EFFORTPOST [EFFORTPOST] The Epilogue John Rabbit Hole - Red Dead 2 Drama

!zoomers !g*mers !effortposters How does a fanbase obsessed with detail take it when their precious character uses the wrong model? Not well.

NOTE: All thinks to the drama will be provided at the bottom of the page, which will include screenshots of what those people are made about, to make it more convenient to find whatever I cite or quote

Prologue

Red Dead Redemption II is the 2018 prequel to the 2010 cowboy game Red Dead Redemption. A famous element of the games is when you beat the main campaign your playable character is permanently killed off and you play the rest of the game as another, supporting character from the story. In Red Dead 1 your main character, John Marston, is replaced by his son Jack with a three year time skip. In RDR2 being a prequel your main character is replaced by John Marston in an eight year time skip

With an ambitious element such as this a lot of resources goes into providing a shocking twist to the player. New animations, models and voice lines have to be made with this in mind because it being an open world game there are side missions that still have to be playable once the game is complete, and in the case of RDR2 the playable epilogue is essentially its own eight hour campaign. The original game didnt have much it needed to replace in comparison, essentially just have Jack’s VA do some line reads, but the second game has thousands of hidden secrets as well as in depth character customization down to dynamic beard and hair growth that had to be remade or adjusted for this new character. However, the developer’s clever workarounds to give the player as much playable features in the transfer has led to the most obscure tantrums I’ve ever seen a pocket of a fanbase experience

Chapter 1 - rDead rDemption

So to understand the reactions I will show you first I will answer: what is wrong with John Marston in the second game? It depends on which version of the game you have, if you are playing on an unpatched physical copy you have the definitive version of Epilogue John Marston on consoles and the people who decry the problems with him dont have as much to say negative about him. Aside from three different elements:

• 1: John’s hair is a jet black recolor of Arthur Morgan’s, the playable protagonist for the first three quarters of the game. John’s hair in lore is a shaggier, messier do than Arthur’s and is more of a dark brown than a jet black

• 2: John’s facial structure is different from both his pre-Epilogue younger self and his RDR1 older self. I will provide some screenshots

• 3: His “Cowboy” outfit from RDR1, unlocked in the epilogue, has some inconsistencies with how it looks. Notably a white undershirt instead of a brown one

• There are also general criticisms people have of John being light on details that Arthur has: like for example, Arthur has a different set of animations for various inclines while walking and the only nuanced animations John does have are reused from Arthur. John also uses the same vomit sounds as Arthur, his own vomit sounds are in the files but go unused

I have presented these three criticisms as unbiasedly as possible, just to show you what these people think of the best possible version of the character without mods. We can dispute these if we want but the point isn’t their validity just yet

However, over time the game being a modern AAA release got patches to address issues with the game, provide QoL improvements and add new content to its Online multiplayer sidemode. The unfortunate result of this is in the process of addressing various clipping issues with John’s model the devs took shortcuts to ensure hair, clothes and other elements wouldn’t break visually whilst pulling the Epilogue John model away from his lore accurate appearance. Within these patches the various new problems include:

• 1: John’s model being resized and remade to be more of a copy of Arthur’s. John is meant to be a leaner man but in the newer versions his body is just Arthur’s with his face and textures pasted onto it

• 2: A now more inaccurate rendition of his “Cowboy” outfit from RDR1, which you unlock within the epilogue. Most notably he now wears giant gloves and wide pants because the model has been resized to fit a more of an Arthur mold

• 3: Changing his facial hair, notably lightening the mustache, and perhaps even giving John arthur’s cheekbones to prevent beard clipping

• 4: Despite these attempts at fixing the issues within the day one Epilogue, there are reports that this further broke John from his clothes textures not working, him either using Arthur’s lines and animations or being treated like Arthur by NPCs on accident and finally even him no longer having working facial animation during gameplay: instead sporting a thousand yard stare outside of cutscenes

