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Matt Freedman is a veteran game developer who led technical cinematic work and mission design on major Rockstar Games titles, including GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Max Payne 3, as well as on titles at EA.<\/p>\nMatt Freedman is a veteran game developer who led technical cinematic work and mission design on major Rockstar Games titles, including GTA 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Max Payne 3, as well as on titles at EA.<\/p>\n
Speaking exclusively to Eldorado.gg<\/span><\/a>, former Rockstar developer Matt Freedman has warned leakers of severe legal action over unreleased Grand Theft Auto footage, whilst noting that early leaks rarely impact a blockbuster\u2019s commercial bottom line.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Matthew Freedman<\/em><\/p>\n Freedman explained that major breaches typically stem from external partners or social engineering hacks, causing internal disruption rather than long-term financial damage. However, he cautioned that publishers enforce aggressive legal action to protect corporate IP, warning: ‘Rockstar can sue you from f***ing orbit, man. If I was a contractor, I don\u2019t think Rockstar pays you enough to be able to withstand their legal team.’<\/span><\/p>\n Beyond studio security, Freedman revealed that Grand Theft Auto 5\u2019s multi-character camera transitions required five months of technical work for a single half-second blend on Xbox 360 hardware. The system used custom transition nodes to switch between Franklin, Trevor, and Michael without causing motion sickness, with Freedman adding: ‘We were on the cutting edge of technology and it meant that we were pushing its systems absolutely to their limits.’<\/span><\/p>\n Reflecting on the unexpected trajectory of GTA 5’s commercial success, Freedman disclosed that internal expectations for GTA Online were surprisingly low before launch. ‘When we were working on GTA Online, it was an afterthought. And we were all positive it was going to fail,’ Freedman revealed, noting that QA testers initially flagged a mere four hours of content.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Despite internal doubts, post-launch updates transformed the mode into a multi-billion-pound phenomenon – driving GTA 5 past 230 million copies sold and generating nearly $10 billion in franchise revenue across a 13-year lifespan.<\/span><\/p>\n Turning to studio design, Freedman suggested Red Dead Redemption 2\u2019s pursuit of photorealism occasionally restricted player agency. Commenting on rigid mission structures, he argued that extreme realism can clash with core gameplay interactivity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n ‘People like games that are games, funnily enough,’ Freedman observed, noting that over-reliance on film conventions signals an industry-wide lack of creative confidence.<\/span><\/p>\n Photorealism in Red Dead Redemption 2<\/em><\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Have you seen the GTA 6 leaks<\/span><\/a>?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> I tried to find it, but apparently I know it’s on X. And I’m like, I don’t want to deal with X. Whatever. I’ll see GTA 6 when official media comes out. I saw some of the gameplay. A friend of mine messaged me and said he described it as looking like they clearly took GTA 5 as a base and then developed GTA 6 on that, which makes sense. I think there’s not a lot of reasons for Rockstar to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.<\/span><\/p>\n Vice City in GTA 6<\/em><\/p>\n Q:<\/span> How do individuals gain access to detailed development footage and leak it?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> That’s happened loads of times. It\u2019s a wide range. It can be a hacker, it can be a disgruntled employee, it can be an external partner. It’s like all the phone leaks, that happens. It’s eventually like someone from a case manufacturer somewhere gets the specs for the new iPhone and decides to get some internet clout from it, so this is a large project like GTA 6. They’ve got thousands of people within Rockstar and thousands of people outside of Rockstar. If all they all have access to the game, and if one of them is a leaky faucet, then they could also be hacked. I think that happened recently, when someone had gotten to them through some kind of Slack credentials, the previous leak that happened with GTA 5. But the thing I think a lot of people forget about these leaks, they’ve got almost no impact on the bottom line. Half Life 2 and Steam had their source code leaked about a year before, and Steam and Half Life 2 did fine. Before Destiny was even announced, the entire marketing media package for it got released, which was a brief that Bungie had sent to a marketing company detailing everything in the game, the story, the factions, the mechanics, everything. Bungie’s response was, “Yeah, we’re making a game called Destiny. We’ll let you know when there’s more to know.” Destiny did fine. This can be a problem when you’ve got confidentiality agreements with an external party. <\/span><\/p>\n For example, when I was at EA, it was very important that information not leak, not because we’re worried about what it would do to the game, but because it would cause FIFA or NFL or whoever the external party is to lose confidence in EA’s ability, EA security. So that’s a serious one they can definitely get behind, where this hack would come from. It was either linked internally or an external party found a weakness in Rockstar’s security. It could be either.