Mapping Red Dead Redemption 2! Landmark Analysis Thread

[Chinese Takeout]

27 minutes ago, BretMaverick777 said:

Do you read/speak Lakota?

"Owanjita" isn't a word...the source you cited is a mangled Americanism.  "Owanjila" is a word, and "North Star" makes some sense.  

 

I speak and read several native languages, including my own Tsalagi.  Trust, it's "Owanjila." ✌

No I don't read/speak Lakota. Hope I didn't offend you.

[Jason]

2 minutes ago, Cutter De Blanc said:

The simplest answer is that there is something we are missing, not that Rockstar is intentionally trying to obfuscate our mapping efforts

 

Equally possible.

 

One thing I would say and maybe this is just my eyesight or whatever, but it almost looks to me as if the black lines go over the grid, compared to the map details which are under the grid? As if they've been put on after the maps been made. It's hard to sell for sure though, and even if I'm right it's not necessarily proof that they are just there to hide stuff.

[Cutter De Blanc]

I can't help but note that the picture of the rolled up map doesn't appear to be large enough to contain both maps on it, not according to the map grid on it

There's a lot that's weird about that picture of the physical map. Is it supposed to be double sided?

[primethief147]

6 minutes ago, Cutter De Blanc said:

I can't help but note that the picture of the rolled up map doesn't appear to be large enough to contain both maps on it, not according to the map grid on it

There's a lot that's weird about that picture of the physical map. Is it supposed to be double sided?

Was actually thinking the same thing the only one that might work is the one that with thieves landing because the angle could potentially fit both New Austin and the leaked map.

[Mynameisnobody]

4 hours ago, AndyGanteks said:

I wouldn't say it doesn't show Mexico, in fact if this comparison from the previous page is anywhere near correct in terms of scale/etc, it might just show a NEW part of Mexico and be the first potential proof towards not just getting RDR 1 Nuevo Paraiso, but have it expanded up until Lemoyne to the north east.

For me it's the only comparison that perfectly match !!! All others I have seen doesn't match at all...

[Cutter De Blanc]

3 minutes ago, primethief147 said:

Was actually thinking the same thing the only one that might work is the one that with thieves landing because the angle could potentially fit both New Austin and the leaked map.

It doesn't look like it goes far enough north

[Xextil]

I think on that map, there are two overlapping maps and some drawings belong to the back side. For example, the lines highlighted in this image are too vague compared to the rest: https://i.imgur.com/EU4CQcw.jpg

[Pudgehodge]

I'm a bit late to this cloth map analysis, but you guys have done some great work! @DuPz0r and @Salinoc both have some strong evidence and impressive analysis on this, and I agree with those who say you could both be right.

 

Apologies if some of this has been said already:

 

- First off, it's definitely possible that Rockstar "cropped" the map, so the actual final map might look different compared to this one (in other words, this cloth map image might not show the full width of the map), as they might have been trying to avoid spoilers or simply throw people like us off. The visible section of the land could easily be zoomed in or rotated, which could explain for the strange angle in @Salinoc's theory, or the zoomed in section in @DuPz0r 's theory.

 

- Secondly, I agree that it could be 2 different maps "stacked" on top of one another. It's a 2 sided map as the picture shows. The side of the map where you can see the letters (A,B,C, D, etc..) is one side, and the side of the map where we can see the numbers 5 & 6 (and has all of the land that we've been analyzing) is the opposite side of the map (though of course both sides will almost certainly have both numbers and letters for the grid, I'm just saying that you can clearly see it's a 2 sided map).. so it's definitely possible that the brown parts of the map (which @Salinoc's analysis is based on) is what one side of the map will look like, and the other side could have mostly the dark black lines. Different sides of the map might show different specifics, and it's also likely that there will be location/ word labeling on at least one side of the map.. which is likely just left out on this promotional image.

After seeing all of your great analysis and looking at the promo picture, I'm pretty confident that the actual cloth map won't look like it does in this image, though I definitely believe that the land we can see on this image is PART of the full cloth map.

Edited October 7, 2018 by Pudgehodge

[primethief147]

53 minutes ago, Cutter De Blanc said:

It doesn't look like it goes far enough north

If you look at the picture of the map you can see the chance of there being two different sides, so maybe they could split the map, half with one side having new Austin/ mexico and the other having the leaked map.  

Edited October 7, 2018 by primethief147
looked at the map again lol.

