And that's work in the sense of time, quality, and in the context of the full game. Including one on a train where you had to take out a group of bounty hunters. The revelation of the sheer size and scope of Red Dead Redemption 2 comes from a new interview with Rockstar Games' Dan Houser at Vulture that also reveals that the RDR2 script was over 2,000 pages long and includes the work of over 1,200 actors.

With full motion capture performances for virtually every face in the game, and over 700 with recorded dialogue - with even the smallest roles getting several pages. A staggering amount of work from a writing and capture perspective that involved 2,200 days of motion-capture work - highlighting the fact that Red Dead Redemption 2 has been in active development since 2011. A privilege afforded by the success of the studio's previous games - where Grand Theft Auto V has earned over $6 billion USD in sales.

As Dan notes in the feature, “We’ve poured everything we have into [RDR2]. We have really pushed ourselves as hard as we can.” Which is in reference to the ten Rockstar teams across the globe that have worked on Red Dead Redemption 2. But even with a game of this size, Rockstar cut roughly 5 hours of the main-campaign in the way a movie might excise a few scenes here and there - they either didn't work, felt superfluous, or didn't add anything meaningful to the story.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is out October 23 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.