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Is it usually a straightforward security lapse that leads to these leaks?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> It’s really hard to know because the previous leak was caused by a hack and someone’s social engineering and all that stuff. This one could be more of the same, or it could be something different. Now that I’m thinking about it, I’m guessing it would likely be an external hacker because that media is so\u2026 Anytime that you’re working on it, Rockstar probably has a watermark on any kind of footage that would tie it to a dev station, a contractor, or what have you. And Rockstar can sue you from fing orbit, man. They can sue you into the stone age. There are forms of digital watermarks and that kind of stuff. You can be very clever in these sorts of things, but also almost all that stuff is really easy to bypass. As much as people insist that if it’s hidden in the video feed, you can bypass it by just recording the screen with a camcorder. If it’s hidden in the metadata, you can copy the footage to a package with clean metadata. These are very easy ways of working around it. But if I was a contractor, I don’t think Rockstar pays you enough to be able to withstand their legal team. I would not f with Rockstar’s legal team.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Can leakers face jail time or extreme civil damages?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> I don’t think they might be able to do jail time, but certainly they could sue you for damages, and the thing as well is, as draconian as that may sound, Rockstar does have a legal responsibility there because if they do not uphold their legal defense, they compromise their ability to have legal defense down the road. So that’s very much why you don’t f*** with the legal teams of large companies, because it’s not that they have to use it or they want to use it. They kind of have to use them because then they can be in court and say, you didn’t sue this other guy, so what’s the difference here? Suing people when you feel, and that’s a tough one. As an aside, Jack Daniel’s legal team is really good at working around this kind. I mean, I’ve ever heard the stories about their legal team. It’s some really good example of a legal team working as a kind of positive marketing. And it’s just, if something happens, they generally assume best intent. They try to make it a teachable moment. They have some fun with it, but they’re also very clear: don’t do that again, or else we’re coming after you.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Do you think Rockstar would ever adopt a lighter legal approach?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> I don’t think it’s in Rockstar’s character. A lot of CEOs are very insecure. It’s hilarious. It is so funny. It’s one of those dark cosmic jokes. It’s like I’m worth a trillion dollars and my god, everyone hates me, and I have to constantly be reassuring them that I’m the toughest person around. Do you ever do any martial arts? It’s always the person with the biggest mouth that can’t take punches. It’s always the quiet**** in the corner you got to be scared of.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Having played games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with seamless customization and cinematic pause features, how easy is it to underappreciate how hard systems like that are to build?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> I played it a little bit. I spend too much time working. I don’t get to play games as much. That’s complex. It depends on how the game\u2019s set up. Games are about a lot of systems that work together. So if you’ve built your systems properly, they can just naturally start to interact with each other, and then you can kind of go from strength to strength. I feel like character customization and cinematic cameras are pretty well understood right now, but to give you an example of how challenging these things can be. So, I did those camera switches for the heist missions in GTA 5. We wanted to have a cinematic camera switch. We had to use a specialty system. That was probably about two hours of very dogged work and a lot of overtime for maybe 45 seconds of gameplay footage. Now, I’m super proud of it, but it was the bane of my existence. But it was also one of those things where, when I finally figured it out, I was getting high fives all around. I forget the name of the mission. [editor\u2019s note: The mission is \u201cThree\u2019s