Red Dead Redemption

[Drakul]

A quick synopsis

The game is set in 1908; it focuses around a former outlaw, John Marston, who is sent across the troubled American Frontiers to help in bringing the rule of law. The game will utilize open world gameplay similar to the Grand Theft Auto series with sandbox environments and free-roaming ability. The environments will include frontier towns, prairies, and mountain passes. Realistic horses utilizing the Euphoria physics will play a major part of the game's transport, and there will be over 40 different types of animals that can be hunted and realistic weather changes including seasons and the ability to ride trains to go to certain places faster than free roaming.

A quick run down of what I know so far:
- The biggest world Rockstar has ever created. It's 3 times the size of GTA IVs map
- Day and Night cycles and season changes.
- 40 types of animal to hunt and tame. Each type of animal will have various levels, whatever that means.
- When hunting animals, you can skin them and sell the skin on for cash. Animals also hunt other animals and will obviously attack you to.
- Weapons sit on your character and don't just appear from bottomless pockets like in GTA.
- One weapon being talked about a lot is the Lasso, which is on your belt. You use it to tame wild horses and hogtie people. Hogtying is helpful if you are bounty hunting. Screw up taming a horse and it drags you across the ground.
- The missions wont be as numerous as GTA but each mission will be longer. Because of this, missions will have check points through out the mission.
- You can travel by foot, horse, stage coach or steam train. You can skip a journey on a train similarly to how you could skip a GTA cab ride.
- The game is built using the RAGE and Euphoria engines so everything will react as believable as possible.
- There will be a feature called "Deadeye mode" which slows down everything around you. You can level up this mode and eventually able to select multiple targets and shoot them in quick succession. You can also shoot guns out of peoples hands or hats off heads.
- Players can enter buildings. NPC go about business and can be seen entering and leaving buildings. NPCs also talk about your actions.
- Minigames including five-finger filet. NPCs will challenge you.
- Online multiplayer
- Duels
- Missions have more variation. One part of one mission sees a girl being hanged. you can either fight through enemies to release her or shoot the rope down. Another mission sees you escorting a stage coach.
- Shooting up a small town turns it into a ghost town for a while. Larger towns will repopulate faster. Dead bodies wont disappear. They stay and have vultures swoop down to feed on them.

The game isn't due out until 2010. It was due out in November but has been pushed back to 2010. I'm looking forward to it and hope it's as fun as it sounds. Who else is looking forward to it?

Edit: the official site still says Fall 2009 for a release date.