• In addition to all of the problems mentioned in the pre-patch not being fixed

So all in all now that I’ve described these issues I will give my two cents: yea when you look at the vanilla version and the modded versions it does look better, I feel like in a game that let’s you play as two people there’s a novelty factor the player will want to experience with how the characters might be different in terms of gameplay and you will probably want them to look different when playing dress up. There’s also the lore argument, it does look a little weird to paste a skinny dude’s head on a buff guy’s body when the character never looked like the buff guy when he was an NPC. However, complaints like him having a jet black recolor of Arthur’s hair dont take into account that this was done so the player could customize John’s hair to the same degree as Arthur’s, and since John has darker hair than Arthur they simply recolored it to a full black as visual shorthand for “different hair”. The hair is fully customizable and while you cant get an exact match you can get close enough. There are also various other complaints where I honestly cant tell the difference, if you told me that vomit sound was Arthur’s I’d have to take your word for it. If you told me his eyes and cheeks were messed up on the unpatched version I’d have to squint really hard to notice. There’s also a case of when you remake a character for a new generation of graphics you tend to embellish or change details in order to make it look better, his cowboy outfit doesnt look exactly like his old PS3 look but it’s also an eight year gap in technology which means it would inevitably look different in some noticeable way. You can still tell it’s his one outfit the normies would know

Now if this was just the end of it, this wouldn’t be an rdrama post. Some fans have neurodivergentally nuanced gripes with a character model, so what you may say. We all have weird OCD, I get annoyed when Agent 47’s tie clips thru his jacket in Hitman. However, if the people who had these legitimate, albeit minor, gripes simply voiced them respectfully to whoever would listen and had some self awareness regarding it they’d remain unremarkable and obscure. Just a weird detail you read on a trivia site, “oh Epilogue John is inaccurate that’s kinda neat”

However, the Epilogue John critics are a very rare breed of autism…

These people go apeshit if you dont care!

Chapter 2 - Red Dead R-sluration

The Epilogue John community has their own website, Justice for John Marston. A bizarre name for a website considering the character’s fate involving him essentially committing suicide by cop, but this is deadass a whole butt website dedicated to some video game character’s hair and textures being wrong

There are videos which try to explain these situations too, but they also devolve into petty drama by doing respond videos to their own comments and multiple follow up videos discussing this incredibly simple-to-explain issue. At one point one of these guys says if you dont care or cant tell the difference youre not a real fan and are just excusing “laziness” on the dev’s parts

They have even spammed Rockstar’s twitter feeds in order to try to get Epilogue John fixed

There are multiple youtube channels and youtube hashtags that sprung up to support this gay movement, the channels go from general Red Dead vids to entice normies to then them alienating those normies by becoming dedicated to pooping on Rockstar and the game for not fixing Epilogue John, citing that not fixing him is due to corporate greed and there is only two avenues in business: fixing Epilogue John, or selling microtransactions. These two things cannot be done simultaneously, so therefore by ignoring this issue to these people the unpaid interns they are badgering on twitter and in the customer service tickets are planting the flag that they dont want to fix Epilogue John because that would lead to it being impossible to milk an online mode?

One channel even suggests that having John look different is false advertising and borderline criminal, even though playing as John was never a selling point

There are still, five years later, controversial reddit discussions on if Epilogue John matters or not to the point where the discourse shifts on the weekly from it being a big deal, to it being fine and then back again

And of course there are now mod projects to fix John Marston in the epilogue, which has done nothing to shut these people up. In fact, I will be a little contrarian and say the mods go too far and make him look too similar to his RDR1 or NPC self, depending on the mod. In the aim for nostalgic accuracy they end up making a character who should look significantly older/younger look way too similar to how he is pre-character development or how he is in a game with a completely different art style

Chapter 3 - Grand Theft Autism

Here's some choice quotes I've found when searching all this up

Man for a game that is touted for its detail in everything, the fact that horse balls got more attention than John Martston is really sad.

[I just can't understand why couldn't Rockstar, a multi-billionare triple A company with lots of studios, make something as simple as this ... the fact that you can't replicate one of your previous protagonist with better technology is outright insanity knowing what they're capable of.](

Sometimes I hate it when modders have to fix things that the community want the devs to fix it just shows that the community cares more about the game and the characters than the people who made the darn game but other than that it’s a really great mod

I can honestly see why most of John’s iconic outfit is different between RDR and RDR2, seeing that its a 4 year difference between the RDR2 Epilogue and the start of RDR, but did they really have to make the gloves the wrong size?