Company\u201d]. I think you’re trying to get someone out of a high-rise building, and you’ve got Franklin sniping, Trevor is piloting a helicopter, and Michael’s a gunner, I believe. Something along those lines. So, we have got three different points of view that we’re switching between. And the helicopter is incredibly dynamic. It can be anywhere on the map, and it can have an arbitrary rotation. And the problem, though, is that because we were going from one camera to another, the blend would inherit the camera properties. And so you’d be going from Franklin to Trevor, and Trevor’s got the helicopter upside down, and then when the camera would leave Franklin’s lips you’d be like it would cause motion sickness and people be like, ” this feels really s*****.” So the solution was we put in a special type of transition node into the camera movement. We would have, say, we start with our camera being character relative. We would then switch to world relative, which would separate it from the character. We would then connect world relative to our target destination, and then it would take those properties, and it just felt a lot smoother because you’d have a smooth transition away from Franklin. Then as we’re floating in the air, that’s when it inherits the helicopter’s rotation, and then it snaps over there, but those transitions are a second and a half long. And that was five months of work, and the solution was very simple in the end. But it was high fives all around, because the solution that I was always told was \u2018just reset the helicopter during the transition.\u2019 And I’m like, \u2018That damages the gameplay. Come on, guys.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Were any cinematics simpler to construct than they appeared to players?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> They were all pains in the ass. I don’t know what else to tell you. We were on the cutting edge of technology. Maybe there were some, but all I can remember is a late night grinding through stuff. But Rockstar is on the cutting edge of technology, and it meant that we were pushing our systems absolutely to their limits. Those transitions we had in GTA 5 on an Xbox 360, we wouldn’t see something similar until the PlayStation 5 down the road with the switches in Ratchet and Clank and in Spider-Man 2 with the portal system and that kind of stuff. And it was kind of funny when I was playing those games. I’m like, I know exactly what you’re doing because I had to do this myself. This is where you’re reducing your LODs. This is where you’re taking away player control. This is where you’re modifying the camera. This is where you’re pulling for your asset loading. This is where it\u2019s verified it is complete. This is where you’re running your exit routine. There are all sorts of tricky things with that, or just sleight of hand. But it’s also hard work. But it was a lot of fun getting to work on that stuff. It’s fun making challenging things.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Was there concern internally about the multi-protagonist design failing?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> I was very much in the technical weeds of this kind of thing. You’re so close to it, you really can’t see the forest for the trees. One of the things that was clear, and this might sound a bit like it’s going against the grain, but it was clear that we were having some narrative issues on the game. And that was kind of our biggest concern. Will having multiple protagonists work? Have we made these protagonists at all interesting characters? And if I go on a bit of a rant, the thing is I’m very proud of Grand Theft Auto 5. I think GTA 5 is very accomplished and, for the watermark of games and AAA development, they did an excellent job. However, it was clear to us that, if we’re comparing our characters versus, like, a Tarkovsky or, even like, a decent manga comic or something like that. Our characters were still quite far behind. We’re still quite generic. <\/span><\/p>\n The games industry has a bad habit of copying other things, like not just taking inspiration from it, but being like: this is Ray Liotta’s character from the movie GoodFellas. This is this specific character from the movie Heat. This is the specific soundtrack from Thief. If you listen to the soundtrack from Thief, you’re like, “Okay. So that’s what Rockstar was doing there. The same composer, same style, same approach,\u201d and this is, I think, where the industry really runs into some limitations. And that was our concern at the time. It was very well-received, but it was certainly\u2026 10 years ago, even before then, because these were issues we saw mentioned during Max Payne 3 as well, it was clear that we were running up against the limits of our storytelling capabilities and that wasn’t a technology revolution. We needed to get better at storytelling, writing, characters, and that kind of thing.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> How was character screen time and narrative focus distributed?