From the gusts of wind blowing through the grasslands, to the clouds scudding around the mountain tops casting shadows on the plains below, the atmosphere is a complete inter-connected system.” “Since the connection between sky and landscape so important to us,” Garbut said, “we wanted to get away from the old methods of atmosphere rendering, where there was a theatrical layering between the world and the sky, and to make it something much more tangible, so the player can almost feel the wind, rain, and mist on their face as they ride across the landscapes.

Some of this may be a byproduct of a desire to establish a sense of literal atmosphere within the game’s Western setting. It’s an interesting statement, though, because in so many ways, Red Dead Redemption 2 seems more clearly inspired by a particular period of fine art than any game I’ve ever seen.Įditors Note: We’ve added a video where we further explore Red Dead Redemption 2’ s connection to the Hudson River School of Art, including an interview with Wendy Ikemoto, Associate curator of American Art at the New York Historical Society. Numerous systems in our lighting, cameras, weather and time of day come together with the player’s actions and the world and characters we have built to create something unique and constantly changing.” We are not building a passive experience. “We were building a place, not a linear or static representation, so while in the past we had looked to both, it no longer seemed as necessary or relevant. “Generally we were not looking to film or art for inspiration,” Rockstar North art director Aaron Garbut told me via email. However, it’s long been clear that Rockstar Games wants Red Dead Redemption 2 to stand apart from its contemporaries with regard to its presentation - assuming, that is, the studio considers other games its contemporaries. For years, color grading has been an aggressive solution to a coherent visual presentation in games, mimicking the style of films from visually oriented directors like Tony Scott and Ridley Scott. Bokeh-based depth of field, which emulates not just the behavior of a lens but the shape of its aperture blades, is often a measure of how advanced a game engine’s visual feature set is. Video games live in a world of cameras and cinematic terms, where the goal over the last decade has been an emulation of film and optical technology.

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