Released in 2018, Red Dead Redemption 2 is an open-world western action-adventure. Developed by Rockstar Games, Red Dead Redemption 2 was a massive success for the company, earning a 97 Metacritic score, making it tied for the highest-rated game on last-generation consoles.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has been praised for its sprawling open-world, poignant story, and sophisticated physics system. This physics system, called Euphoria, was a game animation middleware solution created by the company NaturalMotion that Rockstar first used in Grand Theft Auto 4, integrating it into its in-house RAGE game engine. This engine and physics system has since been used and updated in every game that the company has released since then. Thanks to Red Dead Redemption 2’s advanced physics, dynamic AI, and the game’s responsive world, the massive western features plenty of emergent gameplay and situations that are highly impressive and unique.
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One Reddit user named EyeOfDeath69 has managed to capture a clip of one of these dynamic game events in Red Dead Redemption 2. In the short video, EyeOfDeath69 is low on health while in a gunfight in one of the game’s towns. After dropping an enemy while in dead eye mode, they decide to charge towards another. Upon reaching the next enemy, EyeOfDeath69 takes a bullet to the side of their chest, killing them and sending them spinning from the impact and momentum. With their pistol-carrying arm outstretched as they fall to their final resting place, EyeOfDeath69 fires their revolver directly into their killer’s forehead, violently executing him, despite already being dead themself.
The clip has been highly successful on the Red Dead Redemption subreddit, earning over ten thousand upvotes. Various other Reddit users are praising the clip for its wild string of events and recounting other times that they had killed someone after their own death. Community members are poking fun at the outlandishness of the event and naming the clip the greatest death cam ever.
While realistic physics aren’t necessarily needed for a title to be fun, they do go a long way towards making game interactions dynamic, unique, and even hilarious. Proper physics can also make a game world feel more immersive and believable to a player. Both Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto 5 certainly benefit from having an advanced physics implementation like Euphoria in Rockstar’s RAGE engine.
Of course, Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t the only game with realistic physics. EA’s Battlefield series is highly regarded for its destruction physics, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed also used Euphoria to great effect. Still, between its character death animations, horse muscle simulation, and snow deformation, Red Dead Redemption 2 might very well have the most impressive physics yet seen in a AAA title, and EyeOfDeath69’s clip is a great example of that.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.