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> Those were handled by a different department. Quite frankly, I would just get the assignments. However, looking at it as a creative project, Michael was the POV character. So, we did have multiple protagonists, but Michael was really the key protagonist. So, he gets the lion’s share of attention.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> How should multi-character systems be approached in future titles like GTA 6?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> It’d be hard for me to kind of like to give guidance, because it really depends on the project. From my personal perspective, I always believe that being modest and focused will get you further. Being focused and understanding how to work within limitations is what makes work interesting. So, I think if you’re to have extra characters, the extra characters have to serve a purpose. You can’t just assume that the feature is going to make things compelling for you. If I’ve got an ice cream restaurant and it’s failing, adding extra flavors probably doesn’t fix the issue. We might get a small bump in our sales, but quickly whatever our underlying issues were, if we had just addressed those, that would have served us much better.<\/span><\/p>\n GTA 6 features two protagonists: Jason and Lucia<\/em><\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Did you ever have to use makeshift code fixes for character transitions?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> That was my thing: doing the perfect way. I’m obsessive about small details. For these character switches, I remember there’s one where you go from Franklin to Michael, and I’m like, Franklin can be jumping, he can be reloading his gun, he can be in a car, the car can be underneath an overpass. And I just made special cases for every single one of those things. I never wanted to push the player out of the way. If the player wants to be a maniac, I still need to have the mission work. I still have to make it feel absolutely seamless. So I can’t think of anything where we took the easy way out. I certainly know that’s how some other teams would handle stuff, but I just never allowed myself that. I always felt it would be disrespectful to the players’ time if I wasn’t doing everything I could to help them have fun.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> How many created transitions ended up cut from the final release?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> We got them all done. We got them all done. That was a bit of a broken record, but I wouldn’t let them cut the content. I would just be \u201cf*** it, I will stay late. I’ll be here till 2 AM, I\u2019m going to figure this out.\u201d Put on the pot of coffee. Let’s make this happen. I certainly remember when we worked on Max Pain 3, it was clear that the project had gotten away from us and a bunch of levels had gotten cut and that kind of stuff, but that happened kind of at the executive level.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Should Rockstar have used multiple protagonists in Red Dead Redemption?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> No, I think Red Dead Redemption works better with a single protagonist. It’s again one of those things beyond my pay rate kind of thing. There’s also when you’re working on a game, you don’t really get a holistic view of the game. You’re kind of brought in to solve a specific problem. It’s like, hey, you need to set up combat for this mission, and you are told where it is in the game, if it\u2019s mid or late, but that’s about the most context you get. And then when you sit down and play the game like, okay! That’s where it fits into everything. Sometimes you do have more context, but usually also these games are so huge, no one has the entire thing in their head. It’s just impossible. Even on GTA 5, I talked to department directors and department leads about what I thought was pretty straightforward questions. I remember talking to our coding lead. I’m like, “How does our save game system work? How does it save data?” He’s like, “That was written by a previous programmer, and we inherited it from GTA 4. I don’t know exactly what the file format is. “Yeah, this guy’s got physics systems and car driving and AI and rendering, multiplayer and all this other stuff. The save file format, He’s like, “F*** it. It works.” But the thing is, he did point me in the direction of the person who would actually know. And I’m like, So, that’s why he’s a lead, because if he doesn’t know, he knows who knows.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Is there a single figure responsible for connecting all technical elements in a AAA game?