after everything the guy has been through it's hard not consider his death in the first game as a Mercy Kill.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Cougars, bears, and wolves are back only this time, they can be encountered as early as Chapter 2. Have fun being overpowered by packs of wolves, sneaky cougars, and a giant bear that can practically oneshot you.
  • Introduced in this game is the alligator, which combine the sneakiness of cougars, the power of bears, and are even more numerous than wolves. They live exclusively in the swamps and don’t move on land, which may seem like an upside, but if you are on a horse and get too close, it will buck you down, allowing the alligators to slowly come over to you and one shot you. And have we mentioned you can't go ten steps off the roads without stumbling into one? Or that there are several side quests that need you to traipse through the swamps hunting for dozens of collectibles?
  • Panthers are also introduced in this game and they're even worse than cougars. They will always one-shot you no matter how much health you have and can sometimes not even appear on the minimap until it's too late. If you're trying to hunt them, prepare to be the hunted. Thankfully, they only appear in one specific area.
• Designated Villain:
  • Sheriff Gray and his deputies. While he is a grossly incompetent drunk, after finding out that his new temporarily deputized citizens he hired were an outlaw gang that burned his family's tobacco fields and murdered dozens of his men, he can't be blamed for ambushing them and killing Sean. Yet Arthur, Micah and Bill have the nerve to be outraged that they were betrayed by the same family that they have been manipulating.
  • To a lesser extent, Agent Milton and the Pinkerton Detective Agency. While Milton is undoubtedly smug, unpleasant, brutal and unstable, and the Pinkertons have historically been morally dubious with their history of suppressing labour strikes, their cause is a noble one: trying to stop an outlaw gang from murdering and robbing across the country.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • While the cause of Dutch's declining mental state throughout the game (and into the first game) is up for intense debate, there is no hiding his paranoia, impulsiveness, narcissism, and delusions of grandeur. You can see it early on when he out of the blue tells Arthur that he knows he will betray him in early Chapter 2, long before he really loses control.
  • Arthur's self-deprecating nature, grumpy personality, pessimist attitude, and occasional bursts of anger might be indicative clinical depression (then known as Melancholia) but it's never said outright. And this is before he gets TB.
  • Micah is quite likely a sociopath: He lacks empathy, is manipulative, and back stabs anyone without a second thought. The player can learn in Chapter 6 that he once tried to lure Jack, a little boy, away from camp, implying that he might be a pedophile. His hostile reaction to Cain also led to some suggesting that he has cynophobia.
• Die for Our Ship: Hoo boy, is Mary Linton a victim of this, given how fans prefer to ship Arthur with many other characters. It doesn’t help that fans saw the relationship itself as manipulative on Mary’s part, with Mary continuously asking Arthur for favors to help her with her family troubles and leads him on with hopes of restoring their relationship.
• Disappointing Last Level:
  • Many players have criticized Chapters 5 and 6 for being the point where the game starts to bog down. The former for mostly taking place on Guarma where you're deprived of most of your equipment and can barely free roam, meaning that players will likely try to finish it ASAP, while the latter is criticized for its story missions being repetitive in nature.
  • Arthur also contracts tuberculosis near the end of chapter 5 and you're forced to spend the remainder of his story (which could take up to a whopping 10-15 more hours or so) with both a large permanent hit to your stat recovery and having to watch this formerly proud man slowly and painfully waste away and inch towards death. As at least one critic has pointed out, while this may make for a very gripping narrative, it really does kill the desire to further explore the world and arguably makes you just want to end the story already. Who wants to hunt legendary animals or start stranger missions while Arthur is visibly emaciated and dying?
  • A common sentiment (albeit not a universal one) is that the final region the player visits in the game - New Austin - is very underutilized, despite occupying a noticeable chunk of the game's world map. To wit: Only one main story mission (partially) takes place there, no stranger missions require you to go there, it has less random encounters than the other states, and only Tumbleweed offers most of the standard town services - Thieves Landing is a gang hideout, MacFarlane's Ranch is just a private ranch, Rathskeller Fork is abandoned, and most damningly thanks to a cholera outbreak Armadillo just has general store and a saloon, the latter not even offering much in the way of amenities (i.e. no food, rooms to rent, and activities like poker, just beer and whiskey). This has lead many players to question why the area is locked down for most of the game other than Fake Longevity.^{Note (Spoilers)}Datamining the game files suggests they wanted to have the region open from the start but ran out of time before they could finish both 1899 and 1907 versions, forcing them to combine their assets to a single version and use it for both, while locking it up in 1899 to not make it obvious the area never changes
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • You could call the main characters Draco's gang. While pretty much everyone in the gang is likable, they're still dangerous criminals, and by the end of the game the number of dead lawmen the gang has left in their wake must be in the thousands even without random violence in free-roam. While the story does focus on the growing violent instincts of some members of the gang, many missions require you to murder lawmen by the dozen; with this in mind, Ross's treatment of John in the first game is much more understandable, though still dickish.
  • Dutch in particular gets this, as many players seem to blame his Sanity Slippage entirely on the Saint Denis trolley incident and Micah's influence, ignoring that he's been making bad decisions since before the game started (i.e. the Blackwater ferry); he shot an innocent woman for no explained reason during the ferry heist, and he's shown to be paranoid as early as Horseshoe Overlook. While the head trauma certainly didn't help, the game presents more than enough evidence that he hadn't been mentally all there even before the ferry heist.
  • Even Micah gets this in a minor way — there are a ton of theories about him not being the rat, although part of this can be explained by some awkward writing and lack of payoff^note The game suggests that the gang had a rat in chapters 1-4, but Micah only became one in chapters 5-6. It can be explained as bad luck, predictability and the law using psychological warfare to cause infighting within the gang, however. There is also little signs of him being a rat in Chapter 6 itself, due to the missions and heists being oddly successful.. According to these theories, it either really was Molly and that Milton lied to the already dying Arthur for some reason, or that Abigail and/or John were behind it for vague reasons (See Ron The Death Eater Below).
• Ending Fatigue: The game has two epilogue chapters from John's perspective after Arthur dies, containing perhaps 10 to 15 hours of more story content, longer than the entire story of many games. The epilogue covers John's attempts to lead a peaceful life and build the ranch at Beecher's Hope after an eight year Time Skip, but — while it does have some touching moments between John, his family, and several surviving gang members — it doesn't have the kind of drama of the game's six main chapters. The early epilogue missions in particular can be extremely frustrating because of how slow and uneventful they are. Arthur's story ends with a great deal of action and emotion, and almost immediately afterward, the player is essentially required to sit quietly and complete errands that feel far more like a tutorial than something you need to do 80% of the way through a game. Even when John has to fight, it's only against generic thugs, gangs, and bounty hunters until the final mission, when the player finally gets to kill Micah.
  Yahtzee Croshaw: Saturday afternoon, I was like, "Oh boy! I finally reached the epilogue! Maybe I'll actually have Sunday free to relax on!" Eight hours of additional story later, "Fuck me, my definitions are out of date! I had no idea that 'epilogue' now means 'entire second game'!"
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Sadie Adler has gained several pre-release fans for being an Action Girl who is One of the Boys, and her interactions with Arthur are seen as Heartwarming Moments. Fans have even floated the idea of the next Red Dead game continuing Sadie's story from her perspective, and let's face it, she would be a fantastic choice for Rockstar's first ever female protagonist.
  • Charles Smith is also beloved by fans for his Nice Guy personality and loyalty to Arthur, while at the same time being badass.
  • Sean MacGuire is also pretty popular, especially among Irish fans, for his being such a Motor Mouth and Fun Personified. Players were left devastated when his death comes out of left field.
  • The lion you encounter in the side mission "He’s British, of Course" for being such an unexpected twist that many were upset that there was no way you could save the lion or at least skin it to create an outfit.
  • Mr. Bullard is probably the best example, since he's only seen in a single mission yet is universally beloved by the fandom due to his charming wit. Even Arthur admits he "kinda liked him" and, like many players, was a bit torn up by his unfortunate death.
  • Returning in the prequel, Uncle is much jollier than the grouch he was in the first game. His interactions with both Arthur and John, plus his lumbago, provide the more hilarious moments of the game.
  • Lenny is beloved by the fans for his close friendship with Arthur, not to mention their drunken shenanigans together in "A Quiet Time", considered to be among the funniest moments in the game. His death was shocking to many players.
  • Sister Calderon, while a minor character in the first game, has one of the most moving scenes counselling Arthur about his impending death, and telling him to do good with the time he has left.
  • Rather fittingly, Black Belle is well-remembered among the Stranger missions, being the only legendary gunslinger who doesn't mess with Arthur, and provides a pretty fun shootout with bounty hunters. Her theme music definitely helps.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Before release, there was a popular theory that John Marston would become the Player Character at some point of the story after Arthur... disappears. Depending on the timing, John may or may not have started his path to redeeming himself yet and he canonically didn't spend much time with his family before the first game so both karmic paths could still fit his character. Further evidence for this came in the form of an otherwise accurate leak from 2016 that had info which later proved out to be true, the fact that Marston in some screenshots holds his gear in the exact same place as Arthur does^note So they may share animations if John becomes playable. Note that as of this writing, no other character shares this trait with Arthur and the fact that many people wanted to keep playing as John in the epilogue of RDR1. This was proven correct; John becomes the protagonist in the Playable Epilogue following Arthur's death. A large portion of the world from the first game is included as well, with playable areas in West Elizabeth.
  • The gameplay trailer has a brief clip of Arthur saving a stranger from a bear trap. The guy looks suspiciously like Theodore Roosevelt, who once (supposedly) stepped into a bear trap while hunting. This raised some interesting theories, but it turned out he's just a random hunter. (There is a Theodore Roosevelt analogue in the Red Dead Redemption universe named Thaddeus Waxman who is referenced in several newspaper articles and even appears on a cigarette card, but other than that he has no role in the game).
  • The unmarked missing princess mystery has inspired a lot of these, especially after someone asked Rockstar if she actually was in the game, something they answered with a Shrug of God. Theories range from claims that one of the Van Horn's saloon's prostitutes looks like her, to claims that the fertility statues you can find belonged to a couple who kidnapped her to get a child, moved to New Austin and possibly died in the cholera outbreak.
  • The Housers' offhand comment about the removal of about 5 hours of content has fans guessing just what and how much was cut. Popular suggestions are playable segments in New Austin as Arthur has Dummied Out content there and the official guidebook mentions the book Jack left behind in a hurry is in New Austin both heavily imply he was meant to go there at one point, another one involves getting more info about Arthur's dead girlfriend and son (A theory suggested by the Missing Trailer Shot of Arthur walking away from 2 graves, Roger Clark mentioning Isaac was meant to die in the intro and some cut voice lines about Eliza) and another theory guesses that the semi-Plot Hole of Micah becoming a rat only after Guarma despite the gang being sold out before that would have been explained with someone else who ended being merged to Micah in the final product (although it's also hinted that the gang's pre-Guarma were simply the result of the gang failing to keep a low profile and the Pinkertons being clever and tenacious.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: A common theory is that the gang is a metaphor for Rockstar, which is not helped by Leopold Strauss sharing his name with Take-Two's CEO. Some even see his loansharking practice as a metaphor about microtransactions (for being predatory, making the gang look bad and even indirectly killing Arthur and causing the gang's downfall). Dutch is often seen as a stand-in for one of the Housers (usually Sam), Micah is sometimes a metaphor of Rockstar's sudden focus on Online (which alienates a lot of long-time fans) and the news of Dan Houser (Rockstar's main writer) leaving Rockstar led to many theories of Arthur being his Author Avatar, especially since his departure is rumored to be because of an unidentified illness.
