A few new shots and extra details:

New Article added: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2018/05/04/how-rockstar-is-making-its-open-worlds-even-better

Nelson continues to tell me about all the household duties required to maintain the camp beyond lining stomachs, and how the principles of camp life can be scaled and applied to a town. The amount of detail suddenly becomes dizzying. But everything Nelson tells me can be traced back to a simple and elegant idea – “the real world runs on a schedule” – upon which complexity has been added gradually, layer upon layer. A camp becomes a town, which eventually grows into a city.

The endgame is to create a world inhabited by characters who exist independently of you. Like the real world. They’ll have conversations among themselves, which will branch and change depending if you’re nearby or get involved. NPCs aren’t there simply to give you missions or upgrade your items. This world doesn’t revolve around you.

General:

• As you walk around in the game world, NPCs will react to you differently based on your disposition... E.g., if you're carrying your gun out of your holster, they'll be stand-offish, nervous, hostile, etc. But if your gun is holstered they'll be normal.
• Approaching people (NPCs) in the open world you can press one of three face buttons to say something or treat them in a certain way... Triangle is a congenial greeting, circle is antagonize, and square could be to rob them.
• You can rob people in the game without drawing your weapon, "You can bully them into giving them your money."
• These prompts change as you play (unsure of whether this is based on your actions, or if it's fixed progression style). These prompts are also context sensitive, with the example that a fisherman may give you different prompts and will react differently, while a tough or a bar drunkard might react in a different way and give you different prompts.
• NPCs treat you differently based on what you've done, your reputation, what you're wearing, etc.

Gangs & Camp:

• Your gang has a gang camp with a life to it
• Much of the descriptions are around open world interactions within your camp
• The gang gives you ambient missions / challenges, for instance, as you're walking around camp one of your gang members might let you know that they could use provisions (meat, etc) which prompt you to go off hunting
• WHile there is a management aspect to the gang & camps, it's an extra that's there if you want to use it, but it's not something you have to stay on top of... Sounds pretty optional with bonuses if you do it, but it's not a management game.
• There is a reward for how much you put into the camp.
• Description sounds roughly similar to how in GTAV you kept your crew, though more active and more omnipresent. Personal thought is I'm hoping they have a good expansion of this, e.g., aquiring tough guys or people who are skilled at certain things, giving you an incentive to keep them around, but it's not as annoying/overbearing as the settlement feature from FO4.

The World

• New area called "New Hanover" was where most of the demo took place
• Varied areas, swampy, snowy, industrializing towns
• New Hanover was an alpine, mountainous, forested, has a town called "Valentine"
• Describes a very "living, breathing world," which they say is cliched, but a lot of detail from the descriptions.
• "It looked incredibly impressive," running on a base level PS4.
• "It's an open world game that looks as good as anything I've seen on PS4."

Hunting & Providing for your camp

• Hunting has been greatly expanded from the sounds of it
• Multiple ways to skin your captures with different effects
• Kills can be latched onto your horse or you can just keep the pelt
• Lots of animal animations about hunting...... but they sound very detailed, and as an animal lover sounds pretty striking. Description sounds sad for me, haha, not sure if I'll be able to really do that.
• Value of the animal varies on how well you kill it, either with bow, buck shot, bullet, etc.
• Animals you capture will decay and rot over time, both visually, and the value of it. NPCs will give you odd reactions (From what it sounds like) if you're riding around with a rotting, dead buck on your horse.

Horse

• Connection you make with your horse is much greater, emotional & gameplay connection
• "RDR, Horse was a disposable vehicle." (Rockstar). In RDR2, horse relationship is much stronger, the stronger a relationship you have with your horse, the better performance and attributes of your horse.
• Unique animations, unique open world examples, the closer you get with your horse.
• You keep a lot of your best gear on your horse, and so keeping your horse near you (through a better bond) the quicker access to your wider gear
• If your horse dies...... you have to restart that bonding process.
• Horses can get injured and you can use medical tools to bandage and save it.
• "For something to mean something, it has to cost something."