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> No, there’s no single person. It’s Rockstar as an entity that understands it. This was what we’ve seen is a lot of those executives and leaders from Rockstar have gone on to do their own companies, and they’ve met with mixed results. It’s really hard to take a singular creative individual and assume that they can replicate the effectiveness of a team. And also, it’s the funny thing as well if you look at people who have a reputation for being singularly creative. They generally actually work within a regular team you just don’t hear about. In filmmaking, Steven Spielberg works with John Williams, and he’s got a specific cinematographer, he’s got a specific casting director, he’s got a specific stable of actors he likes to work with. It’s that group that works. If you take Spielberg and move him to a project where he’s working with people he doesn’t know, you usually see a huge dip in the quality. Even, like, an author, which is generally seen as a singular creative force. They generally work with a specific editor and a specific publisher who they can bounce off of and get feedback from. I think one of the worst things to do as a creative is to make your passion project. They’ll usually be the worst thing you’ve ever made. It’s uncanny. I hate working on people’s passion projects. They always suck because, in their head, it’s amazing. On the screen you’re like, “This sucks,” and they’re like, “No, you just got to keep doing it. We just got to keep doing it.” Like, I don’t know how long you want us hitting the brick wall with our heads, but yes, technically we will get through eventually, but there’s probably a better way of doing this. <\/span><\/p>\n The best creative advice I’ve heard was from Dave Chappelle in an interview. He said, sometimes the idea just locks you in the trunk of its car and drives away. And I think that’s much better. I work as a contractor now, so I talk with the executive teams. They said we have to allow the project to tell us what it wants to be. If we try to dictate it to us, to it, then we just wind up with something that feels very stilted. And yeah, it’s kind of fun just being up late. “What we could do?” You have your little a-ha moment. It’s always late at night. That was my favorite time at Rockstar: we’d be there 2:00 AM, and we’d get everything done. We’d finish for the day, and we’d all be walking to the door, and we’d be sitting there, like, saying goodbye to everyone. We’d pause, and someone would say, “You know what? What if we did this?\u201d And everyone would go back upstairs. You pull out some more coffee and say \u201cLet’s do this.” It’s really fun. I want to say crunch is complex. I think voluntary crunch can be great, allowing people to run the marathon at their speed. If you’re whipping them, you get people who are frustrated and angry, exhausted and burned out, which sucks. But I always think it’s kind of a nice thing on our project. <\/span><\/p>\n I remember when I was working at Blackbird, one of my little favorite moments is where we’re getting ready for a play test, and I was up at 1:00 a.m. just getting things ready, and I saw the art team start to come online as well, and we’re all, “So, you getting ready for the play test?” “Yeah, I realized we could redo our water shaders, and this would happen.” And they were all sitting there very tired. The play test being, “Okay, they like it! I’m gonna get some sleep.”<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Was development crunch on GTA 5 voluntary or studio-imposed?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> It was mixed. With my team, I always wanted us to have fun. And the thing is, my favorite quote is, “Work is more fun than fun.” And there, that’s not always that. If you’re sitting there, counting widgets and trying to make a game out of counting widgets, it doesn’t work. But if people understand why the work they’re doing is important, and you challenge them to do their best work possible, a lot of times I find they would just rise to the occasion. That it would become a really positive feedback loop. And that was the thing: whenever I worked on a team, I always made sure that whenever we got a claim, I always made sure, “Success belongs to the team. Failure belongs to me.” So s*** didn’t work. I’m like, “Okay, that was my bad. Sorry, guys. I f***** up. All right, this is how we’re going to fix it. I hope you guys will still trust me. Give another shot.” I think also people knew that we were making something that was going to be special, and we were going to be setting the standards for things going forward, which I think they also really liked, which is very exciting as well.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Has GTA 5’s commercial performance exceeded internal expectations?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> It’s way more. It’s much bigger than I think anyone was expecting. And, as much as I’d love to say I was a big part of that, I think that’s all GTA Online. I’ve got a couple lines of code for GTA Online. I could technically say I worked on it, but it’s the thing as well that a lot of people forget about, and this is, like, when I talk with investors and stuff, where they want GTA Online-sized success, I have to remind them. When we were working on GTA Online, it was an afterthought. And we were all positive it was going to fail. Everyone thought this thing was going to fail. I remember QA testers coming up to me because I started in QA, so I was talking with QA. Then they came up to me and said, “We’ve got four hours of content for online mode. To do everything in GTA Online, it’s four hours,” or it was something like that. It was really short, and they’re like: \u2018We are in so much trouble, and we’re all sitting there going, let’s see what happens.