• Evil Is Cool: Although Micah Bell is not intended to get this effect, he has a fanbase who enjoy the character for his badassery, cool weapons, well-groomed gunslinger image, and the fact that he's exceptionally skilled, competent and talented at shooting, especially in the gang's gunfights. The fact that he's considered one of the best Rockstar antagonists thanks to Peter Blomquist’s performance certainly helps. In fact, he's less hated than Edgar Ross and it's not difficult to find in forums or in YouTube comments people who really like Micah despite his awful actions.

Single-player, F - O

• Fandom-Specific Plot
  • Authors almost always find a way to spare Arthur at the end of chapter 6, often by having another character nurse him back to health or just eliminating the tuberculosis plot thread altogether.
  • Rewrites of the "Blessed are the Peacemakers" mission with a more realistic depiction of Arthur's recovery are very popular. Occasionally he gets rescued by another character rather than escaping on his own, especially in shipping fics.
  • Exploring possibly the biggest What If? of Arthur's backstory: what if Isaac Morgan had lived? His mother, Eliza's, survival is optional.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • How would the surviving members of the gang react to John's death in 1911? Since Landon Ricketts training Jack was never confirmed and appears to be a case of Fanon, it's possible that Sadie and/or Charles trained Jack instead. Maybe the Time Skip from 1911 to 1914 wasn't as bleak as it once seemed to be. On the other side of the spectrum, since they obviously never appeared in I, Jack could be avenging them as well.
  • For that matter, the Marstons spent ~8 years in Yukon; How did that go? Did their unseen daughter die there, since we never see her grave anywhere?
  • Furthermore, what were the surviving members of the gang (such as Charles, Sadie, Javier, Bill, and Dutch) doing in the eight year time gap? Why is Charles in Saint Denis when John and Uncle find him? How did Javier escape to Mexico after being wanted there for the murder of a high-ranking political official? How did Bill and Javier ultimately break with Dutch, and what was Dutch doing on Mount Hagen?
• Fanon:
  • It's typically accepted that Arthur was canonically High Honor and died from tuberculosis after spending his final moments trying to save John and fistfighting Micah.
  • The majority of fans believe the O'Driscolls gang-raped Sadie and kept her as a Sex Slave after murdering her husband; it's implied but never confirmed in the game outright.
  • It seems to be generally agreed that John & Abigail's unseen daughter died in Yukon sometime between 1899 and 1907, as this would explain why her grave never appears in the first game.
• Fanon Discontinuity: A minor example, but some players feel that the version of New Austin (and to a lesser extent, southern West Elizabeth) seen in the epilogue is not representative of what it actually looked like in 1907, due to how much the region would have to change in just 4 years between the games. Since some signs in-game and in the files suggest that the version used in the final game was meant for 1899 instead of 1907^note No grave has a date-of-death after 1898, and the game files mention shops and services meant for Thieves Landing, this belief has some basis to it.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content:
  • Several people feel this about the game's map, which was noticeably compressed from the 2016 leaked version - while the final map is not necessarily bad, the original had a much larger Ambarino^note The most decried change being how many alternate paths to the snowy areas were cut, making the whole area feel like a dead end, Cumberland Forest and Roanoke Ridge, the Fridge Logic-rising landmass opposite Saint Denis was not there, and Thieves Landing was seemingly meant to be an actual town instead of a a hideout.
  • The island of Guarma was originally meant to be much smaller but fully explorable with unique animals, trinkets, landmarks and at least one stranger quest. Thanks to the shoehorned-in feeling of the final version with its Permanently Missable Content and No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom gameplay, many people have admitted to feeling that the original "Guama" version of the island with its Cowboy-Uncharted treasure seeking, hidden cave camp and tropical wildlife sounds much more interesting and fun than the final version.
  • Pre-release screenshots, menu images and even one cutscene show 1907 John Marston with his signature hairstyle, which is replaced by a black recolor of Arthur's in actual gameplay. Once the PC version came out, mods that give him his iconic look back followed soon after. To a lesser extent, this also applies to the small changes to his Iconic Outfit (which somewhat bizarrely is available in its beta design in Online).
• Fountain of Memes: A lot of Dutch’s lines in the game — and in particular those involving plans, money, faith, or Tahiti — have become a source of jokes that players like to repeatedly quote in just about every forum and video related to him. Some have even taken to calling him "Dutch Plan der Linde".
• Genius Bonus:
  • Eavesdropping dialogue from Uncle in the gang’s camp at chapter three has him mentioning the United States going to war with the Phillipines. This nod is a reference to a fairly obscure conflict known as the Phillipine-American War, or Phillipine Insurrection.
  • During the mission "Arcadia for Amateurs IV", wildlife photographer Albert Mason explains his motivation for wanting to take pictures of alligators is because they're in danger of going extinct, and that he hopes his photographs will inspire people to support conservation acts. For players who live in states where alligators are common (or those familiar with their near ubiquity in the misadventures of Florida Man) this might sound preposterous. But alligators were critically endangered, and were listed as such in 1967 under a precursor law to the Endangered Species Act. It was only through such conservation efforts that alligators were brought Back from the Brink.
  • John uses the alias "Rip Van Winkle" to avoid revealing his name to Agent Milton. It just so happens that the character whose name he is borrowing is Dutch-American.
  • You can hunt Carolina Parakeets in this game and there is a limited amount. Around the early 1900s is where the real life species were extinct in the wild due to excessive hunting.
  • Arthur's Welsh heritage is only mentioned in passing and he doesn't seem to be in touch with it at all (understandable considering he was orphaned young), however its possible his parents named him after King Arthur who is a beloved figure in Wales but is usually thought of as English.
  • J.J. Riggins Magic Lantern Show may seem like something fabricated for the game, but these types of shows actually existed and, depending on what show is playing, mimics a certain subgenre of these shows.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The duel against Emmett Granger is actually easier than against any of the other Legendary Gunslingers or any regular gun-wielding Joe Schmoe that challenge you to one because of a bug. For one, he makes no effort to throw off your aim (Flaco quickly sidesteps as he draws while Billy takes a knee when he draws). Secondly, he attacks by throwing a knife, which obviously has a longer travel time than a bullet. The bug part is that, as long as he is killed before his knife connects, even if an inch away from hitting Arthur, it will not result in a Mutual Kill as the knife is seemingly tied to Granger's model and will veer off-track as his body falls to the ground. This is NOT the case with any of the gun-wielding duelists. Once their gun fires, Arthur is as good as dead, even if it results in a Mutual Kill.
  • There is a glitch in a loot box hidden in the Sheriff's office in the town of Limpany, whereby if the player follows the correct instructions, they can get an infinite number of gold bars as their inventory would allow. Not only that, it's located extremely close to your first camp, meaning that you can exploit this and get rich early on in the game. This glitch is patched by the time of the 1.03 update patch.
    • Similar to this is a glitched loot box hidden in a tree stump in Mattock Pond, which contains a stack of bills worth $20 that can be looted infinitely.
    • Also, in the graveyard directly behind Shady Belle is a loot box that respawns a large jewelry bag (worth $50) and a $20 bill pile every time you load the game.
  • The game has a profanity checker when naming horses, meaning you can't give your horse a swear word as a name, though leaving the name blank also causes the profanity checker to stop you with a generic "You can't leave the name blank" error message. One player found that the game's profanity checker recognizes the name of Larry Cook, a notorious anti-vaccine advocate, as profanity.
  • The mission "Angelo Bronte, a Man of Honor" had a sadly patched glitch that, if exploited correctly, actually allowed Arthur to travel to Blackwater and New Austin, something that never happens in-game.
  • Another bug that players tend to run into is at the end of Jeremiah Compson's Stranger questline, where Arthur has the option of killing him, causing him to fall into the fire in front of him and his corpse to catch alight. Which will continuously relight when the player tries to loot him even after the corpse has been charred.
  • If you toss several molotov cocktails next to a bath tub, then have a bath until you die of burning, your character will respawn without wearing any cloth. Have fun doing a Full-Frontal Assault.
  • There was a glitch in Saint Denis where two random horses can spawn. If the player constantly reloads the game near that spot, a different breed of horse will appear every time. This allows players to get rare or expensive breeds of horses such as the Arabian or Missouri Fox Trotter as early as Chapter 2. This glitch has been patched as of Update 1.03.
  • There is also more obscure version of the aforementioned horse glitch whereby players lasso NPCs off their horses. This results in said NPC mounting a different horse from the one they were on before, allowing a rare horse breed to potentially appear.
  • If real, an audio glitch occasionally causes characters to speak with wrong voices. For example, men may speak with female voices or vice versa. The glitch became famous because not only can it cause Arthur or John to speak with what sounds like Adult Jack Marston's voice, the lines are brand new and patches have seemingly added more. There's a possibility that the spoiler lines belong to an NPC, however.
  • Not a glitch as much an unintended side-effect of scripting; the second part of Marko Dragic's mission chain automatically causes heavy rainfall when you approach it. As such, not starting the mission causes the northern parts of Roanoke Ridge to have almost constant rain. Some players deliberately don't start the mission because of this.
  • The Vomit Glitch, which prevents fall damage. If you use an item that makes Arthur vomit and get him close to an edge, he will start vomitting while as he is falling, and won't take damage after the animation ends.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Earlier in the game, Arthur comes across a farmer who is starting a charitable organization in New Hanover while already in the final stages of TB, and towards the end, Arthur can do the same thing to help others all the while dying from the same disease he contracted earlier. Over a year later, Rockstar would donate the revenue from both the online versions of this game and GTA V to COVID-19 relief from April till the end of May.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Red Dead Redemption 2 aspires to be a highly realistic, immersive Western-world where the world keeps going on around your character even if you remain idle as NPCs are given distinct behavior to simulate actual life. It all sound familiar? Not to mention that Steven Ogg, who played Trevor Philips in Rockstar's previous game, is on the aforementioned show.
  • Before release, people didn't think Arthur would be nearly as interesting as John, and he was seen as a Replacement Scrappy. Post-release, John is a downplayed Replacement Scrappy. To add even more to this, many have pointed out that a common reaction to the first game's ending was "I want to play as John, not Jack" and here it is "I want to play as Arthur, not John".
  • There's a character model of a caveman in the game files, but no-one's been able to find in the game proper — a large amount of players speculate he's frozen in ice somewhere in Ambarino. What I wanna know is where's the caveman? Is he frozen in there, and is he the sheriff?
• Hollywood Pudgy: No matter how fat you try and make him, Arthur just gets wider and a double chin, so he seems more stocky than fat. Justified, since the Wild West's conditions were so tough that it would be impossible to survive if straight up fat, if you were even lucky enough to get that much food in the first place. Haven't you noticed that there are almost no fat people in the game (aside from Micah's, Uncle's, and Pearson's beer bellies)?