As much as I didn't mind John's appearance in the Epilogue (yes, call me a mad man), I think R* should take notes from this video. Not to fix John in RDR 2... no, they'll never do that, let's be honest with ourselves. But if the RDR 1 REMAKE TO RDR 2 ENGINE rumors are true... they can't frick this up. John NEEDS his OG look upscaled in today's graphics. Epilogue John won't be acceptable. Thank you for making this video and putting this lovely music in it as well ❤👍🏻

Uninstall and reinstall the game without updating and just play on 1.00. Johns shoulders look better his face looks better and his clothes look less like trash bags.

The devs are working on gta 6 rn so hopefully when its done they will continue working on rdr2

I don't wanna destroy your dreams or anything, but even if somehow for some reason they came back to RDR2, I don't really think they'd give a crap about fixing Michael Jackson, I MEAN! pretty boy John Morgan. Not only would they have to make a full-on accurate John face model, but they would also have to make a different hairstyle, different hair growth, body build structure, clothes refitting, etc. Plus, the people who care about this are such an obscure and mostly unknown part of the community I don't really think they'd spend time, money and effort just to satisfy what's essentially a minority.

lol

New Version suck: graphics, random events that got deleted, performance etc.

Don’t forget epilogue John looking exactly like Arthur

It's still annoying though that they didn't bother to fix John or add more content to RDR1's map through patches, like you said. They largely abandoned story mode after launch and only introduced more problems to it.

They kept patching fun glitches like the Bronte glitch (still works but they nerfed it massively) and completely abandoned some annoying ones like arthur's beard not connecting. Also they should have added some way to remove the NA sniper on your second playthrough or something after we complete epilogue 2 so that we get to experience the story the way they want us to and then do it however we like And I'm sure milking GTA online is more profitable but come on at least don't patch the good gitches 😂😂

They essentially abandoned this whole game after launch. This game got done dirty. If I had worked on this game for 10 years as a dev I’d be very upset right about now

he doesn't have his animations His volmiting sound is Arthur's He has no line for making the horse go faster His model is just Arthur 2.O His face His shoulders His body Arms Etc And his outfit is wrong

in not lying lol you just simply can't handle facts compare his epilouge body face hair etc to rdr1 and npc John

yes simpleton he doesn't look like the John from the first game neither does Abigail jack or uncle cry

Lmao rockstar should really just give us the facial expressions and stuff,even if they won’t give us the hair,what about the other stuff

Rockstar did this on purpose but not for story, they didn't do it so John can honor Arthur, they downgraded him with each update. And I don't think John's ears would lower, neck getting thicker, clothes looking goofy, broken animations, body looking like Arthur's, mustache getting bleached is not about honoring Arthur. They downgraded him in 1.00 too. You made a poor excuse to defend Rockstar.

Rockstar: you put like 8 years of effort on an amazing story and one of the best open worlds. Was it so hard to just put a little bit more effort on John? Seriously bro

Awesome video! One thing you forgot to mention is how on the recent version of the game John has Arthur's body and inflated gloves and pants cuffs. Never the less you earned a subscription

Why won't Rockstar let us play as the Chapter 1-6 John with his normal hair but instead we get John with Arthur's face model and Arthur's hair

The Epilogue would've benefitted from another delay to 2019 to finish up John's model, his unique side missions animations that were cut, removed cutscenes that made the editing feel abrupt and update RDR1's map to 1907. In the files, New Austin is marked 1899 as that's how it's supposed to look in the main story and why it's so different from the first game, they didn't have time to change it by the epilogue to look consistent with RDR1.

UGH this shows a clear lack of any desire to keep people who only play story mode happy. They are actively removing features and changing things to be worse than they were before. There are SOOOO many guns and clothes in online that should be in offline. I don't get it, they already made the models, right? The only reason to NOT add it into offline mode is so that you have to play online and probably buy gold bars in order to buy it online. Such a scummy company :( GTAV is the same. No single player DLC but hundreds of microtransactions and online only content. BOOOOO.

