The making of Red Dead Redemption 2

The final script for Red Dead Redemption 2’s main story was about 2,000 pages. But if he were to include all the side missions and additional dialogue, and stack the pages, Dan estimates the pile “would be eight feet high.” Bringing the script to life meant 2,200 days of motion-capture work — compared with just five for Grand Theft Auto III — requiring 1,200 actors, all SAG-AFTRA, 700 of them with dialogue. “We’re the biggest employers of actors in terms of numbers of anyone in New York, by miles,”
...tells me that “even the peds [RDR2’s non-playable characters] have 80-page scripts — each.”
...before stopping inside the studio where many of the game’s 700 voice actors have recorded lines for Red Dead Redemption 2. Near the control panel, Dan recalls a time when he directed actors himself. He and Burt Reynolds had an argument about the direction of a scene from 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It ended with Reynolds yelling, “Get the limey out of here.”

“I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, poor bugger,” Dan says, “but we don’t bring in name actors anymore because of their egos and, most important of all, because we believe we get a better sense of immersion using talented actors whose voices you don’t recognize.”
The acting for Red Dead Redemption 2’s story mode is now complete, but as release day approaches, five hours of the 65-hour game are dumped. At one point, protagonist Arthur Morgan had two love interests, but “we decided one of them didn’t work,” says Dan. And whole missions were removed because “they were never going to work technically or be quite slick enough, or they felt superfluous. We removed a mission on a train where you had to deal with bounty hunters, because it was fun at first, but then it wasn’t. This part of the process is always about compromise and horse trading.