• Ho Yay:
  • Among other moments, Hosea explicitly refers to himself and Dutch as being Arthur's parents by calling themselves and Arthur "the curious couple and their unruly son." Dutch doesn't object to Hosea implying, even jokingly, that they're a couple.
    • If the player chooses to have Arthur antagonize Dutch in camp, one of the lines he can pull is, "Everyone seeing you and Hosea reading."
    • During Sean's return party, the player can find Dutch and Hosea conversing away from the others, and Dutch can be seen resting his hand on Hosea's◊ several times.
    • The two can be seen holding hands again in an out of bounds cutscene as well.
  • The wholesome bromance between Arthur and Albert Mason is undeniable and adorable. Or between John and Albert.
    • Ditto for the relationship between Algernon Wasp and Arthur or John. Algernon even affectionately calls John 'James', as he believes his name is Jim Milton.
  • And then there's of course the scene where Châtenay, the French painter, makes out with Arthur in public. Arthur...is indifferent towards it. You can also do his quest as John if so desired. Yes, he gets kissed too.
  • There's some moments between Arthur and John as well, even if the game likes to remind us immediately afterwards that they're like brothers.
  • Charles and Arthur have a decent amount of chemistry, especially towards the end of the main story. Even most of Arthur's antagonize dialogue is wondering why someone like Charles would waste his time with the likes of them. It's actually one of the most popular ships in the entire series! Not to mention Charles and John in the epilogue...
  • Nigel, the Englishman who is searching for his friend Gavin, gives off this sort of vibe with some of his dialogue.
• Hype Backlash: Only natural given how much hype and praise the game has gotten. While the game has been lauded for its presentation and storytelling, some feel this resulted in a game that is too slow-paced and sometimes frustrating to actually play (see Scrappy Mechanic below for some examples).
• Iron Woobie: Poor Arthur Morgan just can't catch a break. He sacrificed the chance to live a normal life and have a family with Mary, having already lost a lover and son before. He loses more and more of his friends (including his mentor and best friend), and discovers that he's come down with a fatal disease. He is subsequently abandoned by Dutch, realizing he had just wasted his whole life constantly screwing up for a man who is never loyal in return. Despite all that, he still pushes on to the very end and ultimately dies at peace with himself.
• Interrupting Meme: "I want to pick some Ginseng..." Said by Rains Fall cutting off Arthur as he tells the story about how he had a son and one day went back to them to find them murdered by robbers. It's the only time in the game that Arthur will talk about this, frustrating fans who wanted to hear him finish. Naturally, it became one of these.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One complaint among some players is that this game's story is very similar to the first, where it focuses on one main character until he's killed, and they are replaced by a different character in the game's epilogue. However, some feel that the ending of this game (The Ending Fatigue and similarity notwithstanding) is handled better than the first game's. While John's death came out of nowhere and his replacement was a stubborn teenager with plenty of Wangst who didn't even appear until the final 10 missions of the game, Arthur's slow death feels more thought out and his replacement has not only been an important character with his own Character Development, he's also John Goddamn Marston, who already has a massive fanbase.
• It Was His Sled: It's supposed to be a pretty big spoiler, but now it's fairly common knowledge that Arthur contracts TB and dies in the end. Additionally, some of those who don't know of the previous plot point, know that John is playable.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Bill Williamson, who comes off as far more sympathetic than he was in the first game. Before joining Dutch's gang, he was dishonorably discharged from the army and lost his father to dementia, which he fears he may have inherited. During one campfire chat, he sounds genuinely broken up when talking about how Dutch gave him a new purpose in life. He tries his best to pull his weight in the gang, but everyone brings up his failures every time. Sadly, by Red Dead Redemption, he's lost all of his sympathetic qualities, becoming just as nasty as Micah.
  • Javier Escuella, who would later become a sleazy Dirty Coward, is presented here as suave, friendly and steadfast to the gang. Starving after being forced to flee Mexico, Dutch took Javier in and earned his Undying Loyalty. Then the gang starts to fall apart, he watches Hosea die in a botched bank robbery and he is captured and abused by soldiers when they are stranded on Guarma. This further soldifies his loyalty to Dutch to the point where he even betrays John and Arthur.
  • Dutch himself qualifies as his Sanity Slippage becomes apparent. Towards the end of the game, he's starting to cross lines he wouldn't do before, such as murdering people needlessly or abandoning both John and Arthur to save his own skin. However, at the same time, you can see why he's full of anger as his gang moves from one disaster to the next under his flawed leadership, losing his closest friend, John and Arthur's increasing suspicion towards him, with the corrupting influence of Micah not helping matters.
  • Molly O'Shea. Sure, she may be an Alpha Bitch who can be insufferable to the rest of the gang, but you can't help but feel a bit bad for her if you take time to see how life is like for her in camp. She's often neglected and cheated on by Dutch who refuses to take her seriously, and neither does the rest of the gang. There's also her sorry drunken state where she fesses up being the traitor in a desperate cry for Dutch's attention, only to be gunned down by Susan Grimshaw and labelled as a traitor in death. What's worse is that it's revealed that she wasn't the traitor at all, meaning that she just died a pointless death.
  • Reverend Swanson is a belligerent drunk who spends the entire game moping around in camp. But he lost his priesthood and his family after getting addicted to morphine and heroin and often speaks on his ruined life, even wishing that God had killed him.
  • Leopold Strauss is a heartless loan shark who knowingly preys on the poor, but had a horrible life back in Austria with his sister being sold into servitude and lost his uncle immediately after coming to America. In the final chapter, he becomes a Nervous Wreck painfully aware of the gang's demise but is ignored and dismissed by everyone. Nobody even stands up to Arthur if he throws Strauss out and he is captured and killed by Pinkertons, refusing to rat on the gang to his final moments.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Arthur has been shipped with just about every character in the game, both female and male. Most fans like to have him shipped with Sadie, Mary-Beth, Charlotte, Tilly, Marston, Charles Smith, and Dutch.
• Love to Hate: Micah Bell. He is a despicable, sadistic psychopath, but you can't deny that he is incredibly badass, entertaining and creepy.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Charles Smith is a member of the Van der Linde gang. An expert hunter and tracker, he helps Arthur Morgan hunt and kill two deer for the gang while they are stranded on a snowy mountain. Upon returning to civilization, he participates in various train, stagecoach and bank robberies, proving himself a valuable ally. While scouting for a new campsite, he and Arthur learn that a German man had been kidnapped from his family and despite Arthur's reluctance, Charles helps rescue him and return him to his family. Growing close to Arthur, he learns about his tuberculosis diagnosis and encourages him to make use of remaining time to do good. Lending his skills to aid the Wapiti Indians, he leads a prison break to rescue Eagle Flies, participates in a raid and ultimately stays with them. Years later, he reunites with John Marston, helps him build Beecher's Hope and avenges Arthur by helping John and Sadie kill Micah.
  • Josiah Trelawny is a traveling Con Man and associate of the Van der Linde gang. Preferring deception to violence, he alerts the Van der Linde gang to Sean MacGuire's capture and aids in his rescue by distracting two bounty hunters. Reappearing in Rhodes, he brings Arthur along on a stagecoach robbery, distracting and charming the mark so that Arthur can peacefully loot the stagecoach's lockbox. In Saint Denis, Trelawny masterminds a heist on the Grand Korrigan riverboat, installing Leopold Strauss and Javier Escuella aboard and having Arthur impersonate an oil baron, cheat at poker and loot the riverboat's safe. Trelawny is the first to notice Dutch's mental decline and chooses to leave the gang, thanking Arthur for being his friend before he does.
  • Maybelle Elizabeth Colter, better known as Black Belle, is an infamous outlaw and one of the four legendary gunslingers Theodore Levin tasks the player with interviewing. When the player tracks her down in a shack at Bluewater Marsh, they find themselves approached by an army of bounty hunters. Declining the player's offer of misleading them, Black Belle lures one of the bounty hunters closer to her house before ordering the player to set off an explosive charge, killing the bounty hunter. She and the player fight off the rest of bounty hunters, utilising more explosives that she strategically placed around her compound. After the battle, she allows the player to take her photo before riding away.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Arthur is getting plenty of this treatment by players. Even minutes before his death by tuberculosis, he can still kick ass.
  • Alligators, the apex predators of the swamp.
  • And then there's Bray Aberdeen; Kill or kidnap his sister and he'll chase you to the ends of the country. It helps that he's still running after you despite the obesity.
    • If you prefer to spare Tammy by hog-tying her then cutting her free, you'll get both of the Aberdeen siblings chasing you.
  • Uncle. Don't let his lumbago fool you into thinking that he's a pushover.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Dorothea Wicklow, the suffragette that you meet in Saint Denis, has become this due to YouTuber Shirakko's infamous videos of him killing her in various ways. Many players as a result found her to be the punching bag of the whole game. On his part, despite his misanthropy, Arthur agrees with Dorothea that women should be allowed to vote and is shown to be rather progressive in terms of women's rights, even marching with suffragettes at one point in the game.
  • Less controversially, Norris Forsythe, the eugenist barking his ideas on the street. He's hated so much that you can murder him in broad daylight with no consequences (as long as you aren't too noisy).
  • In a similar vein to Forsythe, the KKK members, who always get themselves killed in some stupid manner.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Dutch's Bag ^Explanation A mishearing of Dutch's line "Will you have my back".
  • "You got some ____ for me, boy?" ^ExplanationThe first line spoken by Arthur in the original trailer. The fourth word was originally money, but fans have taken to swapping it out for other things. Some also find Arthur's pronunciation of the word "boy" to be amusing.
  • Once the game came out, Arthur's constant use of the word "boy" (usually rendered as "boah") became this, especially since, if you ride a male horse, he'll be saying that a lot. It helps that there was another game released earlier the same year that also spawned memes based on the main characters constantly saying "boy", leading many people to joke that 2018 was the year of the boy.
  • Dutchposting ^Explanation People on ImageBoards like to imitate Dutch's iconic way of speaking, specifically imitating his repeated desires for people to have faith in him to point out just how crappy of a leader he eventually becomes. Examples include asking for Arthur's help with stuff, and moaning about "mangos", "money", and "Tahiti".
  • GAVIN? WHERE IS GAVIN? GAV! ^ExplanationThere is a guy in Rhodes who is looking for his friend, Gavin. After seeing him a couple of times in town, you can find him wandering in the woods, still looking for him. Even after the Time Skip, he can be found looking for Gavin in Blackwater. His constant shouts has spawned several memes.
  • LENNY! ^ExplanationWhen Arthur and Lenny get drunk in the saloon in Valentine, Arthur loses Lenny at one point and ends up drunkenly shouting Lenny's name in the hopes of finding him. Since Arthur even sees everyone, women included, as Lenny, he ends up doing this a lot, making it a memorable scene in the eyes of many fans.
  • Lumbago ^Explanation A Running Gag has Uncle bring up lumbago as an excuse whenever he refuses to do any work. Thus fans like to joke that Uncle was a former Memetic Badass who’s held back by his lumbago, comparing it to Arthur's tuberculosis.
  • "Fuck Micah" ^Explanation Without going into spoiler territory, Micah's assholeness throughout the game led to the above sentence, which has became so common among fans there's an entire subreddit named "Fuck Micah" dedicated to (jokingly) hating him.
