Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game that wants to be absorbed slowly, and with that comes a lot of built-in vagueness that will become clear with time. In a video game, though, vagueness often leads to confusion. Luckily, there are a lot of settings in the menu that you can toggle to help you keep track of what’s going on. Here are our favorites and suggestions.
Speakers and subtitles
Red Dead Redemption 2 is full of gruff outlaws who spend a lot of time speaking to each other while riding their horses. Although cowboy-Aaron-Sorkin-ing is entertaining, you usually only see the backs of their heads, and it can get really confusing figuring out which gruff outlaw is speaking.
In your Settings menu, go to Settings > Display, then scroll down and turn on Subtitles and Subtitle Speaker Name. This adds the name of the person speaking to the subtitles. This may seem like a silly thing to advise, but it is seriously the best way we’ve found of keeping everyone straight in our heads (and just learning names).
Cores and status icons
Cores are a confusing part of Red Dead Redemption 2 — so much so that we wrote a lot of words about them in our cores guide. Keeping track of how your cores and rings (or bars) are doing is something that takes a bit of work to get comfortable with.
Go to Settings > Display, then scroll down and switch Status Icons to Static, which will make your cores remain visible around your minimap all the time (instead of contextually). This will not only remind you that they’re there as a thing to manage, but keep you thinking about how to use them.
Minimap/radar
We don’t have advice on what to set this one to, but it’s important to know you’ve got options. Your Minimap (or “radar,” as Red Dead Redemption 2 calls it) gives you a lot of information about your immediate surroundings — from the bodies you haven’t looted yet to where your hunting trophy fell to what stores are nearby — but it takes the “mini” part of its name seriously, and it can be hard to see what’s going on.
On the other hand, if you’re looking for more of an immersive experience, having that minimap there at all is a bit of a distraction. And besides, NPCs will change their dialogue to reference landmarks to make sure you don’t get lost.
When you’re playing, hold down on the D-pad. You’ll get four options for your minimap.
- Compass. This one only shows you which direction you’re heading in, not what’s around you.
- Expanded. Your minimap (and the icons on it) are all bigger. This option also makes your core icons a little bigger.
- Regular. This is the default size.
- Off. Choose this one for the fully immersive experience.
The obvious one
Finally, go to Settings > Controls and switch Invert Look to On because what kind of animal doesn’t play that way?!