The game engine is a nervous creature, and as soon as it hesitates for a second with loading assets, the hero of a western goes to the fire wearing his mother’s clothes.
Usually this ends up reloading the save, but sometimes a bug hits the perfect frame, and then the grim story of the fall of the Van der Linde gang turns into a comedy.
That’s exactly how it is it turned out one of the players Red Dead Redemption 2 on Xbox: after loading the save, Arthur Morgan found himself completely naked, and the dialogues continued to go on around him as if nothing had happened.
Dutch looked at his ward with his signature piercing gaze, which made the scene take on a completely unexpected sound.
The community, naturally, got tired of jokes about “I have a plan” and added a line from the game to the screenshot:
Well, I’ll be damned, Arthur, I’m looking at a real miracle.
Technically, there is nothing mystical here. Clothes in Red Dead Redemption 2 – these are separate models with their own textures that are put on top of the character’s base body, and if asset streaming fails, the game simply does not have time or cannot load the required set. What remains is a “blank”, emphatically faceless: Rockstar sculpts naked models without anatomical details, so there is no scandal even with the most offensive glitch.
Arthur is far from a pioneer in this sense. Back in 2019, players massively caught John Marston naked in the epilogue, when in cutscenes at Beecher’s Hope Ranch he appeared without a single thread on his body, and Rockstar corrected this with patches more than once.
The bug loves precisely the moments after loading a save or switching between chapters, when the engine juggles dozens of sets of models at once.
The solution is quite boring: reloading the save, completely restarting the game, changing the costume through the horse’s saddlebag or wardrobe in the camp, and on consoles sometimes resetting the cache helps. On the Xbox Series, the situation is aggravated by the fact that the game works through backward compatibility and has not received a full next-gen patch, so rare oddities with loading assets are still encountered there. However, an extra reason to send Arthur to the bath in Valentine is also not bad.