  • “Okay, I’ll catch you later then.”^Explanation Often said in game by Arthur to end conversations with NPCs. The line is used regardless of context, and can result in some serious cases of Mood Whiplash when you hear Arthur say it in response to something heartfelt or angry.
  • STOP COMPLAINING! ^Explanation A Running Gag among RDR2 fans whenever somebody criticizes the game (like pointing out a glitch), making fun of people that consider RDR2 too perfect to be flawed and attempt to silence any sort of criticism towards it.
  • STICK TO THE PLAN, ARTHUR. ^Explanation Dutch's plans almost always get the gang in trouble, and his insistence on sticking with the current plan has become memetic.
    • HAVE SOME GODDAMN FAITH!
  • "Shoooore." ^Explanation Arthur's pronunciation of "sure", which has become a trademark phrase on par with "boah".
  • "Aren't you cold dressed like that?" ^ExplanationDue to a bug in v1.26 that has since been fixed in v1.27, gang members would frequently comment that Arthur was not wearing appropiate clothes for cold weather, even if he was wearing winter clothes in Lemoyne.
  • You killed Micah ^ExplanationBecause of how deplorable Micah is, players would end up receiving a game over screen whenever Micah dies due to player action, especially the final run as Arthur where they fight with knives, and if you actually kill him, the game treats it as a failure because Micah isn't supposed to die until John and Dutch does it themselves.
  • TENNIS BOAT! ^ExplanationA mishearing of "Damn us both!", Arthur's last words to Micah before getting shot by him in the "low honor, go with John" ending.
  • Using dynamite before triggering a cutscene becomes a meme on its own as soon as you manage to lit a dynamite, it will blow up the mission requester, to the point of blowing up their limbs or head, or just set them on fire. Hell, it can work during missions, such as blowing up Bronte and the cutscene still plays out.
  • "What do you think this is? 1785?"^Explanation Uncle refuting John's concerns on building a barn which he claims would take 6 months to build.
• Moe: Jack Marston as a kid is just as adorable as you would think.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • It's implied that Micah Bell crossed it a long time ago. When he was only 17, he and his father were wanted for murdering two people by cutting their throats and subsequently hanging their corpses. In the events of Red Dead 2, if him callously shooting up half a town just to get his favorite guns back didn't already have him crossing it, Micah definitely crossed it when he betrays the whole gang, eventually leading the gang to its imminent decline.
  • Miss Catherine Braithwaite crossed it by ordering her sons to kidnap Jack Marston (who, mind you, is just a 4-year-old boy and has had nothing to do with the gang's business with her) just to spite the Van Der Linde gang for stealing both her moonshine and horses. Given the nature of the gang, it went just as well as anyone can expect.
  • Milton executing an unarmed Hosea in front of Dutch, Arthur and the others out of sheer spite.
  • The O'Driscolls crossed it by brutally murdering Kieran and delivering his remains to Dutch's gang.
  • Colonel Favours crossed it by deliberately provoking the native Americans into starting a war with the US Army by stealing their horses and withholding vaccines meant for their sick, all to get the glory for slaughtering people trying to defend themselves.
  • In-universe, Dutch crossed it in the eyes of some of his gang members when he abandoned the native Americans to their fate after manipulating them into a war with the US Army. Players felt he would have crossed it when he abandons both John and Arthur even though the two have served him loyally to the end.
• Narm:
  • Unfortunately, the Wham Line where Arthur all of a sudden reveals he had a family who was massacred is completely but hilariously ruined by Rains Fall constantly interrupting him to pick herbs. The worst part is, there's no reason whatsoever Rains Fall can't simply multitask and talk to Arthur while picking herbs.
  • A powerful scene where Arthur has a conversation with a dying Eagle Flies while taking them back home on horseback is completely undercut by what is likely a bug. Other characters are following you on horseback, but will go at a steady trot and won't match the player's speed, even though the player will likely be at full gallop in order to get Eagle Flies to the reservation before he dies. This leads to Arthur getting stuck in a dialogue loop as the other characters constantly interrupt Arthur with requests to slow down. This doesn't happen if you have Arthur ride at a slower pace, however, so it appears you're not supposed to ride full speed, lest said bug happens.^note After all, a full gallop may very well aggravate an injured passenger's wounds.
  • For all the spectacular voice acting the game has, Jack's voice can stick out as the only strange performance by what is obviously an adult woman straining herself to sound like a little boy. With all of the attention to detail and vast resources that Rockstar has, it's puzzling why they didn't get an actual child actor for the part.
  • Abigail’s breakdown when Jack is kidnapped consists of her demanding to know where he is, which the gang obviously won’t know.
  • Amidst Jack's welcoming party, Micah will deliver a nihilistic speech about the gang's damnation, all the while Karen and Grimshaw loudly sing a bawdy song in the background.
  • From a part in the epilogue where Jack's dog Rufus is bitten by a venomous snake, the incredibly unfortunate line from a panicking Jack: "Suck it, Dad! Don't swallow it!"
  • In the endings where Arthur helps John escape, John decides to run to a nearby cliff. Sure, it makes a dramatic place for Arthur to die in and works out in the end, but his escape plan is pretty much "we're being chased, let's run up this rock that could end in a dead end instead of disappearing into the woods".
  • While to many he crosses into Narm Charm, Micah to some is a bit too evil to take seriously, because he comes off as rather one-dimensional when compared to the otherwise almost entirely morally grey cast.
    • Some of Arthur’s early complaints about or to him are irrelevant to the current situation and come off as jealous, petty or childish.
• Narm Charm: Arthur’s monologues after certain missions can be pretty melodramatic for someone who is a proud outlaw or for doing some relatively simple work but following the reveal that he has tuberculosis, becomes pretty powerful character development for him and excellent foreshadowing.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Several of the Gambler challenges aren't simply about winning, which can be hard enough, as it is in a game of chance, but winning in specific ways. Gambler 8 specifically draws a ton of ire by forcing players to win three games of Blackjack while hitting three times. It's pure luck and can take hours to accomplish.
  • Hunting for Perfect Cougar and Panther pelts, with one of each being required to craft The Legend of the East satchel. The Panther in particular only spawns in two locations, with a laundry list of conditions that will cause them to not spawn. Each are ambush predators which can kill you with a single pounce. From the moment they growl and appear as a red dot on the mini-map, you have about one second to activate Dead Eye, lock on, and shoot. If you need the perfect pelt, you'll need to make that shot a head-shot as well. Happy hunting!
• Obvious Beta:
  • Not the game itself, but glitching into Mexico shows it had/has work put on it. For example, even though Chuparosa is not there as of this writing, a plot of elevated land ends unnaturally and abruptly around where the wall surrounding the town should be, and the shape of the train track can be seen pressed into the sand, likely as a developer note. The country's foliage and textures also have effort put into them, although both noticeably lose details the further you go east.
  • The returning areas from the first game show signs of this. Once they are finally unlocked it's 1907, but outside of Blackwater these areas seem to be stuck in 1899 as no grave has a date-of-death beyond 1898, the area is extremely undeveloped and the MacFarlane Ranch's barn is missing. Both Jack Marston and Jeremy Gill mention train tracks that don't actually exist in the game world^note Jack mentions the tracks between Beecher's Hope and the river north of it, and Gill mentions Frontera Bridge, and an info card for Pacific Union Railroad appears if you pull up the info card in the forest where it was on in the first game. It's been speculated that this is why the area is locked down for most of the game, as the map is the exact same one in 1899 and 1907, suggesting Rockstar didn't have enough time to finish both versions, threw them together into one and blocked it off so it wouldn't be immediately obvious.
  • Ambarino, (especially West Ambarino) shows signs of this, likely due to Rockstar redesigning most of the northern map edge mid-development. There are no settlements that provide services, less content than on the other regions (bar New Austin), and the design of the snow-covered part is very awkward, as it can only be accessed from the western side since Tempest Rift is just unaccessible filler, making the whole area feel like a dead end. Judging by the game files, glitches and beta maps, the region was heavily cut down, and a lot of areas, routes (including at least one more road to the snowy section near Chez Porter) and content were either Dummied Out, blocked off by hills and large rocks, or moved elsewhere like both Fort Wallace and Wallace Station.
• Obvious Judas: A lot of players probably would have guessed early on that Micah is the traitor, given his record of dog-kicking throughout the game that would give Bill in the first game a run for his money and his constant ass-kissing of Dutch until the reveal.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The dialogue system as described in previews is very similar to that Rockstar used in their previous game Bully down to similar controls (Locking onto NPCs with the left trigger and using the face buttons to choose interactions). Same goes for the hand-to-hand combat wrestling used in Bully.
  • Also, Arthur isn't the first playable character to have suffered tuberculosis; that honor instead goes to Ukyo Tachibana from Samurai Shodown.
  • Many of the plot points also happened in the previous game. Like with Arthur and Guarma, John landing in Mexico was a case of the protagonist landing on the coast of a country he'd never been in, and the Mexico arc also had a Playing Both Sides like this game's Grey/Braithwaite storyline. In both games the first protagonist dies, and the game ends with someone close to them avenging them.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Strange Man's brief cameo in the mirror inside a shack in Baygall Edge. It's very difficult to trigger unless you know how, but him, his shack, and his implied Deal with the Devil with Herbert Moon are filled to the brim with Creepy Awesome, resulting in a very memorable Easter Egg.
  • That lion in "Of Course He's British". How many were expecting to see an African big cat in a western?

Single-player, P - X

• Player Punch: Inevitable given the Foregone Conclusion of the original game.
  • During one seemingly average mission, Sean McGuire has his head blown off with zero warning in a surprise ambush.
  • Kieran Duffy has only just begun to ingratiate himself into the gang when he disappears for several days. People suspect he might've turned traitor... then his decapitated and mutilated corpse is set back to camp on horseback as a prelude to an O'Driscoll attack.
  • Hosea Matthews and Lenny Summers both die during the botched Saint Denis bank robbery. Agent Milton captures Hosea only to murder him in cold-blood to spite Dutch, then Lenny Summers is gunned down by Pinkertons. Lenny's is especially jarring given that it's the only gang member's death that occurs out of nowhere during gameplay and Arthur spends time lingering over his friend's corpse in mourning.
  • A seemingly normal journey with Arthur ends with Arthur collapsing, coughing up blood, going to a doctor, and being diagnosed with tuberculosis, confirming that the player character is not going to survive the events of the game and everything that comes after is him living on borrowed time.
  • Charlotte, the widow you find out in the woods who had recently buried her dead husband can potentially do this if you don't finish her second mission as Arthur, she's dead by the time John finds her.
  • The final mission of Chapter 6 has the player's horse being killed by Pinkertons. Especially painful if it's the horse you've had throughout the entire game or if it’s Buell, who a dying Hamish passed to you. Arthur will comfort the animal until s/he is dead, giving up valuable escape time to pay his proper respects to his beloved horse.
  • The death of Arthur Morgan. Even though you know it's coming, it's still a punch. Depending on the player's honor, Arthur can have a peaceful death of his disease watching the rising sun, or be murdered in cold-blood by Micah.
  • Riding around Bayou Nwa in Lemoyne might see you run into and shoot a new bird for your compendium, and upon doing so receive the message "Carolina Parakeet: ???? Remaining" in the corner of your screen. Congratulations, you just contributed to their eventual extinction. This shares a similarity to the finite number of bison in the Great Plains of the first Redemption game.
