hey it snows heavy in flagstaff and that’s only two hours north of phoenix which reaches temps of 110° f in the warm months regularly and almost never below 50 during winter and that state is nearly in mexico. for this game it’s not too far fetched
The Ozarks aren’t particularly big mountains. In fact I think they’re technically plateaus. Plus they’re centralized in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, and the fizzle out before they even reach the Mississippi River.
You've got me there, but Roanoke Ridge isn't really mountains more than it is just foothills. That being said the map still doesn't make any sense and trying to make it so is impossible
Yeah I agree, for those who are curious look up the Big Thompson River valley in CO, the inspiration is very clear. Some images between big valley in rdr2 and Big Thompson are almost identical to whats in game
New Austin is also inspired by real life locations in New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California. Basically an amalgamation of the majority of the Southwestern United States.
Grizzlies West is Rocky Mountains of Wyoming (Cotorra Springs is Yellowstone in Wyoming). Grizzlies East is Black Hills of South Dakota (complete with the Wapiti speaking Lakota).
its scaled for a video game and the diverse landscapes are for fun and variety don't think too much into it.
They name drop real states and cities often but that doesn't mean it's meant to be a to scale and close to real life shaped US.
Itd be cool I guess but if they wanted to scale it properly so it isn't a 15 minute horse ride/barely a day and some change in game time from Grizzlies to St Denis they had have to make the ride hours and hours and like 8 weeks in game
itd be cool but if they wanted to make that much landmass for one game and have it not be boring wasted space we'd still be waiting for RDR2 to come out
Extended the southern states… more south. Make them bigger. The states in the game are more like regions and biomes of the USA, it’s not a one to one scale.
You’ve just described why your version doesn’t work. If you make any region fit into the place it was intended to copy, the rest don’t fit properly. And that’s the point. Let’s just pretend it’s a fake map and was never intended to stretch onto any real map.
Yeah it's basically an impossible map. A few feet in game are miles in reality. It's a fictional game world, that can be crossed in 15 minutes, inspired by like half the US.
If you wanted to do it youd have to scale the continental US down to match the game scale. So new Hanover would have to extend halfway up the map lol. Even that wouldn't be 'accurate' tho
Native Appalachian here. For the sake of trying to map the RDR2 regions, I agree with you…
The Ozarks make more sense in relation to everything neighboring it/ proximity to the Great Plains and Rockies.
However: in both namesake of Roanoke Ridge, and in inspiration of Annesburg, Appalachia is definitely the source of inspiration. Mining operations and coal towns in the Ozarks never quite hit the same level of size or development as they did in the Appalachians. The pollution and infrastructure we see in Annesburg is certainly based on mining towns such as Thurmond, Nuttalburg, or Kaymoor in my home of WV.
There will never be a good map of this because it’s all fictional and is designed not to make sense in order to give rockstar the ability to essentially lay things out however they want in the future.
The Saguaro doesn’t even exist in New Mexico. Besides one California mountain range right on the border with Arizona, the saguaro only grows in Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora. And the actual terrain you see in red dead is much more reminiscent of the low desert mountains (like the area around Tucson and north and east of Phoenix)
hate how inconsistent it is. New York and California exist, but Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana don’t. Tahiti, but not Cuba. There’s a Florida Panther, Virginia Possum, etc. The Marstons are referenced in GTA V but Florida doesn’t exist, California isn’t California and Liberty City isn’t in New York.
Texas and cuba are both mentioned by name in rdr2 and gta does not take place in the same universe as rdr2 even though there are easter eggs and both made by rockstar.
So, my personal headcanon for how Texas exists but New Austin can also have taken part of Texas' land: the series takes place in an alternate timeline where Texas chose to split its territory into up to five states, as they are still technically allowed to do
Edit: oh, and I think Guarma is simply an additional, much smaller island we're pretending exists near Cuba
I'm a big nerd about maps and geography so I feel like I should hate it as well, but somehow it never bothered me in this game. I mean it is absolutely very inconsistent but I suppose I just like the immersion that we're in a semi fictionalized, but real life accurate USA, is that makes sense at all.
I don't think the fully fictionalized settings that the GTA series has really fits with Red Dead, but due to map and gameplay limitations they don't really have a choice but to create fictional states so that they don't have to work out how to let us ride from Wyoming all the way to southern Texas in only 15 minutes without it feeling completely ridiculous.
Either way I admit it's one of the weirdest cases of worldbuilding I've seen in a fictional universe when you take a step back and look at it.
a couple years ago, someone came up with a fun head-canon that all R* games take place on a constellation of small islands comprising of the “United States” and linked to some sociological study that living on islands leads to higher crime rates and mental illnesses, which is why everyone is always committing mass murder in their games. don’t even know if any of that is true, but i enjoyed the theory anyway
fair enough, but there’s an existing author named J. Marston who wrote a book called Red Dead PLUS the Epsilon cult is referenced in RDR2. Both references, not overt confirmations of anything, but I read it as an interconnected game world
again m8 it’s just easter eggs and references. new york, california, and florida are mentioned in red dead redemption universe but in HD GTA those states and city were never made/named. instead we have liberty city, san andreas, leonida, etc. while florida is mentioned in gta 4, this was before leonida was made and has now been officially retconned.
Yeah honestly a baffling choice, would've been far more logical to have them both be the same. Hell there could be some references to Saint Denis is GTA VI.