\u2019 We’re going to do our best job anyways. And then it took off, and then there was, to Rockstar’s credit, a fast follow with as much content as possible and just kind of keep it going. And now it’s become this phenomenon. <\/span><\/p>\n I’m really interested to see what they do with GTA 6 online. The thing that’s going to be interesting is GTA 6 Online would have started development when games as a service were huge, and it would have finished development as games as a service are crashing. So, the thing is that a lot of smart people are working at Rockstar, and I’ve got a feeling they probably saw the crash coming because the writing has been on the wall for a long time. The indifference to games as a service is not necessarily a new thing. Tons of MMOs failed. Was it the Marvel Avengers wasn’t that long ago, and that was a massive f**** smoking crater. And if ever you see a game that mathematically should have absolutely printed money, it was that Marvel’s Avengers game. But you could tell the passion wasn’t there on screen. You could tell that everything that was being done in that game was to check a box off a list. Not that people were excited or passionate about it. <\/span><\/p>\n People like art, they like creativity, like seeing people work at the edge of their capacity. It’s what we find fascinating. The example I give people is that I can watch Jackie Chan jump off of a bus or juggle telephones while trying to eat ramen all day long. You give me a CGI character doing that, it instantly becomes uninteresting. There’s no talent there anymore. You had an infinite amount of time to have those things line up, and you can control that stuff. So, it’s no longer impressive. And also, sorry, I could talk about Jackie Chan for a while. He’s great. Yeah. Yeah.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Will AI implementation impact creative quality in future AAA productions?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> I see it the other way, actually. So the current project, we’re using AI a lot. We’ve been very judicious about its use. So this is why I say I think I see the other way. All that AI is going to do is emphasize the importance of having people do stuff. It’s just that all of the AI-generated content is crappy. We’ve tried so hard. It’s all crap. And it’s overly processed food. You take a bite, you’re like, “That tastes pretty good.” Second bite, you’re like, “Okay, this sucks. I don’t like this.” That’s what AI stuff is like. First thing, you’re five seconds: “Cool. I got a big battle scene.” You’re like, “Wait a minute. That guy’s head’s on backward. There’s no clear line of intent. The composition’s all weird.” And, like you’re saying, “Okay, can we just have it focused?” You talk to the AI, “Have it focused on this character.” And it’s, “Okay.” AI doesn’t have a sense of context, so it can’t take direction or instruction very well. It appears to, but we constantly find with our AI-generated content, it just\u2026 if it’s way in the background, you don’t really look at it, it’s fine. But at that point, why don’t we just use clip art? Just get something off the asset store. I do think AI does absolutely have a place in modern development. It is very good for prototyping and whipping up very quick concepts. As, “I want to have a fight scene that looks like it’s being covered in a 1930s newspaper,” and to say, “This is kind of what it would look like,” and that took me 15 seconds. So we can try that out and then try a bunch of different ideas. You then take that, and you hand that off to a concept artist to actually get something reasonable. But it beats me fiddling around in Photoshop and trying to stick things together. But even within that, I would say I find I get my best results taking a bunch of AI stuff, taking it into Photoshop, giving it context, and then sending that out. It’s a tool in the tool belt. It’s super useful for SDK reference lookup. If I can’t remember exactly how part of a software interface works or that kind of thing, I can talk to AI and say, “F***. How the hell do I do color multiplication on this type of material node?” Because it’s either I ask AI and it takes five seconds, or I Google search and it’s five minutes. Those things add up. <\/span><\/p>\n I’m comfortable with a very small amount of AI code, but we’ve also done tests. We’ve had AI write systems for us, and it would work, and then as soon as you got to change it, you look at the code, you’re like, “This is code written by a machine for other machines. This is not human-readable,” which is a huge problem. It is a huge problem if you have non-human-readable code in your project, because then you can’t have a person fix it. And believe it or not, people