• Quicksand Box: The game world is absolutely massive, with dozens of main story missions, dozens more side missions, over 100 "challenges", hundreds of random "encounters", and even more unmarked places to visit and non-mission-related things to do. It's entirely possible to get sucked in and put off a mission for hours while you stumble into many other things to do along the way.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Due to their similar roles in the story, Guarma is often compared negatively with Mexico. In terms of storytelling, John ending up in Mexico felt natural and tied to the general plot pretty well, but Guarma has been accused of feeling very shoehorned into II's plot - while it has its place (it worsens Arthur's disease and shows how Dutch's dreams aren't as good as he thinks they are), many players have still expressed belief that those plot points could have been integrated in other ways. In terms of gameplay, Mexico gave players a large area to explore that looked and felt different from America without distracting from the core gameplay, while Guarma is a tiny, briefly seen area with a bunch of Permanently Missable Content that punishes exploration and has very little mission variety, giving players the feeling that the game is Railroading them. As such, while Mexico was divisive in I, it's very rare to see players claiming they like Guarma as it appears in the final product ^note It was seemingly intended to be explorable, much smaller and could be returned to, with much more unique animals; several of the island's detractors feel this sounds much more interesting than what the final game offered - some have even expressed confusion why Guarma was even used, as Mexico could have been used in its place. ^note Likely because Guarma's humid climate has a negative effect to Arthur's health, while the dry desert climate of Mexico would be much better for him - his TB had to be sped up somehow for the plot.
  • The Van Horn Trading Post, this game's shady Wretched Hive is also often seen as a rather disappointing follow-up to Thieves' Landing in the previous game. While Thieves' Landing had no law, it still felt like a town, and in fact had most services of New Austin's settlements; shooting people did usually result in them shooting back, but everybody also minded their own business and generally didn't join in when the shooting started; and the town actually tied to the game's Karma Meter and low-honor players got discounts from the shops. By contrast, Van Horn has very little services (hotel/bath, post office, pawn shop, saloon, a stables outside the town), honor affects nothing, the civilians tend to start shooting at the player for the smallest excuses, and if a firefight does start, the whole town becomes hostile and keeps spawning infinite amounts of hostile townsfolk. In essence, Thieves Landing was a low-honor player's main hub area and playground, while Van Horn feels like a town full of cops, ironically enough.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
  • Arthur was at first seen as a Replacement Scrappy for John Marston due to early trailers not exactly having sympathetic moments for him and John being a really beloved character. Once the game came out however, many fans were won over by his tragic, complex background and how he kept on trying to help out the gang even during the inevitable breakdown and making his last moments a chance for John to escape the outlaw life. Fans are now claiming he’s Rockstar’s best protagonist of all time, even better than John.
  • Kid Jack Marston lacks most of the problems his teenage and adult versions had in the first game, and instead is an Adorkable textbook case of Children Are Innocent.
• Ron the Death Eater:
  • Thomas Downes has gotten hate from the fandom for being the reason Arthur got tuberculosis and ultimately died, being shamed as irresponsible.
  • Those dissatisfied with the twist of Micah being the rat, seeing it as a cheap copout with several plot holes, tend to look at the other gang members (usually the Marstons, Pearson or Mary-Beth) and accuse them of being rats instead of him. Many of these theories give very vague reasons and sometimes rely on Insane Troll Logic (John is forced to work for the government 12 years later in the timeline, so apparently he must have a connection to the law in 1899 and Abigail, instead of just leaving the gang with Jack and John some night decided that should get her surrogate family and friends all killed and/or captured in the progress), but credit where it's due, it's not an entirely crazy idea — the game does try to mislead the players to think this way — before The Reveal happens, of course.
  • Even Micah himself, who’s hardly anything close to a hero, is accused of being an informant to the Pinkertons as early as Chapter 1, or to the O’Driscolls, when Milton states he only turned rat after Chapter 5.
• Sacred Cow: Arthur himself can be interpreted as this. Almost universally beloved or at least well liked by the entire fandom, the harshest criticism you'll likely see levied against Arthur is his more enthusiastic fans having to be reminded that even at high honor, he's not exactly morally spotless.
• The Scrappy:
  • The residents of Van Horn and Butcher Creek are (for the most part) violent jerks who will antagonize the player for no reason, and even if Arthur greets them, they will usually respond with an insult or Spiteful Spit. Even worse, if one of them starts a fight with the player, everyone else will join in no matter how it started. At some point, one of them will pull out a gun and start shooting, causing the others to do the same. Needless to say, most players do not feel bad for killing them when this happens. Even if the player goes out of their way to help the people of Beaver Hollow (helping Lemuel, stopping the rabid dogs, and saving them from being poisoned), the residents will still treat them as an outsider.
  • The Street Urchins in Saint Denis have already garnered hatred from some players, especially the urchin who pickpockets Arthur in "The Joys of Civilisation". They will constantly harass you which quickly becomes grating to the ears for players. Some might even trick you into getting mugged in an alleyway and if you retaliate you'll end up getting wanted by the law. Don't retaliate and go with the trick and you will lose a quarter of all your money with absolutely no way of getting it back from them.
  • Out of any minor character, Deputy Archibald is arguably the most annoying. For one, he is an incredibly slow wagon driver and walker, meaning Arthur has to often wait for him during his mission. Then there's his incessant, unsolicited Exposition Dump about the Grays and Braithwaites, nagging Arthur to catch-up to a train when the player can only go a certain speed, spouting meaningless folksy wisdom, and acting like he's a lot smarter and more competent than he clearly is. The only thing that makes up for this is that you only have to interact with him twice, and Dutch shutting him down at one point.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • You can now be too far away from your horse to whistle for it, unlike in the first game where a quick tap of the button will summon the horse to your side from anywhere. When hunting, it's scarily easy to lose track of the beast and end up stranded in the middle of the woods.
  • Fast travel is very limited, only being available for free from camp. (Patch 1.15 mitigates this by allowing fast travel from player-made camps as well.) If you are willing to pay a small fee, you could also board a train at a train station or grab a stagecoach in a town. But if you're stuck in the middle of the wilderness without a horse, you'll have to walk or wait to hitch a ride from a fellow traveler passing by.
  • Although the switch to John is handled fairly well (Such as the money from the Blackwater job giving you 20.000 dollars so you can rebuild your inventory once you beat the game), he still cannot swim. Instead of drowning instantly however, going too deep will destroy your stamina (core included) and John'll start splashing around in an attempt to save himself. Again, the fact that John can be controlled and thus rescued during the few seconds before he drowns means that it's not as bad as it was in the first game, but it's still a bit of a bummer to lose an actually useful game mechanic.^note Considering that New Austin opens up at this point, it's probably there to prevent you from swimming to the now unavailable Nuevo Paraiso.
  • Having to start with your base loadout whenever you have to replay missions. You will lose whatever items you have on-hand, your stats will be reset to their default level, and your horse will be the weakest one. This makes it frustrating for players who want to fulfill all objectives in order to get the gold medal, since they would lack the equipment or stats that would help them. This was addressed in the 1.15 patch, as the player now keeps their weapons and stats during replays.
  • The control system in general has received complaints, with many players pointing out that the controls feel sluggish and unresponsive, making it difficult to move Arthur around.
  • Beard growth. It's not a bad system in and of itself, but it's so glitchy players may not be able to fully utilize it, and no one is sure as to how it is supposed to work. Some players have no problem growing a maximum-length beard as early as Chapter 2; even after they beat the game, some can't make it grow longer than level 6 or 7 no matter how much hair tonic they use; some players can't get the beard to grow consistently.
  • While the gambling minigames themselves are considered to be fine, the gambler challenges are seen by many as the worst part of the game due to their luck-based nature and tendency to cause extreme amounts of frustration. The fact that most of them don't simply involve winning but winning under specific circumstances has caused annoyance even in actual gambling fans.
  • The autoaim on consoles is especially annoying when you're out hunting, as it snaps to the biggest threat first. This means that you might be trying to shoot a bird or squirrel, but the gun will constantly snap to an alligator instead, even though you've centered your targeting reticle onto your actual prey. There is no option like 'snap to target closest to reticle' to mitigate this.
  • Treasure maps. They're supposed to help you locate hidden loot that makes the player exponentially richer. But the maps themselves mostly consist of crudely drawn landmarks that do little to clarify where you're supposed to start looking, and the game doesn't use the in-game world map to make it any easier to locate said treasure. This leads to many players completely disregarding them unless they're really good at cartography, or decide to get help from the internet.
  • The inability to run in camp. Once you get close, you'll be reduced to a brisk walking speed. Some of the campsites, like Shady Belle, are very spread out which makes it agonizing to slowly walk between the various supply caches, food stand, ledger, Arthur's bed, etc.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: If you can imagine it, you can try it, and someone else probably already has. Options include some of the more standard video game variety, such as the "Dead is Dead" challenge where you have to start the game over if you die, and another where you don't buy anything that isn't required for plot related reasons, instead looting or crafting everything you use. Some of the more extreme include the Going Native challenge, where you only wear Trapper clothing and only use a bow, tomahawks, and a knife to fight except for where required by a mission/plot.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Cougars received a significant nerf, as they are much rarer and can be seen on the minimap when one is near. To balance this, they are now much more lethal, but the warnings the game gives you make them much easier to hunt.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike:
  • Your horse, if wounded, might start bleeding and you need medicine to save it; if it dies, you can't just whistle for a new one. (The latter was also present in the Hardcore mode of the last game) The ability to just whistle for a new free horse was removed because the devs want to make horses feel more than disposable modes of transport.
  • Hunting is now more realistic, and the price people fork out for your hunting goods depends on how fresh and clean the kill is. Getting a perfect fatal shot with a bow or the proper gun/ammo and immediately selling the meat rewards you better than using the wrong gun/ammo and waiting a week to sell whatever remains of the poor creature you annihilated. Dynamite doesn't even net you anything to harvest, unless you're using it for fishing. About the only animals you don't have to worry about ruining the pelts and carcasses of are the legendary animals, although the only person that can take their carcasses is the Trapper.
  • John was relatively Easily Forgiven in the first game, only getting a payable bounty and an occasional visit from bounty hunters or the region's law enforcement. Bounties are now harder to get rid of if you're not wanted dead or alive, and super-persistent bounty hunters will hunt the player all over the map. In 1, they would spawn every few in-game days or so, while here they have a habit of showing up if you linger around one area for 5 to 15 real minutes, forcing you to stay on the move. Fortunately, they don't spawn in states you're not wanted in.
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: With a wide variety of side activities and stranger quests the game has to offer, players can more than often get derailed from the main story. Not only that, many players also refuse to progress with the story so that they could remain playing as Arthur.
• Signature Scene:
  • Arthur collapsing on the streets of Saint Denis, coughing up blood all the way down. The scene is burnt into the minds of many players, due to it coming out of nowhere even after a good amount of foreshadowing, and for making it immediately clear why Arthur isn't around in 1911.
  • The discussion between Arthur and Sister Calderón at the Emerald Ranch train station is well remembered for being the one time Arthur's stoic nature breaks completely, revealing that underneath the rough exterior is a man very much afraid of dying.
