I was really surprised by the ending sequence. It makes me regret writing my earlier piece talking about Marston's rather one sided personality from early in the game.

The last segment, which may have been an hour long, really got me attached to Marston better than the first 20 hours of the game. Here's a man who thinks he's finally put his past behind him and trying to rebuild his life of peace. He and his wife have come to terms with their past and Marston is trying to close the distance between him and his son.

Then it all comes to an abrupt close as Marston goes out in a reckless, blaze of glory. His final end echoing what Dutch told him before his own death: you can't fight change. The world around them is changing and they're relics of the old west.

Simply put, I was so tired of the game by the time I entered Blackwater, and was tired of hunting for Dutch. And Marston's simple pleasure of bonding with his family after everything made it all worth it.

I liked the ideas behind the end section of Red Dead. The last 3 or 4 hours really seemed to drag on though, the whole Blackwater section seemed unncessary to me.

That being said my main issue with the end was the just the odd and unexplained aspect of them taking down Marston. I get that the government lot would want to clean up the loose ends but I would rather have had a bit more explaination to it, why even give him his life back if they were just going to take him out? I mean I must've killed like 50 guys in that last section, they could've just shot Marston in the back once he'd killed Dutch.

I did think letting you play as Jack after the ending was a nice touch though. Ultimately though it the end section was just too drawn out for me to feel satisfied.

Yeah -- they could have better explained why they killed him then and not earlier. Perhaps those two agents that were left didn't think they could take him on their own.

Maybe I'm weird, but I liked cow-herding. I would've preferred that to horse shoes as a mini-game.

The problem is the game still ends with a shootout -- and a not-well-explained one at that. I can see the various Western homages in the endgame (Butch Cassidy being the biggest one), but I wish it had ended more peacefully, with John riding off into the sunset. He deserved it.

Though I agree with you, I think the epilogue in which you play as Marston's son creates a distracting preservation of continuity. With that jump forward in time, one would expect the world to change. Why are all of these strangers I met as Marston still intent on solving the same problem of theirs?

Years later, Grace is still crying over her missing son? MacKenna still needs the missing Spatchcock to return to the movie set? Most everything is static, and it's not just characters, the world is the same. It's as if time stopped and resumed just for you.

Not to mention, for all intents and purposes, you practically are Marston. Same dialogue in stranger missions and the same exact equipment (the excuse being it was inherited).

I'm not saying the team needed to spend another year and a couple million dollars more on creating such wide-reaching change in the epilogue, but some meaningful change would be nice. However, since there is no such change and season to speak of, I'd almost rather the game end after Marston is laid to rest.

I felt something for a moment when Marston is gunned down, some pale, inarticulate shadow of tragedy or loss, but then I realized that nothing is lost. Marston never left, never died, he simply jumped out of his body and inhabited his son's, with all of his loot and unfinished business preserved. This superficial epilogue is bizarre, jarring, patronizing, and it saps Marston's death of any potential potency or finality it may have had. 

And all the meat you had in your pack was still good after all those years. I just saw everything after Marston's death as a convenient way to stop you from having to reload your save to keep playing. I just saw it as a horde mode -- something just barely within the main game's fiction that allows you to pick flowers to your heart's content.

I couldn't agree more with Evan about putting John in Jack's skin -- but the final objective of using Jack to hunt down Ross was innovative and extremely satisfying.

Yeah, it was a blunt and unapologetically stupid device for you to continue playing and bypass a final end state. Who knows, maybe if the Fallout 3 ending debacle hadn't happened, Rockstar may have included a progression-terminating ending. Personally, by the time I entered Blackwater, I was already disenchanted with all of the uncompleted game left for me outside of the main narrative. It was different with Fallout 3. I NEEDED that game to continue past the ending ... I was very much in the throes of all matter of addiction with that game.

@Ben

I agree, the hunting of Ross was pretty grand, but it still wasn't enough to justify the entire continuation for me.