Red Dead Redemption 2's brutal opening was supposed to be worse, but Arthur Morgan was "very, very nasty," so Rockstar Games "ended up cutting it"

Red Dead Redemption 2's opening act was already pretty tough - sludging through knee-high snow for hours is always brutal - but the game's introduction was originally going to put players, and more so protagonist Arthur Morgan, through even worse.

Rockstar Games co-founder and frequent Grand Theft Auto lead writer Dan Houser recently revealed an alternative beginning for the open-world cowboy sequel where Arthur Morgan acts "very, very nasty," but it was scrapped so as to not make the game's leading man immediately hateable.

"There was a bit at the start of RDR where [Arthur] had a baby who just died," Houser told the Lex Fridman podcast, "and we ended up cutting it, which was the right decision" because "it was too tough in some ways."

"And he was not very sympathetic to his occasional girlfriend who’d had the baby. So, it made him very, very nasty at the start, which I thought would be interesting to play around with because then it would make his redemptive arc even more interesting," Houser added, while explaining that the final version of Arthur was "still sort of tough and nasty, but he’s slightly more likable early on. That was the right decision commercially. It’s better that way."

What Houser enjoyed about the original idea was Arthur's "inability to access his emotions," which is a very big contrast to his emotional collapse nearer to the Western epic's finale. Even so, Houser thinks "the games ended up the way they were supposed to be."

Red Dead Redemption 2 overtakes Mario Kart 8 as the 4th best-selling video game of all time, boasting 79 million sales