  • The "High honor, Arthur went with John" ending is also well remembered for its sheer emotional impact.
  • Arthur’s last ride to camp, particularly the high honor version, for its emotional impact. With the soundtrack of Daniel Lanois’s “That’s The Way It Is” only adding to its massive Tear Jerker status among fans.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • During the mission "Friends in Low Places", which introduces players to Stagecoach robberies, Arthur can be seen inspecting whichever sidearm was in his primary pistol holster. However, the animation that plays is more suited for a revolver, leading to clipping issues if a player had any of the three pistols or the Sawed-Off Shotgun in that holster prior to that cutscene.
  • With the sole exception of Blackwater, southern West Elizabeth and New Austin both show signs of being incomplete. They don't change at all during the Time Skip, are very underdeveloped, have at least one Continuity Snarl^note Most notably, the barn at MacFarlane's ranch is missing, and no grave has a death date beyond 1898. This, on top of some dialogue that still mentions locations/other things that don't actually appear in game. The most accepted theory is that Rockstar ran out of time before they could finish both 1899 and 1907 versions, and didn't want the lack of two versions to be too noticeable, so they locked the areas down in 1899.
  • One of the complaints about John's epilogue hair is that even if you can look past the change in color (from dark brown to black), it's only his hair that's off-color; his eyebrows and beard are still the same shade (or at the very least, a very close shade) of brown his hair should be. While it is subtle enough that most players don't pay attention to it, those who do have trouble unseeing it.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • The game seems to be a spiritual adaptation of Young Guns II, The Seventh Seal, and Tombstone, with a bit of Grand Theft Auto V mixed in.
  • In another sense, the game seems to be a violent R-rated 1890s version of Night in the Woods in that both protagonists keep their journals; both go to parties by campfires and get drunk at one point; both have their ex-boy/girlfriends; both have dreams of spirit animals; both struggle to do good with finding their own identities and coping with the massive changes in the world around them; and both have come down with illnesses in their lives... and at least Mae Borowski's illness isn't terminal unlike Arthur's.
  • Interestingly, as the PC version (and now the PS4 and Xbox One versions) adds gang hideouts to Gaptooth Breach and Solomon's Folly (Twin Rocks^note Special Edition only and Fort Mercer are already gang hideouts) and puts the LeMat revolver, Evans Repeater and a High-Power pistol Expy into the single-player campaign, the epilogue includes a lot of content from the first game in it, especially since John is playable. While there are some major differences such as New Austin being less active and there being no Mexico or story, it's now fairly reminiscent of the first game — especially on PC as the previous game never released on it.
  • With a nigh-identical plot about an outlaw party that falls apart and grows increasingly more vicious in the process, gratuitous amounts of gorn, troubled Anti-Hero protagonist, similar time period, heavily matching themes, horror elements, and being a dark, gritty deconstruction of the western genre, this could very well be the best spiritual adaptation of Blood Meridian of all time. And to drive the whole thing home, the game has a Shout-Out to said book.
• Squick:
  • "A Quiet Time" has a few bits of this that can be gross. To whit:
    • You can catch a couple having sex in Room 1A and hear them scream a bit. This, however, can force you to go though the squicky part later if you want to "Catch Lenny in the act" for the Gold Medal.
    • Waking up outside at the rear of the saloon after a Smash to Black from the supposed Bar Brawl-turned line dancing is one thing, but then you are forced to go to first-person perspective as Arthur has to look down at his crotch and reach into his pants for his... manhood (which he cleverly manages to hide with both hands grabbing it) before taking a tinkle. And yes, that's the sight of his tinkle on the grass! You might need some Brain Bleach after that.
    • And at the end, if Arthur manages to escape being arrested, he wakes up in the forest... only to get so sick and hung over that he'll stumble over for a bit... and then gag before leaning over and barfing on the grass as the icing on the cake! This is so gross it just screams Nausea Fuel!
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys: Just like what happened with GTA V, Rockstar is developing this reputation among single-player fans: Many exploits players enjoy using, such as wall-breaching and going out-of-bounds ^note Understandable in online mode, but doesn't negatively affect single-player, the Full-Frontal Assault glitch mentioned above, and most notably going to New Austin as Arthur are actively and regularly patched out once discovered — yet actual, game- or immersion breaking glitches seem to go unaddressed patch after patch and player feedback and criticism is ignored pretty much entirely (for example, John's own hair not being even an option in the epilogue). This is one of the reasons why SP and Online have developed a Fandom Rivalry, as multiplayer does actively get new content and bug fixes.
• That One Achievement: Have fun trying to nail the two hunting-related achievements, one to study every animal in the game and one to skin them all. The number of different animals is astronomical, some (especially smaller types of bird) are difficult to spot owing to being very small and very fast, and as if that wasn’t enough, there’s a handful of species that only spawn in a scant handful of locations if they even spawn at all. While you’ll have ample opportunity to go looking through the game, if you’re going out of your way to look for a moose, for instance, you could spend hours of real-time waiting for the damn thing to show up. This isn’t even getting into the predators that ambush you; even if you manage to survive the first attack you probably won’t have enough time to study the animal before you have to kill it, so you’ll need to wait for another specimen to appear and hope you can study it before it takes your throat out. The one meager saving grace to this mess is, nothing on Guarma counts towards these achievements so you don’t have to worry about the wildlife there.
• That One Boss: The Legendary Giaguaro Panther for Master Hunter Challenge 10. Unlike the other Legendary Animals, this one will actively track and hunt you down like a regular panther. And like a regular panther, once it gets you, you will be instantly one-shotted and you will have to do the whole tracking process all over again.
• That One Level: The final mission "American Venom". While tracking down and killing Cleet is easy, upon entering the mountain you are attacked by a powerful sniper before facing a horde of well-trained gunmen. Rat bastard he is, Micah knew who to hire for his new gang.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Achieving a gold medal for each mission in story mode, which require players to complete all optional objectives. Especially missions requiring you to complete them within a specific amount of time, but the kicker is that the cutscenes themselves are counted in the countdown, meaning that you would have to skip the cutscenes in order to meet the time limit. This is frustrating for first-time players who would likely have to replay these missions. While replayable, the player will start off with their default stats and equipment at the start of the story rather than their current loadout, which may make achieving these objectives even harder.
  • Sharpshooter challenge 8 is extremely difficult. You need to disarm 3 opponents without reloading or changing weapons. Not only has the Deadeye reload exploit been fixed from the first game and thus activating it means instant reset, aiming is more difficult than before and enemies have ridiculously tight grips, having a tendency of not dropping their gun no matter no many times you shoot at their arm. After a while you'll just grab a shotgun and start literally disarming to vent out.
  • Sharpshooter 3 can also be annoying, as it requires you to shoot 5 birds while standing on top of a moving train. The problem here is climbing on top of a train will get you a bounty after traveling for some time, which will make the train stop, and you might get really unlucky and not even encounter any birds on the train at all.
  • While most of the Gambler challenges can be frustrating since they are mostly based on luck, Gambler 8 Challenge stands out since it requires you to win three hands of Blackjack with three or more hits. It is incredibly easy to bust after just one hit, with many players pointing to it as the worst task needed to be done for 100% completion.
  • An actual sidequest is this: Going to the doctor's office in Valentine and demanding he takes you to the back room where there are three O'Driscoll mooks and their prostitute. Killing all of them (including the prostitute, who will pull a gun on you) stealthily does not work as if you're trying to do it quietly, the local law enforcement will chase after you.
  • Horseman Challenge 9 requires you to get from Van Horn to Blackwater (essentially one side of the map to the other) in less than 17 minutes without touching water. Sounds simple enough, but for starters you'll need a horse with extremely high speed and several Horse Stimulants, or you can get by without stimulants by patting the horse to regain some stamina, but either way your thumbs are getting fucked. And that's assuming you don't get ambushed on the road by bandits, wolves or cougars (the last of which will be guaranteed to cause your horse to buck you if you don't kill it fast enough). And since you'll likely be taking several shortcuts along the way, be sure to avoid rocks or ledges that are just a tad too high, because you WILL be knocked off your horse (particularly in the treacherous areas south of Strawberry). And for your own sanity, do this mission during the epilogue, or you will likely have your hard work invalidated and your fast horse killed when you enter southern West Elizabeth and are immediately swarmed by Pinkertons.
  • Herbalist 9's goal of 'Pick one of each species of herb' seems tedious in a straightforward enough way, but there is a small catch: Some plants will not spawn until you unlock a specific sidequest, so its best to wait until completing the whole game before attempting this.
  • Survivalist 7, "8 consecutive small game kills using small game arrows". It doesn't mention it, but they need to be one-hit kills. Translation: You'll be running around the forest of your choosing murdering every squirrel you come across, since anything bigger than them can survive a small game arrow. And with bad enough luck, even they can live through said arrows. The challenge has a simple objective, yet requires very good luck and patience. Fortunately, those who don't mind a honor loss can go kill chickens at certain towns as they tend to die from one arrow.
  • Similar to Survivalist 7 is Weapon Expert 5, which requires you to kill 5 mounted enemies with 1 throwing knife each. Since it's harder to get in close to horsed enemies to knife them during missions, and hostile gang members are very rarely riders in the open world, it's much easier to just kill random strangers on horseback and take the Honor hit.
  • Weapon Expert 6 and 7 require you to kill 4 enemies with a single stick of dynamite, and 4 consecutive enemies by throwing and retrieving the same tomahawk respectively. The best strategy for these is to hogtie a bunch of gang members and kill them at your leisure.
  • The Hunting Request and Exotics lines of sidequests aren't particularly difficult, just incredibly tedious, as they require you to find and/or hunt dozens upon dozens of rare animals and flowers. You will be forced to wander around the same locations over and over again waiting for the animals/plants to respawn.
  • Out of all the camp upgrades, the moose antlers are widely agreed to be the most frustrating to obtain—since they require finding and killing a bull moose, which is one of the most elusive animals in the game. Moose only spawn in a tiny handful of locations on extremely rare occasions, so finding one is often a simple matter of luck—and male moose (the only ones with antlers) are even rarer than their female counterparts. As a nice bonus: one of the only places where moose can be reliably lured with bait is Cairn Lake—where, due to a bizarre quirk of the game's programming, only female moose ever spawn.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Several people have expressed disappointment over the changes to the bounty hunting missions. In the previous game they were endless randomly generated missions that could be used for making money or lowering your own bounty, while here they are a handful of scripted missions that give a handful of cash each. This gives the game less post-game content.
  • Random encounters have received similar criticism; in the first game they could happen at any time and most would repeat at random forever — for example, Herbert Moon became notorious for being constantly robbed. Here most encounters only happen once at set locations and only a few have multiple encounters. Like with bounty hunting, this leaves the game with less endgame content and causes the map feel somewhat empty when they are all completed.
  • The lack of repeatable activities (such as horse breaking and nightwatch missions from the previous game) has also received criticism for the same reasons as the two above.
