Say you're riding along on a stallion, looking for a Wanted man to take down, tie and then take back to town for a bit of juicy ransom. This being the Wild West, it's clear that the criminal will not be coming along happily and that he might actually have a few other gunmen close to protect his villainy. I am fully prepared to kill them all, hoping only to remember to spare the Wanted guy in order to get the reward. I am committed to performing some really violent acts in the next few minutes but there's one thing I swore not to do: loot the bodies of the men I kill.
There are two events in
Red Dead Redemption that trigger short but sort of graphic and highly annoying cutscenes: looting bodies and skinning animals. The video sequences where control is removed from the player are short but they cannot be skipped, which should be a capital sin in videogame development.
The looting bit involves Marston kneeling and ruffling the pockets of dead men in search for a few dollars while the skinning one is a bit longer and seen from the dead animal’s point of view, with blood spraying on the screen and a big knife featuring prominently. There's more violence in skinning but there's definitely more of an impact coming from the looting cutscene.
I play a pretty moral and lawful Marston but even for the more morality lacking gamers, looting bodies is a good comment on what taking a life means. In role playing games, we are used to searching corpses in order to see what nice, superior loot we can use.
In Red Dead Redemption, small amounts of dollars are the most you can find on a dead man, bringing into full view the desperation of the men who turn against the law and the low price put on human life in the world the game creates. If the cutscene had been skippable, I would have searched all the bodies for all their treasure. With the constant remainder of my hero’s cruelty, I chose to kill but not to rob a man.
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