[Auditore]

I wonder if Reusing old maps will become a tradition for the Red Dead franchise,Red Dead 3 goes up north and includes Mexico and New Austin lol

[Jabalous]

20 minutes ago, Auditore said:

I wonder if Reusing old maps will become a tradition for the Red Dead franchise,Red Dead 3 goes up north and includes Mexico and New Austin lol

I'd say that reusing Redemption's map, but this time with what's believed to be additions/modifications, can generally be attributed to the fact that it's the Redemption universe, or more specifically the universe/story of the Van der Line gang. It works and it makes sense for this particular game, and looking into the future, there's no shortage of US-Mexico lands that Red Dead 3, or Redemption III, can be inspired by, and we can end up hearing/reading about New Austin in the same way we hear/read about Vice City in V's Los Santos. 

Edited October 7, 2018 by Jabalous

[DuPz0r]

35 minutes ago, Auditore said:

I wonder if Reusing old maps will become a tradition for the Red Dead franchise,Red Dead 3 goes up north and includes Mexico and New Austin lol

GTA 6 will be San Feirro and Los Santos?

[Jimmarn]

17 minutes ago, DuPz0r said:

GTA 6 will be San Feirro and Los Santos?

San Fierro and an expanded/enlarged version of Los Santos

 

I'd buy it

[Nutduster]

2 hours ago, Cutter De Blanc said:

The simplest answer is that there is something we are missing, not that Rockstar is intentionally trying to obfuscate our mapping efforts
 

 

Occam's Razor doesn't always apply though. It's a useful tool, not a hard and fast rule.

 

A third possibility too is that this isn't meant to mislead but is doing it anyway because it's a phony marketing image that was mocked up quickly before the real map was ready.  This promo pic could have been made ages ago. Or at least before the actual maps were printed.  With the way marketing works today, there's a strong chance that poster is not a real picture of the real poster, whether the slice of map we see on it is accurate or not.  Photoshop and digital mock-ups often look better for this purpose.

[INFERNO E100]

11 hours ago, DuPz0r said:

Yeah i see what you're saying, but that would be a strange angle to make the map if i'm honest. Again we can't rely on anything we see here 100%. It could just be for display.

 

One thing i dont understand with your theory though is why would the thick black lines be overlapping the mouth of the river like that? Makes no sense.

Create a separate layer for the black lines as it's rolled over the brown ones

[AzBat360]

2 hours ago, Cutter De Blanc said:

I can't help but note that the picture of the rolled up map doesn't appear to be large enough to contain both maps on it, not according to the map grid on it

There's a lot that's weird about that picture of the physical map. Is it supposed to be double sided?

Yeah, I put the rolled map on top of the whole RDR1 map & with columns 5 & 6 being in West Elizabeth. After copying the columns going West I found that 0 & 1 would catch all of Armadillo, but not enough to cover Rathskeller Fork, Ridgewood Farm or Fort Mercer. This would still give enough new area North of New Austin & East Nuevo Paraiso, but it doesn't seem like it goes far enough West to catch all of New Austin & Nuevo Paraiso. If any anybody wants to see it let me know.

 

I also believe the 45° angle is done on purpose. We've always wondered & conjectured about areas North of New Austin & West of the leaked Map. In addition to areas East of Nuevo Paraiso & south of the leaked map. By orienting the map at a 45° angle they can cover the most area in a rectangular map. It's not unheard of & in fact it's done quite often in mapping. In all my years of land surveying & GIS work I've come across lots of older highway maps called alignment maps. This is done for project areas the don't go straight North/South or East/West. Here are a few examples below...

 

 

 

Neither of those have North going with the orientation of the paper. I think the RDR2 paper map is doing the same thing.

 

As far as the back of the paper map: I thought the grid lines were going in a different direction than the grid lines on the front. But after closer inspection it looks like if you flattened it, the grid lines would go basically the same direction.

 

As for the black darker areas sitting on top of the brown areas that we know is the RDR1 map. I think it's a shaded relief area for the newer leaked map areas. It's how they are able to put 2 different maps on the same side of the map. Maybe you can use red filter glasses like 3D glasses to filter out the brown shaded relief portion of RDR1 map to just see the black shaded relief map that's in the leaked map. They could have done it this way in order to preserve the back for zooming in closer at St Denis, Valentine or any of the other towns.