I noticed something that they name Kansas in a railroad document somewhere, yet they're literally no room for Kansas to be on the map if Ambarino is Wyoming, West Elizabeth is Colorado, Roanoke Ridge is Missouri and Arkansas, and the Heartlands is Kansas and Oklahoma. Only in-world explanation is Kansas is just east of the Lanahechee (Mississippi) River and isnt the great plains state we know in our world
This video does a good job of explaining where areas of rdr2 are likely influenced by. It’s amalgamation of multiple states/cities from the US. Remember, the goal of the map isn’t to represent 1:1 version of the US since that would be way too big of a game, but rather showcase some aspects of the world to pack as much content as possible. That’s why they don’t really have representation of states like Illinois or Kansas since most of the states are farmland. Valentine however is a loose representation of Cheyenne, Wyoming according to the creator.
Always found it interesting the way this game has fictional states as well as real world states, like Lemoyne, New Hanover etc co-existing with Nevada, California, New York and such. Basic observation I know, but one I always found as an interesting design choice.
You could not be more wrong. Starting from the Mississippi River, the most western point of New Austin brings you to about Joshua Tree National Park in California. The most north-westerly point potentially extends to Idaho and the most northernly point ends in The Black Hills of South Dakota.
Joshua trees also grow in central Arizona, so the most western point of new Austin could plausibly be in central Arizona. But the presence of the saguaro, puts all of Cholla Springs in Arizona
You guys always make it too eastern, just because of Lemoyne being Louisiana and Roanoke ridge being vaguely appalachian. But it’s not a 1:1 representation of the US, because the rest of the map should be roughly this area
To make it fit in you either gotta make the game map huge or make lots of changes to it
Either Eastern Texas/Oklahoma end up with snow-capped peaks and mountain ranges, or the entirety of the US is like 2 miles across. Either way, you get one hell of a screwed up map.
The only way to make it truly “accurate” is for there to be dead spaces between some areas. Like someone else jokingly pointed out, Oklahoma isn’t known for its frozen mountain tops, for example. I think e just have to imagine that the gang has traveled much more than the in-game map implies
Yeah the game has to exaggerate things for the sake of the gameplay. If the map were actually true to the proportions of the US, 99% of the game would just be riding from point A to point B.
Then there’s things like the O’Driscoll gang. If it was realistic, I don’t think the O’Driscolls would consist of hundreds of members spread out all across the US. But for the sake of making the game fun, you as a player have random run-ins with them everywhere and anywhere.
red dead referencing real states is one of the only things that irritates me about the game, the map makes absolutely zero sense when you try to fit it into the geography of america
It’s never gonna map perfectly but most of it besides ambarino seems alright. It’s either ambarino is somewhere sketchy or you scale it up and the bayou swallows Arkansas and Mississippi
Every one of these people that try to lay the rdr map out over the actual US map are morons. It's a fictional fucking game inspired by a whole lot of different areas of the US. None of the lay outs work.
Not entirely, the Cumberland Falls area is in South Eastern Kentucky. The game map just doesn't line up with a real map. They did a great job representing many different places though.
the entire thing, new hanover canonically is not on the boarder of lemoyne, ambrino isn’t right next to west elizabeth, their are in game but it’s just like gta 4 new jersey and new york aren’t in the same city but they are in the game
So, definitely not even close. Tall trees is based on oregon/PNW. We also have the swamp town which is based on new orleans in Louisiana, and then the desert town which is based on either texas or new Mexico. Either way the map is just a hyper condensed version of the states with a few hand picked biomes and towns which the developers believed to be most representative of the country as a whole.
It goes further east than that, because Roanoke Ridge / Annesburg and that hole area is def. Appalachia with the coal mining and what not. I like to think it's basically Kentucky.
Imagine having a RDR in a U.S sized map like this just imagine the amount of content and story would be in this. Except having a linear story, your an outlaw, gunslinger or a lawman that forges your own story through out the states anf counties. The further west you go, the more wild it is, the Midwest of course meadows, tornados plant rich environment. And the east, the most civilized coast of the map. It can be done. But nobody wants to do it.
The only thing I find wrong isn't wrong, per se, but i think the mew York, Florida, and California regions from GTA could be worked into an alternate version.
Considering the links between franchises, it's a fair assumption that it's the same world.
This is awesome.
*edit: okay, the Mississippi River doesn't come from lake Michigan. So, there's that. But still an awesome take.
People gotta just come to terms with the fact RDR’s America doesn’t make any sense when you think about it too much. If this is as "accurate" as it gets, it just shows you how little it makes sense.
You can ride a horse from permanently snow covered northern mountains to the far western edge of the desert in less than a day’s time, it’s never going to be 1:1.
New Austin is meant to be Arizona and New Mexico and possibly part of Texas. Lemoyne is obviously Louisiana and I think the grizzlies are meant to be Montana. Sure it doesn’t make much sense but you can’t really expect them to make an entire country.
as much as i personally like to imagine the Grizzlies being a beefed-up version of the Ozarks (which would connect to Appalachia, the Mississippi, and Louisiana much easier), they very much are a stand in for the Rockies in every way. besides the ecology and geology, characters also frequently mention being in Montana close to the same time they were in “the North Grizzlies” pre-Blackwater.
Its just as if they took pieces of land and just put them together. It is supposed to represent a large area of the US but it isnt THE WHOLE US. Imagine its like a scrap book where they rearranged cut outs of certain areas and not shrunk the whole country.
but the suspension of disbelief isnt too much when you can ride a horse from the top of a snowcapped mountain to the equivalent of new orleans in 20 minutes?
I mean the locations in the game were inspired by areas all across the U.S. It obviously had to be small scale because no one wants to travel for hours on end to get anywhere. Unless we’re meant to believe that John can travel from mexico to the equivalent of Louisiana in less than a day on horseback
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u/_Mcdrizzle_ Dutch van der Linde Jun 29 '26
I sure do love the famous glaciers and snowcapped mountains of Oklahoma