Am I the only one that really doesn't care about the hair?

maybe, idk, people want it because its iconic, its not just the hair people also want epilogue john to not look like arthur

Trust me, Red Dead redemption 1 is my favorite game of all time. And I still don't find the hair is being such a problem that mods are created to fix it

It’s not so much the hair it’s that epilogue John looks like Arthur, he literally uses Arthur’s body and head model that’s mainly what the mods fix, the hair and correct hair color are perks of the mod

They also decided that John should be a completely clueless dullard, who somehow lost his talents for Gunslinging, Brawling, heck, even social aptitude, and anything else of note that he possessed in RDR1. It's like he's a completely different person, instead of the steel-nerves, snappy wit and charm he displays in the first game. It's kind of disgusting what they did to a western icon. Thankfully, RDR2 is so inconsistent with the lore proceeding the events within, nothing from RDR can convince me it was ever canonical. That's their failing, not my own.

man discovers prequels include character development

Most of us did play the first game, That's why we can notice the major differences between John's RD1 game model and RD2 (epilogue) game model. During the first 5 chapters, John's design looks closer to RD1 than in the epilogue. the only difference is his youth. A lot of players noticed this and made mods on the PC to get a more RD1 accurate model by editing the younger John. Changes like darker brown hair, not the sludge grey of Rd2, and a slimmer jawline or smaller face and body frame like chapters 1 to 5 John. John in the epilogue is just a reskinned Arthur with a different face and hair colour But I assume that this was due to Rockstar not having enough time in development. They made a lot of cuts to the game in order to set an earlier release date. This would explain why John Morgan has the same body and skeletal structure as Arthur.. I hope I explained it well.

Arthur's broad shoulders, thick neck, overall more burly body - Arthur is a bigger dude than John. Also Arthur's hair and beard just recolored to black, even though they each have a completely different hair consistency. The differences are clear as day when you look at them side by side.

It's the most detailed game ever made, and they put a lot of effort into creating the most hidden details, and Rockstar didn't even work a little to make John Marston's original hair growable and put on his original body. His model is the same as Arthur's, with only John's face with Arthur's hair, and they didn't even make a vomit sound for John (when you make John throw up, you can hear Arthur's voice). That's why I don't like playing as John, I feel like playing a low-life version of Arthur Morgan instead of John Marston. Before the release of the game, I already knew that we would play John after the end of the game, but I wanted to see the same John Marston from the first game, but no... John Morgan.

Epilogue

Here's the links in question:

A comparison of John in the epilogue versus pre-Epilogue - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/ozr2et/not_my_comparison_but_this_is_how_bad_epilogue/

Comparison of modded John vs vanilla I believe - https://media.groomercordapp.net/attachments/755543425473970216/846734312799076402/ezgif-4-ac5b84a0c04c.gif?width=1196&height=676

A comparison of how John's facial animations look in the 1.00 version versus the patches - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/122onvx/i_still_wonder_why_rockstar_worsened_epilogue/

Multiple posts arguing about if Epilogue John looks bad - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/13vndlq/maybe_im_blind_but_after_all_these_years_i_still/

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/p508sm/anyone_else_notice_that_before_epilogue_john_was/h93jv40/

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/12cxe5h/how_do_people_feel_about_epilogue_john_marston/

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/pcgw6u/why_are_some_people_defending_epilogue_john/ - this one's my favorite thread it has it all

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/sgw26i/did_rockstar_finally_fix_epilogue_john/

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddeadredemption/comments/d4vdcx/another_comparison_of_npc_john_and_epilogue_john/

justice for john marston website and youtube videos -https://justiceformarston.wixsite.com/website-3

• https://youtube.com/watch?v=OmTtngELSw0

The video made by the guy saying that Rockstar did false advertising -

the guy who made the video explaining the problems who then made a response to people saying it wasnt a big deal -

• https://youtube.com/watch?v=VHeSbcD-MFg&t=454s

memes about the situation -

misc. videos complaining about the epilogue -

An article by Polygon about the debacle - https://www.polygon.com/2020/6/4/21280437/red-dead-redemption-2-john-marston-changes-patches-update-rockstar

In conclusion, it’s been about two years since Red Dead’s last Story Mode patch and thus Rockstar have moved on to developing GTA VI and maybe even RDR3. However, these nerds show no sign of stopping. I’ve found new channels talking about this all the time and there are still videos as recent as a couple of months from these old channels which are still complaining about this. Godspeed to them, I see. Their autism is very entertaining