Kiss goodbye to your social life – this is how long it’ll take you to complete 'Red Dead Redemption 2'

When Red Dead Redemption landed in 2010 it was an instant smash. Gamers just couldn’t get enough of all that good gun-slinging action and the game is regularly selected as one of the greatest of all time.

And – try not to wet yourself – the latest in the Red Dead franchise, Red Dead Redemption 2, is now just days away.

Here’s the synopsis of the new game to get you properly pumped:

America, 1899. The end of the Wild West era has begun. After a robbery goes badly wrong in the western town of Blackwater, Arthur Morgan and the Van der Linde gang are forced to flee. With federal agents and the best bounty hunters in the nation massing on their heels, the gang must rob, steal and fight their way across the rugged heartland of America in order to survive. As deepening internal divisions threaten to tear the gang apart, Arthur must make a choice between his own ideals and loyalty to the gang who raised him.

And this latest Rockstar game, we’re delighted to inform, is going to be absolutely massive. In fact, the main gameplay is expected to take around 65 hours to complete.

To put that in perspective, if you devote three hours every day to the game, it’ll take you three solid weeks to make it to the end. Basically, then, your friends and family are probably going to assume you’ve either died or joined some sort of nefarious sex cult.

Speaking with Vulture, Rockstar writer Dan Houser said the main story is 2,000 pages long and that making the game required 2,200 days of motion-capture with 1,200 actors.

Houser even explained how he and the team behind the game put in back-breaking, ridiculously excessive hours to finish the project. “We were working 100-hour weeks [several times in 2018],” he said.

It is by all accounts, an incredible undertaking with an incredible attention to detail. The final game will feature more than 200 species of animals and also, oddly, extremely realistic horse testicles. Here’s hoping the rest of it lives up to the hype!

You can play Red Dead Redemption 2 when it comes PlayStation 4 and Xbox One systems on 26 October, 2018. 

(Image: Rockstar)