 

Originally I thought the black areas were for gold and/or silver veins for mining(per Trusted Review leak), but it seemed the black areas didn't even match the brown area below. The black areas more closely resemble shaded relief & I thinks it for the newer leaked map area.

 

[TechDevil]

1 hour ago, DuPz0r said:

GTA 6 will be San Feirro and Los Santos?

I'm still holding out for that Liberty City/Vice/City/San Andreas map. With some new cities in-between. A man can dream, right?

[Len Lfc]

1 hour ago, DuPz0r said:

GTA 6 will be San Feirro and Los Santos?

I've genuinely believed that could be true for a couple of years now. It's Rockstars ambition to simulate the world. At some point their incarnations of cities would theoretically become 'definitive'. So, instead of redoing them again and again, what if they put them together? RDR2 is evidence they are interested/willing to do that. Those fan maps of San Andreas may not be as crazy as we believe. 

 

Obviously that's a long long way into the future, but still...

[Pink Pineapple]

9 hours ago, Frantz Fuchs said:

Has the mapping community got a final predictive map yet? 

 

Yet? We've had it for over 2 years!

 

 

 

I'm going to be really upset if the GTA VI map leaks.

[bakerach]

5 hours ago, Jason said:

Equally possible.

 

It's not equally possible, mainly because Rockstar has nothing to gain from tricking a relatively small group of people on message boards.

[Jason]

30 minutes ago, bakerach said:

It's not equally possible, mainly because Rockstar has nothing to gain from tricking a relatively small group of people on message boards.

A small group of people whose discoveries have the tendency of going viral and generating a ton of discussion among of the wider gaming communities.

 

Rockstar fuelling it's community with teases that they can glean information from has been a staple of how they market their games for a long time now.

[bakerach]

40 minutes ago, Jason said:

A small group of people whose discoveries have the tendency of going viral and generating a ton of discussion among of the wider gaming communities.

 

Rockstar fuelling it's community with teases that they can glean information from has been a staple of how they market their games for a long time now.

I've been following their releases for 17 years, I know how they tend to work.  What they don't have is a tendency to put out material just to "throw us off" because, like I've said before, ain't nobody got time for that and don't nobody at R* really care as much as lots of people here want to think.

[Jason]

16 minutes ago, bakerach said:

I've been following their releases for 17 years, I know how they tend to work.  What they don't have is a tendency to put out material just to "throw us off"

Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't change the fact that without those black lines the map starts line up extremely well without those black lines but is iffy with them. It's not conclusive either way.

 

16 minutes ago, bakerach said:

because, like I've said before, ain't nobody got time for that and don't nobody at R* really care as much as lots of people here want to think.

Then they sure do read these forums a lot considering how much they supposedly don't care.

Edited October 8, 2018 by Jason

[Nutduster]

38 minutes ago, bakerach said:

I've been following their releases for 17 years, I know how they tend to work.  What they don't have is a tendency to put out material just to "throw us off" because, like I've said before, ain't nobody got time for that and don't nobody at R* really care as much as lots of people here want to think.

 

I agree that they don't spend a lot of time specifically trying to trick us. And people who say they do things like delay DLC to punish leakers... well that's crazy. However, putting a phony Photoshop image together for advertising because they know a real pic might reveal something they don't want revealed yet? I don't find that too hard to imagine. This isn't just about the mapping thread either. Big discoveries hit YouTube and get tens of thousands of views; from there they can propagate to game news sites, and then back and forth in a huge feedback loop. 

 

I don't know if that's what this is. I think it's probably not, in fact. But it's not completely outlandish. I can well imagine them telling their PR team, "We don't want to reveal X on the map yet. Play it safe and make a map-like image out of these existing assets, it'll take 15 minutes and this way we know nothing meaningful gets out."

Edited October 8, 2018 by Nutduster

[bakerach]

24 minutes ago, Nutduster said:

 

I agree that they don't spend a lot of time specifically trying to trick us. And people who say they do things like delay DLC to punish leakers... well that's crazy. However, putting a phony Photoshop image together for advertising because they know a real pic might reveal something they don't want revealed yet? I don't find that too hard to imagine. This isn't just about the mapping thread either.

This is the plausible scenario.  I worked in marketing for years, my point was that they're not trying to "throw off the internet detectives," things like that are either oversights or intentionally "incorrect" material for exactly the reason you've stated.

