Red Dead Redemption 2 is really Westworld at your fingertips

Westworld and Red Dead’s unconventional stories are much more intertwined than we realized.

We’re coming up on two weeks since Red Dead Redemption 2 had the largest opening weekend in recorded human history, and if entertainment blogs and YouTube funnies are any indication, this thing will haul in more money than any train heist by the time it’s all said and done.

Rockstar has been an innovator seemingly forever, now, and while the conglomerate has given us groundbreaking entertainment such as the Grand Theft Auto Series and L.A. Noir, Red Dead 2 takes it to the next level with almost complete and total immersion. Although there is a narrative at play in the grand scheme, it’s the mundane actions such as washing your horse or cooking the deer you just downed with four clicks of a revolver that makes story authentic.

But all these petty actions that we take for granted in real life set the stage for the most impulsive reflexes that we know we can’t act out in this one. Things like shooting someone square in their mug because they looked at your avatar cross-eyed or running yourself and your horse off a cliff because what are the real world implications? Just wake up a horse, gun in holster, wipe the sleep from your eyes and saddle up again, pardner.

Flipping from white hat to black one quicker than a waffling politician, the Westworld intro may as well be blaring as I tear through the dusty towns and provoke all the reckless gunslingers and their itchy trigger fingers. But it’s a funny loop that opens within the mind to think, like Westworld, perhaps Red Dead 2 is telling us the same things: It’s not about the experience, it’s what we learn about ourselves.

More from Gaming

Red Dead Redemption 2, however, didn’t take its cues from Westworld. In fact, it was the other way around. Executive producers Lisa Joy Nolan and Jonathan Nolan discussed at the show’s New York Comic Con panel how the original Red Dead Redemption served as part of the inspiration for Westworld, explaining, “The way that we act in our simulations is not how we act in the real world.”

They may not be exact but the connections correlate between the show and the game, with npc’s and hosts drawing guests into precarious journeys. Something as inconsequential as a card game, or something as unthinkable as a murderous jailbreak are all welcome in these simulations. Free will is the only true rule that applies.

The biggest difference, the one that sets the two apart, is also that free will. In Westworld, we can only watch and judge as years and years of learned civilized discourse are peeled away by the most gruesome compulsions. In Red Dead 2, we can put these notions to the test, for better or worse, and find out how we come out on the other side.