Given that Dark•Heritage Mk. IV was heavily inspired by westerns, it shouldn't be surprising that I'd been looking forward to Red Dead Redemption 2 for a long time. I never played the first one (the Xbox 360 and PS3 was the generation we skipped in our house) but I really enjoyed Gun on the original Xbox, and I was keenly interested in Red Dead Redemption, even though I never played it.
My youngest son was so excited that he spent his own money, hard-earned by spending the summer at a farm picking, sorting and selling crops, on pre-ordering this way back in August, I think. He got the Deluxe Edition with a fair number of pre-order bonuses. It looks like it'll have been worth it. We've had it since release day, so about a week and a half now, I guess.
He's played it probably the most, of course, but this is probably the most popular game in our house, pretty much ever. I haven't played video games much beyond an occasional sit down with some Street Fighter as a stress reliever in many years, and I'm playing it. My other son who's at home still seemed a bit reluctant to get into it, and he himself was big into Spiderman PS4, but he's now finished that (including the first DLC which just came out) and he's playing it. Even my daughter, who doesn't play very many video games, but who is really a big fan of the Zelda series, and was especially primed for this type of game because of Breath of the Wild which was similarly open world format, is playing it. The only person in our house who isn't playing it is my wife, who literally hasn't ever turned on the PS4 in the two years that we've had it and probably hasn't played a video game since Dr. Mario way back in 2001 or 2002 or so.
If you haven't played this game yet, and that may not be surprising because it's still less than two weeks old, you should. It really will raise the bar in terms of open world and NPC sophistication, among other things.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLH8sgqaTeYpfT3sb2BVDlgrsoRWj6Mxd
As an aside, I've had the original Red Dead Redemption soundtrack for a long time, and it's on my list of "approved" soundtrack elements for the Dark•Heritage setting. For whatever that's worth (not much).
As another aside, a funny side effect of having the game is that my youngest son now really wants to go on a hiking trip with me out west to see some of the territory that's kinda sorta modeled in this game. Much of the territory that you play in for the first many hours (after you do the tutorial stuff up in the snowy mountains) closely resembles the Wildcat Hills of western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming, and the mountains that you also spend a fair bit of time in wandering around (not the really snowy stuff, but the Eastern Grizzlies) have much of the feel of the Wind Rivers, the Beartooths, or perhaps the Medicine Bow and Laramie Mountains (which would have been relatively close to the Wildcat Hills. I think he'll be particularly intrigued wandering around Scots Bluff National Monument; which is a good couple hour stop on the way further west, but which will look to him (and to me; I've actually been there twice) after playing through the Heartlands section near Valentine.
Speaking of close; I've read some ridiculous reviews here and there; one in IGN, I think, or maybe Gamespot or CNET or something like that, seemed to suggest that this game is literally nearly as big as the American West, and is only "sorta" compressed. This is absurd. The entire area of the map, which admittedly is quite big for an open world story type game, is still only comparable in really to scale size to a modest sized county in a more populated part of the US where counties are modestly sized geographically. It does feel really big, but it's not actually really big when compared to the prototype; i.e., real life.
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