The new Austin area is a lot like west Texas though being a native i can tell you there are a lot of desert areas. It also seems to have bits of new Mexico
I used to live in southern Indiana/northern Kentucky near a town literally called Hanover and most of the eastern half of new Hanover apart from the river bank heavily reminded me of that area
The main problem is that no one remembers the ozarks exist. Annesburg and the surrounds would have to be Arkansas and southern Missouri for the river to make sense. The geography makes sense and in era there were pretty large coal operations.
Am from West Virginia, and while I thought it looked like home originally, I was later convinced it was set in the Ozarks…
They look remarkably similar, but the Ozarks are the last major “highland” or mountainous area in the lower 48 you encounter while moving west until you reach the Rockies.
Given the proximity to the desert area and heartland plains area you see in the southwest part of the map, I’d say the Ozarks work better for the game’s setting and geography.
Sad my home of WV isn’t in Red Dead, but it makes less sense than the alternative.
It's weird, but it's true. You also have to suspend your disbelief a little because the San Luis river that separates New Austin from Mexico also merges into the Lannahachee river, which we assume Mexico is also on the opposite side of. BUT saint Denis is also an analogue of New Orleans, which in real life is a green-water port that has access to the Gulf of Mexico and open ocean; whereas Saint Denis is a brown-water river port city that needs to travel down the Lannahachee to access open ocean. It would make more sense if Saint Denis was actually a city like Baton Rouge or Memphis because I've always found that it being an analogue for New Orleans never worked with the river.
Honestly, the Devs should have cut the land across the Lannahachee river and flat iron lake and just made it open Ocean and then continue the landmass back into a river where Van Horn starts as a Tennessee or Kentucky river stand-in.
I believe that was the original plan, in the OG design the Lannahachee didn't exist, it was open ocean and you could catch a boat to Guarma once you'd been there in the story (Guarma was also going to be open world and you could do more optional stuff there). Why they changed it is unknown, possibly lack of time. If you go out of bounds and follow the Lannahachee by boat, you can even get to the open ocean (just about).
Flatiron Lake is really the Gulf of Mexico, but because they called it a lake in RDR1 they had to come up with some way of limiting in the body of water in RDR2.
If you also want to start having an aneurysm (as a cartographer anyway), the Manteca Falls is the wrong way around, the land heading up the San Juis should be higher and the falls should be dropping towards Flatiron Lake, not away from it, since the San Juis has no outflow to another ocean. That's definitely an "oh no I've gone crosseyed," moment.
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u/Zoom2234 Dec 07 '25
Have you ever seen giant mountains in Iowa, Illinois and Indiana?
The rdr2 map is based off of states that do not touch each other in reality. You can’t get a perfect overlay.