Red Dead Redemption 2 protagonist Arthur Morgan often finds himself rescuing the NPC civilians of the Wild West from various figures of ill-intent, and now it seems like one of them has returned the favor in the most bizarre way. This was reported yesterday, as one Reddit user posted a clip of a brief confrontation with a hostile NPC, only for another to inexplicably come from out of nowhere and kill the would-be assailant in glitch-induced cold blood.
Like many of Rockstar Games’ open-world titles, the landscape of 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2 is vast and teeming with NPC characters going about their AI-mandated lives, whether as decent people just looking to slip by in the wild setting of the 1899 American South or hardened criminals looking to size themselves up to the game’s central protagonist. As Van der Linde gang member Arthur Morgan, players can choose to either help or harm these bots, and Red Dead Redemption 2 even provides random events and boss encounters that Arthur can come across during his travels – and it seems not all of these were devised by the developers.
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An article on Kotaku describes the tale of Reddit user DMarlow310, who was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 when an NPC approached him looking for a fistfight upon exiting a building. Suddenly, a second NPC walked up behind the first, knocked him in the back of the head and slit his throat before walking along his merry way, as the NPCs around him panicked at the killing they just bore witness to. Since DMarlow310 first uploaded his clip of the incident, many have speculated as to what caused the glitch that drove the seemingly passive civilian to take the already loose law of the Old West into his own hands, with the most likely answer being that since DMarlow310 neither started the initial fight nor struck back, the game registered it as an assault and a civilian NPC stepped in to assist the player. However, that still doesn’t explain why it was this particular NPC out of the crowd of much closer onlookers nor the lethal force he used.
In a game as large and complex as Red Dead Redemption 2, glitches and bugs are certain to come up, either as cheats that RDR2 players have exploited for infinite money or strange occurrences shared on forums. Fields of dead horses have appeared out of nowhere, NPCs have taken off sliding wildly in the mud, and hackers have even inserted two-headed skeletons to attack players in the game’s online mode. Most of these can be explained by a misplaced fragment of code or the physics engine failing to register a wall, yet DMarlow310’s encounter remains an enigma.
Still, it is indeed amusing to see such a random occurrence in Red Dead Redemption 2, and the seemingly out of the blue act of violence the NPC in DMarlow310’s clip commits does indeed fit with the untamed 1899 Western setting the series takes place in. Although the technical explanation for the attack is still unconfirmed, maybe fans could devise an in-universe context for the scene – like perhaps the attacking NPC was wronged by his target in the past, or he is a sort of vigilante who saw Arthur in trouble and sought to help out. Regardless of the reason, strange things continue to occur in the world of Red Dead Redemption 2, which remains one of the biggest and most well-regarded sandbox games in recent memory.