  • The character model used for John Marston in the epilogue has attracted the ire of some fans. As discussed here and here, John's playable model and NPC model don't actually match, and some patches have taken him even further off-base. As an NPC he resembles his 1911 self pretty closely, but in the epilogue his facial features, head & body shape and facial hair change enough that an eagle-eyed player can notice it - it doesn't help that many of the changes seem to exist only to give him a resemblance to Arthur. Even fans outside this group take issue with his hair: instead of his trademark, dark brown mess, he instead sports a black Palette Swap of Arthur's hair - to the point where A) His hair and beard are actually a few shades different and B) John's ears had to be moved to make room for Arthur's hair. The small changes to his cowboy outfit (rescaled gloves, slightly more open pant sleeves, lowest vest button closed) are also sometimes complained about.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Both Leviticus Cornwall and Colm O'Driscoll are major villains throughout the game, responsible for the majority of the protagonists' troubles. Colm in particular is set up as having a long history as Dutch's nemesis, is responsible for destroying Sadie Adler's life, and his first appearance sets him up as a threatening and deranged figure. Unfortunately, in a game with a 60 hour long story, neither man gets much in the way of development or screen time. They only appear in two missions each before dying.
  • The guy running the Rhodes general store is eventually replaced by Pearson in the epilogue. Seth Briars from the first game apparently owned a store before going mad. Since the first shopkeeper just disappears and never interacts with John, Seth could have easily been used to fill his role without going against canon.
  • Though Micah is by no mean a wasted character, the game could have gone further with him. Currently, he bears remarkable similarities to a low-honor John in the first game. They are both dishonorable government collaborators who try to wipe out their former gang to save themselves. A low-honor John can even ride on the Dark Horse, which is identical to Micah's Baylock in RDR2. The game could have made this parallel clearer and shown us that Micah is a basically evil version of John, thus making him less of a one-dimensional villain and more of a dark reflection of a protagonist.
  • Despite what the trailers played her up to be, Sadie doesn't become an official gunwoman of the gang until the final chapter of the main story, and even there she is in few missions.
  • Some players lament that Karen's Action Girl qualities were only shown in one mission and wished she was an official gunslinger.
  • Kieran is an ex O'Driscoll turned member of the Van der Linde Gang. Fans were interested in how he was growing closer with the gang and wished he wasn't killed off at the start of Chapter 4.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Fans are disappointed that you are unable to visit West Elizabeth and New Austin as Arthur, despite many promotional trailers showing you exploring them. What's worse is that when exploiting a glitch that allows Arthur to visit them as mentioned in Good Bad Bugs above, he has his own unique dialogue from Marston's, implying that developers likely intended for Arthur to visit those locations.
  • Fans who bought the Special and Ultimate Editions that come with an exclusive heist are also disappointed that it's a rather generic bank heist in Rhodes. Some felt that the exclusive mission could have instead covered the Blackwater heist that started the events of the game.
  • That the relationship between Arthur and Sadie Adler is never explored more past friendship can feel like this to some, given how badass and likable Sadie is compared to Arthur's old flame Mary Linton, and how well Sadie and Arthur work together every time they're put together (and how much Arthur writes about her in his journal) makes it apparent that their relationship could easily have developed into something more. Interestingly, Word of God is that Arthur was supposed to have a second love interest in the game, but that it got cut for making the game several hours longer than it already was. Naturally, the most famous fan-theory is that Sadie was this love interest.^note Interviews with the cast have since clarified that the two weren't intended to be romantically involved.
    Sadie: [to Arthur] Aside from my Jake... you're the best man I've known.
  • Dutch, Arthur and Bill working as Rhodes deputies was an interesting plot point and they could have used their authority to fight the O'Driscolls and Lemoyne Raiders. Alas, there is only one mission where they act on behalf of the Sheriff to ambush moonshiners.
  • Some fans of the first game feel this about the game's story. As discussed under Contested Sequel, while the game's plot is usually considered to be a quite good standalone story, the sheer amount of changes to the established backstory make it a questionable prequel; contrast John's stories from I ^note The gang was small, Dutch was a smart Robin Hood type, Javier was a creeper whose loyalty was questionable, Bill was Ax-Crazy, Abigail was the gang bicycle and John himself was quite rational, had no friends, still respected Dutch after he went mad, and left the gang after being shot on a ferry to what is depicted here ^note The gang consists of ~20 people, Dutch's Just Like Robin Hood aspects are an Informed Ability and Hosea is the gang's real brains, Javier is a Nice Guy who holds Undying Loyalty to Dutch, Bill is The Friend Nobody Likes, Abigail is a single mother and John for most of the plot is an impulsive Jerkass who hates Dutch by the end of the main game, has a Big Brother Mentor in Arthur, and is shot in a train. While the game sometimes mentions Dutch and Abigail better matched John's stories in the past, this is never shown, and so some players who wanted to see the "Small gang gives to the poor" characterization feel the originally described version had a lot of potential in on itself and that this game changed things that didn't need changing.
  • In the 7th chapter, after the talk about the legend of King Arthur, it would have been more fitting for John and Abigail to take the aliases "Arthur" and "Guinevere", the former also being a tribute to his late friend.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Exotic plants, which only serve as glorified collectibles; despite actively respawning and seeming important, they're only needed for some ambient challenges and a single stranger quest. Other than that, they're completely useless since they can't even be sold anywhere.^note it is speculated that the cut "exotic shops" mentioned in the game's files would have bought them, giving them some value, but none of these shops made it into the final game
  • Wellbeing, a system that tracks whether or not Arthur is sick or not. It's listed in the player stats and being sick has some features tied to it (such as affecting core drain and weight) but it's only used in two chapters in a completely scripted manner after Arthur's tuberculosis gets serious. Given how the game has multiple potential sources of illness (temperature, animal bites, strange plants) and also has a system for crafting medicinal items (for health, stamina and dead eye), it's a bit disappointing it's not used for anything other than a scripted sequence.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Strauss. Despite him being a loan shark, he was still a loyal member to the gang. It’s later revealed that he was then captured and killed by Pinkertons, meaning Arthur essentially killed him by forcing him to leave. It's way more poignant if you play as Arthur with low honor.
  • Cleet. While he's kind of a dick, his humiliating execution in front of a crowd feels unnecessarily cruel, especially after he revealed that he betrayed Micah because Micah killed a little girl. Some players wished that there was a chance to let him go rather than have Sadie kill him herself.
  • Of all the bounties, it's Mark Johnson who gets the most of this. The game seems to present him as a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing who wastes his chance to say goodbye to his family and instead gets his gang to attack his captor, and Arthur has the option to say that he lost all respect for him after that. However, I Surrender, Suckers is a tactic that Arthur himself can use when surrounded by bounty hunters, and it's also understandable that he wouldn't want to leave his wife a widow considering he's the sole provider for them. The fact that his former gang was willing to fight for him makes them just as sympathetic than the Van Der Linde gang, making the whole mission rely on Protagonist-Centered Morality.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Arthur and the rest of the gang when he throws Strauss out of the gang, most especially if you have low honor. While it is depicted as a noble choice that rewards him with honor, Arthur had still thrown out a loyal gang member to be captured by Pinkertons or the Murfree Brood. None of the gang members stand up for Strauss and only a few scold Arthur afterwards.
  • While some of Abigail's complaints in the epilogue are completely justified (most notably John shooting people in front of Jack) she doesn't seem to realize she is sending some seriously mixed messages. She wants John to keep his job at the Pronghorn ranch, yet objects when John takes arms to keep their employer alive when murderous thugs come-a-knocking. She wants to live a peaceful life with John, yet doesn't like when John protects himself against people who are trying to kill him. As a result, her claim that "There's always a choice" comes off as a little hollow, since had John not made these choices, he would likely be dead and she and Jack would end up homeless. And that's not going into the fact that she's constantly insulting and assaulting him at the beginning portions of the game even though he was recovering from a wolf attack.
  • Charles, Sadie and John in the final mission. While Micah deserved to have a couple bullets or 10 pumped into him, Sadie's recruitment of John indirectly leads to him being tracked down by the Pinkertons while she and Charles presumably manage to escape, and John agrees to follow them despite Abigail begging him not to and insults Jack as he leaves. Their interrogation and execution of Cleet also feels uncharacteristically petty and cruel (and hypocritical seeing that they were also outlaws), especially since Sadie overrides John's choice to spare him and kills Cleet herself.
• The Un-Twist: Subverted. Many players familiar with the series went to the game fully expecting Arthur to die as it was the easiest way to explain why he was never seen or heard of in the previous game. These people were of course correct, but the game still surprised most of these people with the reveal of how he dies — very few expected terminal illness.
• Viewers in Mourning: Arthur's tuberculosis and eventual inevitable death prompted many fans who first played the game to look up on Google Search for ways to find a TB cure, in spite of the fact that there is none for Arthur^note Effective treatments do exist for tuberculosis. But sadly they didn't exist in 1899. (though he does get warned by the doctor to "rest somewhere warm and dry" in an attempt to slow down the infection, which is not on the cards). Also, his death became a catalyst for Austin Hourigan of Game Theory and Eirik Gumeny of Polygon to write their own personal experiences on the game as tributes to its fallen protagonist, and for many fans to go and vote for the game's nomination categories in awards ceremonies in his honor, with the game winning the "Fan-Favorite Fall Release" award at the Gamers' Choice Awards, both "Action-Adventure Title of the Year" and "Game of the Year" at the Australian Games Awards, and about half of the eight categories at The Game Awards 2018 (said half being "Best Audio Design", "Best Narrative", "Best Score/Music", and "Best Performance" with Arthur's voice actor Roger Clark, who indeed admitted that he looked surprised at his win).
• The Woobie:
  • Kieran Duffy. Ending up with the wrong company after the death of his parents, he is assumed to be an O'Driscoll and is captured by Arthur. He spends a good while tied to a tree, without food or water, and Dutch threatens to castrate him. Even after saving Arthur's life, his every attempt to get in good terms with the gang is met with suspicion and is constantly bullied. When people are finally starting to trust him, he is captured by the O'Driscolls, who proceed to gouge his eyes out and decapitate him, before sending his body back to Dutch's hideout to taunt and demoralize the gang.
  • The entire Downes family. Being burdened with financial troubles and debt, Thomas Downes made the mistake to loan from Leopold Strauss. Not helping matters is when he's afflicted with tuberculosis, only to get beaten up for his troubles when Arthur came to collect the debt in front of his family, leading to his death. This forces the rest of the family to move out from the farm without a husband to support them any longer, where Mrs. Downes is forced to work as a prostitute, while her son Archie has to work in the mines and is treated like crap by his co-workers. When Arthur comes across Mrs. Downes in Saint Denis, the poor woman is a broken shell of her former self when he first met her.
  • Rains Fall. All he wants is to protect his people and stop them from getting into a war with the US Army who are constantly harassing them, having lost his firstborn son in a previous skirmish with the US Army. Sadly, thanks to Dutch's manipulations, his second son Eagle Flies ends up getting killed in another pointless fight as well, and his people are still forced off their land and have to move to Canada. When Marston comes across him in the epilogue, he's a broken man with possible signs of Alzheimer's.
  • Jack Marston. He goes through all of the same Trauma Conga Line that the rest of the gang does, while still being a young child. This includes watching several members of the gang die, which, judging by the fact that he refers many of them as Honorary Uncles, is equivalent to losing a huge chunk of his family. If that wasn't enough, he also gets kidnapped for a big chunk of the game. It gives some perspective to his angst in the first game.