can still absolutely outperform AI. We are not as good at information retrieval, but we’re a lot better at creativity, lateral problem solving, and a lot of other things. AI can reproduce the things it’s already seen in a very limited fashion. In creative industries, you are not to compete by giving people what they’ve already seen. I don’t compete with Avengers by also making Avengers, as much as people think that’s a strategy. It really isn’t. You compete with Avengers by making Backrooms, or the Minecraft movie, or the recent Demon Slayer film. It breaks so many rules. It’s weird. It’s abstract. It’s avant-garde. We don’t see\u2014we don’t meet our protagonist for about two hours into the film. It’s incredibly violent and scary, but kids love it. They showed up at the theaters. They dressed up as the characters, and then they bought a s*** ton of merch. I think it was $700 million just in box office receipts on a $15 million production budget. They still haven’t done Blu-ray. They still haven’t done\u2014loads of money to be made there.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Did Red Dead Redemption 2 limit player agency in pursuit of cinematic realism?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> I aggressively kept player agency in there, because I understand how frustrating that was. Remember, I’m only one person doing a tiny part of the game. I left RDR2 part of the way through development. So after it had shipped, one of my friends said, “We just made the world’s most expensive walking simulator.” At the same time, though, I met someone last week who started talking about RDR2 and how much that game had inspired her son and made her son want to get in touch with more traditional arts and crafts and leatherworking and that kind of stuff because he just loved that world. I think there’s something to be said for the rich, meditative kind of meditative and conscientious approach that Rockstar took to RDR2. At the same time, for my own personal design temperament, I think that they might have downplayed player agency a bit too much. I think that they could have made some rather straightforward changes that would have kept player agency there and kept overall player engagement while still allowing there to be the level of that meditative, conscientious kind of gameplay style. A lot of that comes down to allowing players to just kind of take optional, additional shortcuts, speeding up some animations, providing additional levels of interaction, that kind of stuff. This is me very much speaking from my own personal opinions, but I think the games industry has a real lack of confidence in itself. So it constantly looks at other things as sources of\u2026 not inspiration, but what their objective should be. \u201cThis should be more realistic. This should be like a movie. We should copy this other game.\u201d It’s that thing of, if we do the things that we already know work, then clearly we’ve made no mistakes. And I find it’s oftentimes the opposite of that.<\/span><\/p>\n GTA 6 follows the realism introduced in Red Dead Redemption 2<\/em><\/p>\n Q:<\/span> Did the pursuit of absolute realism negatively impact Red Dead Redemption 2’s broader game design?<\/b><\/p>\n MF:<\/b><\/span> The game was full of that. Be as realistic as possible. And I appreciate that. I think they accomplished what they set out to do there. But I think what they quickly realized is realism does not have a terribly good big audience. It’s kind of a funny thing, like, everyone points at movies as being realistic. They really are not realistic, down to fidelity. It is a low-framerate, low-color, low-detail image that is so poor it requires an incredibly specialized viewing environment. The reason why theaters are dark is that projection technology is so weak you can’t show it in a properly lit environment. But they made that part of the experience. It’s now a feature, which is why you embrace limitations. People like games that are games, funnily enough. As much money as GTA 5 made, it didn\u2019t make as much money as Candy Crush or Minecraft. GTA 6 likely won’t as well.<\/span><\/p>\n Check exclusive Eldorado.gg interviews about gaming from industry insiders:<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Matthew](\"https:\/\/www.eldorado.gg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Matthew-Freedman.webp\")
<\/p>\n![\"RDR2](\"https:\/\/www.eldorado.gg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RDR2-Arthur-Morgan.webp\")
<\/p>\nKey takeaways<\/span><\/h2>\n
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Full interview with Matt Freedman<\/span><\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\n![\"RDR2](\"https:\/\/www.eldorado.gg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RDR2-John-Marston.webp\")
<\/p>\nExclusive Eldorado.gg interviews with industry insiders<\/span><\/h2>\n
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![\"GTA](\"https:\/\/www.eldorado.gg\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GTA-5-CTA-2.webp\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"