Red Dead Redemption II is out now and we’ve been slowly combing the frontiers of the dying Wild West. Rockstar Games have made not only a beautiful open world to look at, but also a deep world that you can soak in and lose yourself in. Sometimes.
But one hard hitting moment I had experienced is the death of my first main horse.
Early in the game, your character Arthur Morgan found a horse in a stable and it served as the introduction to how horses work. It’s easy to map that horses are Red Dead’s equivalent to cars from GTA, but there are more than just that. These horses are not just a vehicle, they’re animals, full of life and emotion. You need to treat it right, just like you treat yourself as they too have health and stamina meters and cores, which governs the regen rate of the meters.
As the story progresses, I encountered quite a few conversations about horses. One was about how Arthur just lost his horse not long after the events the game started us with. There were conversations with other gang members about their prized ponies now gone from the world. And even a few stranger encounters that lost their horses in front of their eyes. Each time, Arthur is all sympathetic, he too has experiences such losses. It hurts, but we all move on with life.
Never have I expected such foreshadowing.
You see, you can get attached to your main horse immensely in Red Dead Redemption II. Alongside the health and stamina, you need to established a good bond with to not only unlock new abilities, but also how fast it can go. To treat the horses well, you have to give them food occasionally, calm it down if it gets agitated and give them some good old patting down or a scrubbing to keep it all clean.
Each time you do this, Arthur bolts out some kind words for the horses. He’ll call it according to its gender. The first main horse you find is a male Tennessee Walker, and you ca make Arthur say “Boy!” way more times than God Of War’s Kratos have through that entire game. Pressing down the left thumbstick while on a male horse might as well be called the dedicated boy button. It’s used to calm an agitated horse down but in quieter times, you can hear many variations of “Boy..” being uttered.
You can also customise your horses. Give them some fancy manes to make them your own. Rename it to what you like. As long as that horse have your saddle place on it, it will come to you when you whistle (with some limits to its range of course) or retrievable when you go to a horse stable.
As alluded earlier, horses have health and they can die. Interestingly, there are horse reviver tonics sold in shops which in theory will be able to raise it back from the dead. Unfortunately, I never got test this due to the way my first horse death happened.
It was night time. Arthur needed to steal an oil wagon as part of a robbery setup. So this is not a proper mission with checkpoints. I did not realise it has armed guards around the location I blindly barged in and they started shooting.
One of the oil wagons then start moving out and fleeing and I panickingly decided to give chase while the dozen or so guards are shooting all over me. I got close enough to jump into the oil wagon and steal it while it’s moving but alas, the guards shot the wagon.
It exploded. Arthur was dead. But more importantly, the horse was dead.
Arthur respawned as usual. The horse did not. What was left of it is the main saddle, which when placed to another horse makes it your main horse.
Should that situation be in a mission, the game will reload to the checkpoint, no harm done. If the horse died I could in theory revive it back with the Horse Reviver tonic. But by dying and respawning, the dead corpses all despawn as a result, making no way to have it live again.
So long, boy.
At least the game compensated me somewhat. When I respawned again there was a new horse waiting, and it was a better breed than my previous one, with better speed. I saddled it up, make it my main horse and now I’m hearing the many, many ways Arthur say “Girl..”.
But like the game’s many conversations alluded to me, the death of a good, loyal horse you bonded with is tough. But life goes on and you’ll find another horse of to bond and share adventures with. As annoying as it sound that horse have permadeath, it made me care more about horses. It made me cherish the time I had with them. It also made me pay more attention to them.
Some actions have consequences, and horse permadeath in Reed Dead Redemption II is an intended design choice, one of the many that helps sell that this is a living, open world. To a certain extent.
We will have to see how Red Dead Online will handle your main horse. Imagine online trolls just there to murder your prized pony, the ones you sank money and time to make it good, all gone in one terrible gunshot. Or explosion. In Red Dead Redemption’s multiplayer, you can buy deeds that will respawn a horse of the same breed. We will see if this is the case when Red Dead Online launches in beta sometime this November.
Stay tuned for our full review of Red Dead Redemption II soon.