Red Dead Online

• Default Setting Syndrome: Auto Aim settings, which are enabled and at the highest strength by default. This affects Online particularly hard since, unlike Grand Theft Auto Online, players are not separated by their preferred aiming settings, so people who are used to playing in Free Aim lobbies in the latter game are putting themselves at a distinct disadvantage in the former game.
  • To curb this some its been changed locking on only secures bodyshots, and you can't just tilt up the camera a bit to score easy headshots anymore, removing roughly 90% of the advantage afforded by autoaim.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Zig-Zagged with bounty hunters. While normally not major threats due to being confined to specific areas in story mode, and are easy to dispatch on their own, Online takes them to new heights in online. For starters, their hunting grounds are not constrained to the state where a player has committed crimes, appear out of nowhere to pursue the player until dead, attack the player in large numbers, and have an increasingly varied array of weapons at higher bounty levels. After taking them all out, the player must escape the area to avoid death. In order to avoid being hunted, the player must pay the bounty at any post office or collection box for half of the value. If the player is killed by a hunter, the full value will be paid off instead.
  • High-level hostile players during sale missions. God helps you if you come across an entire posse of them during one. It's easier to just close the game down at that point and restart the mission than to endure the unwinnable fight those griefers will bring upon you. Even if you have a posse of your own, it's still a lopsided fight as a griefer only needs a single explosive or incendiary round to destroy your precious cargo.
• Epileptic Trees: There is speculation that Maggie Fike, the woman who helps the player in the moonshiner update, is the sister of Black Belle, a gunslinger seen in both single- and multiplayer. Their character models are almost identical, they sound similar and Maggie mentions a sister she has not seen for years.
• Friendly Fandoms: While usually the two groups have a Fandom Rivalry, as of 2020 single- and multiplayer fans are starting to get along... due to the drastic increase of glitches and lack of proper fixes in both modes. Single-player keeps getting strange new glitches in most patches, while multiplayer still has unfixed issues from back when the game launched.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Red Dead Online vs. Grand Theft Auto Online. The fandom is really divided here.
  • Like with GTA V, Single-player vs Multiplayer. Fans of multiplayer think it's superior due to custom characters and ability to play with others, while single-player fans feel it's boring and that the single-player mode does everything better. The fact that MP is the one receiving all post-release content is also a sore spot for some.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The "Slow and Steady" Dead Eye Ability Card is arguably this. During Dead Eye, the player becomes unable to move any faster than a slow walk, but in exchange, incoming headshots have the same damage as bodyshots. When paired with certain passive Ability Cards, players can become killing machines. As a side bonus, it hard counters the meta PVP weapon, the Varmint Rifle, since its bodyshot damage is next to nothing, instantly negating the one advantage said rifle offers (highly accurate headshots).
    • Subsequent updates have nerfed the card and headshots now do more damage than bodyshots, making it a bit more balanced.
  • The Collector role is definitely this. You get hundreds of dollars and a thousand exp for every collection you sell. Each collection can be completed in less than half an hour if you use fast travel and have a fast horse. It's possible to earn thousands of dollars and level up several levels a day if you spend time to do all of the collections. To balance this, artifact locations are changed every day and players need to buy expensive maps to find them. However, instead of being changed randomly, artifact locations are just changed into another set of fixed locations, meaning that experienced players can accurately predict the current locations of artifacts based solely on their past locations. This trick eventually leads to multiple groups of players documenting the possible location of every artifact and create a map to show where everything is on any given date. With this map in hand, finding artifacts become a breeze and many players have accumulated money and experience in days that others have to grind in weeks. Even for players who consider the use of the map to be cheating, the collector role is still very profitable, just a bit more time-consuming and costly.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The story mode, at the time of the beta was a scant eight missions, and four of them are dependent on the player's current honor level. At least this can be excused somewhat with the production values of said missions, having fully voice acted and motion captured cutscenes, which is something its predecessor GTA Online only reserved for heists and purchasing new properties (and almost all of that game's missions were prefaced with nothing but a text message).
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: The Frontier Pursuits update is this for some people as all the roles basically act as a supplement to what people were already doing prior to the update - shooting up enemy gangs (Bounty Hunter), hunting animals (Trader), and treasure hunting (Collector). The Trader role's Cripps Trading Co. is doubly this for veteran players of Grand Theft Auto Online as it recycles the "supply business to make it produce sellable goods" formula that was used in that particular game with practically every major content update.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "You have been disconnected from Red Dead Online due to a fault in Rockstar game services" ^Explanation The servers are very unstable, and this message in particular is seen fairly often. Players have since started making parodies of it.
  • "50% off from carrots and beans" ^Explanation Rockstar adds discounts and other bonuses to the game almost weekly, but the decision to lower the price of some the cheapest food items in the game was seen as a particularly odd one - especially as this happened during the content drought of 2020.
  • RIP Red Dead Online^ExplanationThe #SaveRedDeadOnline hashtag was trending for a few months in 2022 due to a lack of substantial updates from Rockstar for roughly a year. Later that year, Rockstar posted this article on Rockstar Newswire, which stated their future plans for RDO was smaller updates to existing game modes and monthly events for the game's various Roles on a rotating basis. Smaller updates pushed by a skeleton crew of developers is often an indicator of an online game about to go defunct — RDO fans took this interpretation and ran with it, holding mock funerals for the game despite no obvious plans that the game was going under any time soon.
• Misaimed Fandom: Interestingly, some believe Rockstar is doing this to themselves with their focus on Red Dead Online over the single-player campaign. RDO suffers from many of the problems present in Grand Theft Auto Online, but here the setting heavily limits what can be done with it and the GTA-like over-the-top silliness just isn't possible; as such, it comes off as boring in comparison — which is not helped by Rockstar using the same update model they used for GTO for 4-5 years. Their apathy towards the single-player mode also comes off as odd, as while many understood why this happened with Grand Theft Auto V^note They didn't expect Online to be as popular as it became, they had some internal trouble at the time and the single-player story was seen as an Excuse Plot by many anyway it makes much less sense when the single-player campaign is widely seen as one of their best, causing many to wonder just why they are trying to push a So Okay, It's Average cowboy rehash of GTA Online over some of their best work, especially since the player-base of RDO is nowhere as big as the one GTO still has to this day. And this is not even mentioning the fact that GTO holds the honor of being the first game of its scope and style, but RDO has no such novelty and as such suffers from Uniqueness Decay.
• Misblamed: Many single-player fans blame Red Dead Online for taking priority in post-launch content and bug fixes, but Online players have since pointed out that Online itself is full of glitches, some of which make parts of the game unplayable, some of which have been there from launch, and the entire thing is still plagued by server issues. Even if it were Rockstar's favorite, they'd still be doing a terrible job with it.
• Never Live It Down: The server issues that persist from update to update combined with the relative lack of content have not helped the game's reputation, to say the least. Many a player have simply stopped playing after one too many disconnects, especially if it led to losing a mission.
• The Scrappy: Harriet from The Naturalist update hasn't been very popular with players, mostly because of the simple fact that she punishes the player for killing too many animals...in a game where hunting is one of the core mechanics. The way she does this is by drugging the player with her pheromone spray and causing them to pass out and wake up a little far away from her tent. She will then proceed to not attend the player for the next five or ten minutes, which pretty much completely locks you out from the update itself. Needless to say, she's been getting a lot of spite from the Red Dead Online community and the fact that her personality is this very loud Cloudcuckoolander isn't really resonating well with some of them either, to the point that players are deliberating killing animals and showing up to her tent dressed in their fur and throwing carcasses at her out of spite.
  • A subreddit has been made entirely dedicated on the hate for her character.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Good luck trying to find Madam Nazar if you want to sell her collectibles. She doesn't have a fixed location, meaning that she could be anywhere on the map. It wouldn't be so bad, if the game would actually show her location on the map. Oh, and she will change locations daily, meaning that players would have to be kept up to speed on where she is everyday. That being said, her location is consistent across all players, so it is very easy to look for her daily location on the internet.
  • Killing too many animals with the Naturalist role activated means that Harriet essentially locks you out of being able to interact with her for about five-ten minutes. This is bad enough for the role itself, since it means you essentially can't do anything towards completing part of the game you paid for, but it's made worse by the fact that hunting is a vital mechanic of the game both in several other roles (it's the whole core of the Trader role, for a start) and just in general (hunting provides several valuable items for crafting and health purposes essentially for free). Furthermore, Harriet doesn't distinguish between you actively hunting animals and you accidentally killing them, which is almost guaranteed to happen as small animals tend to find themselves underfoot while you're riding your horse with you being completely unaware until it's too late. Nor is self-defence considered valid, so be prepared to either let every wolf, mountain lion or bear you come across tear you apart for free or face lockouts for the simple crime of not wanting to have your face torn off. All this essentially means means that in order to complete this role, you essentially have to either self-lock yourself out of playing a huge part of the rest of the game or face numerous frustrating delays that prevent you from doing so. And it doesn't help that Harriet, already The Scrappy as discussed above, comes off as incredibly obnoxious and judgmental when locking you out. Needless to say, the Naturalist role isn't hugely loved by the players for numerous reasons.
• Sequelitis: A segment of players feel this way about the game compared to Grand Theft Auto Online. As detailed under It's the Same, Now It Sucks!, the repetitive nature of Rockstar's Online DLC releases is causing people to become numb to it, which combined with the already smaller playerbase and a general disinterest in PVP means some people find the game to be too barren, grindy and barebones to stay interesting. The game also lacks the novelty and uniqueness factors of GTA Online, and as such comes of as a less interesting, cowboy rehash of it.
• Tainted by the Preview:
  • The beta had the fandom up in arms due to what is perceived to be a massive progression grind combined with an extremely stingy economy. Players typically only earn $3-$5 per mission, and they have to constantly spend cash on survival items to keep their characters in optimum performance. Combined with the fact that unlockables can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and this means a player would have to grind for an excessive number of hours to unlock an item for cash. Not only that, but the game's premium currency, gold bars, can either be bought with real money or earned slowly in the game by collecting 100 gold nuggets. In the beta, it takes around 8 hours of gameplay to earn one gold bar, but most of the gold items cost multiple gold bars. Many fans have decried this grind as a deliberate move on Take Two and Rockstar's part to drive more microtransaction sales. This has died down considerably after the first patch which changed the economy so missions give out more and the more expensive items cost less, making the game easier for everybody involved.
  • The Moonshiner update was this to some as it seems to be an another rehash of the DLC model Rockstar has been using for the last 4-5 years. To make matters worse, Rockstar's decision to release it and GTA Online's Casino Heist just a few days apart caused some to question this decision, since the latter is a major, flashy heist that finally shakes up the formula — that no doubt will overshadow the Moonshiner update.
• That One Level: The Legendary Bounty hunt for Philip Carlier is frustrating as hell. The first part of the hunt is simple enough: shoot the hallucinations of Carlier before they can One-Hit Kill you with their machete. Thankfully, they only come one at a time, and the drugs you're doped with wear off after a while. Then comes the hunt for Carlier proper, which entails wading through swamps, dealing with machete and bow-wielding goons, and worst of all, attack alligators. A single bite will kill you on the spot, and when you have one of these surprisingly agile predators bearing down on you, you're not gonna have a lot of time to hogtie Carlier (if you're trying to bring him in alive) and load him on your horse.