Rockstar never builds replicas of real places; the studio assembles America as a collage of recognizable details. Snow-capped peaks coexist with swamps, and from the windy plains to the desert with cacti you can gallop in fifteen minutes, and for some reason the brain does not protest.
It was this gluing that they tried to take apart piece by piece on Reddit, where one of the players imposed cards Red Dead Redemption 2 and the first part on the real geography of the USA and Mexico.
The diagram is colored by affiliation: purple indicates lands available only in RDR1, yellow indicates territories that appeared in the sequel, and turquoise indicates areas common to both games. The result is a template that shows from which pieces of the real country Rockstar assembled its West.
The schedule came out as follows:
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Ambarino lay down on the Rocky Mountains and the northern states of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho
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The Big Valley occupied the west, from California and Nevada to Utah
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New Hanover with Valentine and Annesburg moved to the Midwest – Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Ohio
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Lemoyne went to the South, and Saint-Denis took exactly the place of New Orleans
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West Elizabeth with Strawberry and Blackwater stretches from Utah and Colorado to Texas
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New Austin with Armadillo and Tumbleweed went to Texas and New Mexico
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Nuevo Paraíso covered the northern states of Mexico along the border, and Guarma turned out to be an island in the Caribbean east of Cuba
Players are still unhappy that Arthur from the art of Red Dead Redemption 2 does not look like the game version
The most interesting thing in this layout is not even the linking of cities, but the scale. The game map occupies about 75 square kilometers, while the territory it depicts stretches for millions. Saint-Denis, with its streetcars and port grime, reads like New Orleans, but the game’s Louisiana is the size of a major park.
A separate irony in the purple zones. Nuevo Paraiso physically exists in the files Red Dead Redemption 2 like a set across the river, but you can’t get there legally, and Guarma from the sequel is generally staged as a plot corridor for a couple of hours.