Robbery

• Ambient music as you start missions similar to GTAV
• As you approach robberies and missions, they bridge out based on choices, for instance, one of the members of your gang plays a character to cause a distraction in a bank, allowing you to get a surprise on the staff
• "One continuous camera movement," soudns almost similar to the camera work in that True Detective scene carrying you through a missiong
• Option to crack a safe v. blowing up, with different rewards and risk
• Very detailed animations for all of this
• Shootout begins as you come out after robbing the bank, which introduces more of the action
• Action sounds consistent with the last RDR
• Dead eye returns
• Some kills would give you a cinematic camera
• The fight doesn't end when you flee the town, fight continues on horseback, ALA RDR missions from the sounds of it
• In one scene, the characters hat gets shot off, and because he flees... he doesn't get it back. If you want it back, you have to go back at a later time and get it back.

Article: http://uk.ign.com/articles/2018/05/03/why-red-dead-redemption-2-is-more-than-just-a-prequel-2
Atricle: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gaming/features/red-dead-redemption-2-exclusive-first-look-preview-comes-next/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seIdgTfInOk

This game is gonna be fucking amazing

I like the idea of having to look after your horse. This also sounds intriguing:

"The depth of the relationship with other members of the gang and the persistence of our actions are such a big step for video games, that we will talk about it for a long time. With just a few minutes of gameplay, we were left with the feeling of witnessing a new generation of video games. It's not so much about the visual evolution but the complexity of this world and the beings that inhabit it."

Rockstar are truly the king's of open world. Man I can't wait. I'm not gonna read much of the OP. I want to be surprised by it but fuck it's hard to go on a media block out lol. 

I added a summary from another site to the OP. It's not really spoilery. It just gives people an idea of the game mechanics without being too specific.

Do you play as John Marston's son in this?

Sounds deeper and taking some good influence from GTAV. Can't wait.

No, they want people to actually buy the game.

If you're at all interested in that #RedDeadRedemption2, it's probably worth checking out @IGN today.

And... tomorrow I've got our big interview feature going live, with lots of new information about how Rockstar is improving its open worlds. pic.twitter.com/OMWE70CHhI

— Daniel (@Krupa) May 3, 2018

Stealth sounds like it's a thing and I'm happy with that:

For Red Dead Redemption 2, we tried to go further in the interiors. You can go into a house, open the drawers, take the jewelry in the drawers. Small things in even smaller things, so that the world is the deepest and most credible possible. From big coffers to small pockets in people's jackets, you can steal everything, without ever knowing what you're going to fall on. We tried to create a consistent world in which it is possible to jump and hold onto a train running at full speed, enter the cars, find a bag, open it and take what's inside, come out the train without being spotted, all this will be possible.

Hair will grow: 

Yes quite ! The beard too. But this time, it's only by subtraction. Not like in GTA V where you could go to the hairdresser and go out with a beard and even longer hair. You will have to wait for your beard to grow and ask you if you want to shave it, or just the chin, or the mustache.On the other hand, once it's cut, you have to wait for her to push back to return to the barber's.So yes, at Rockstar, we live constantly in this world where "Yes, we do too much and we are a bit crazy in our head and sometimes we have to know Stop now". This is what is difficult, knowing how to draw the contours of what we want to do, and allow all the elements that we managed to integrate inside are connected between them. We did not want to cheat with "smoking mirrors" to hide the connections, everything had to be "seamless", without transition, natural, in order to keep the player immersed in this world, without cheating and without revealing the limits of development (an invisible wall for example, note). Once the decision is made to make a coherent and organic world, we have to go all the way to avoid imbalance and lag.

I'm shocked at the lack of interest. We've been starved of information about this game since it was announced, and yet when information finally comes in, nobody seems particularly interested. This is supposed to be THE game of 2018, THE game to define a generation, a new RDR from ROCKSTAR.