 

Also, I haven't had time to look through the whole thread, but it looks like we're seeing two sides of the map here.  The lighter colored lines match up with the RDR1 map while the bold black lines look to be the mountains in Big Valley, with giveaways around Thieves' Landing:

Edited October 8, 2018 by bakerach

[Pudgehodge]

31 minutes ago, Nutduster said:

 

I agree that they don't spend a lot of time specifically trying to trick us. And people who say they do things like delay DLC to punish leakers... well that's crazy. However, putting a phony Photoshop image together for advertising because they know a real pic might reveal something they don't want revealed yet? I don't find that too hard to imagine. This isn't just about the mapping thread either. Big discoveries hit YouTube and get tens of thousands of views; from there they can propagate to game news sites, and then back and forth in a huge feedback loop. 

 

I don't know if that's what this is. I think it's probably not, in fact. But it's not completely outlandish. I can well imagine them telling their PR team, "We don't want to reveal X on the map yet. Play it safe and make a map-like image out of these existing assets, it'll take 15 minutes and this way we know nothing meaningful gets out."

This is exactly what I think the case is. They definitely aren't just doing this to try to mess with people like us.. They simply didn't want to spoil certain things so they likely are only showing a smaller part of the map. I'm sure they don't give 2 sh*ts about tricking map analysts, but they are definitely aware of their dissecting skills and are smart enough to know exactly how much to show to avoid spoilers but encourage intrigue.

 

Just like the desert images. Even with all of the skilled analysts in this sub, there is still no confirmation of Mexico being a playable area in the game, even though it's clear that they've shown Mexico in several images.

[mrots]

Hey Guys!

 

Yes I just signed up for this thread - like most I'm pumped for RDR2! Been lurking here for a while now and you guys have done an awesome job putting everything together... This could be nothing, or it could have been mentioned before, but it just sort of clicked for me when I was having a look at the maps over lunch...

 

Excuse the VERY dodgy MS Paint cutout, but is that inset in the leaked map actually a piece/region that fits in below WE that isn't mapped? I always thought it was an island somewhere because of the blue around it, but maybe its just a blue background and not water... Anyway, let me know what you think...

 

https://i.imgur.com/WHASKbv.png

Edited October 8, 2018 by mrots
back to link

[AzBat360]

Did a little more work to help explain my previous post.

 

 

Also, totally agree with @bakerach. I suggested the same about the black shaded relief being part of the newer leaked map. Though I'm not sold on his location yet. I would expect it to cover area that the light brown couldn't cover. If you go with the orientation I have above, there's not a lot of area not covered. Though that does depend on how long the map is. If there's only 15 columns(would make the map square), then Blackwater would be almost the middle & then East end would be somewhere near the eastern edge of the Heartlands. Almost all of Roanoke Ridge would be excluded & a large part of the eastern ends of the Grizzlies & Cumberland Forest. I think we need to look there instead to line up the black shaded relief area.

 

[Cutter De Blanc]

Another interesting thing I note while staring at these pictures for hours, is that on the flip side of the physical map, the side we can barely see, there are lines for the grid, but there doesn't appear to be ANY topography at the border of the map, which I find curious.

[Salinoc]

7 hours ago, AzBat360 said:

I also believe the 45° angle is done on purpose. We've always wondered & conjectured about areas North of New Austin & West of the leaked Map. In addition to areas East of Nuevo Paraiso & south of the leaked map. By orienting the map at a 45° angle they can cover the most area in a rectangular map. It's not unheard of & in fact it's done quite often in mapping. In all my years of land surveying & GIS work I've come across lots of older highway maps called alignment maps. This is done for project areas the don't go straight North/South or East/West. Here are a few examples below...

 

 

 

Thanks mate, that's exactly what I had in mind when I was talking about a 45° oriented map, but I couldn't find any exemple. You've nailed it!

 

9 hours ago, Pudgehodge said:

After seeing all of your great analysis and looking at the promo picture, I'm pretty confident that the actual cloth map won't look like it does in this image, though I definitely believe that the land we can see on this image is PART of the full cloth map.

 

Totally agree. There still are too many strange things with this map. Even if you ignore the black lines and just look at the brown map, why are there no figuration of the bodies of water? No roads? No settlement name? This can only be a quick photoshop placeholder, no way that is the final product. But how much of the final product does it actually show? I guess we'll never know until the next leak...