This does prove that he is/was meant to be discovered like other points of interests and the "frozen animation" kinda confirms our suspicions about where he probably is/was.
Some of these animations tend to trigger when the player is a certain distance from a particular point. Hoping we can still find this "trigger point" (if it wasn't cut of course).
EDIT: Unsure if this has been mentioned before but his ped model is even listed under the same category as the corpses and peds from other points of interests.
I just started playing a few weeks ago, and I thought about that the day when I first played! I was like, there's SO much in this snowstorm, there has to be something hidden. But each time I'd look too far, it'd mission fail.
If you had to ask me, it'd be after the home invasion when you're going with Dutch, or during that home raid somewhere around it. But I looked and didn't find anything, but I'm also not anyone to be known for finding things like this.
Maybe, I'm not sure but I'll check. I found the first little mining town where the gang attacks the o'driscolls to get the dynamite the other day when I was up and The Grizzlies, so you might be able to get back to the little town or even say dee burn down cabin. I'll have to check that out later when I get on the game.
I would suspect that it's in "Enter, Pursued by a Memory", but I think when I messed with this, the mission would fail if Arthur strays too far from Javier. Since the animation appears to be in a frozen lake, I now strongly suspect it's not up on the glacier that you are permitted access to during just this mission. Perhaps somewhere after the wolf battle and on the way back to Colter?
One addedum for anyone that might be searching on this mission for the Cave Man (on this mission. I've noticed that between objectives on a mission, the restrictions and fail modes may change. For instance, after you pick up Javier in the wagon just before arriving at Horseshoe Overlook in "Eastward Bound", you can drive the wagon quite far before the mission fails, with Hosea, Javier and Charles all whining and complaining (it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/96kHoiBTlaI?t=989) whereas straying off the path on the way the way before picking up Javier will pretty quickly fail.
What I'm getting to is that I did a lot of searching on the first part of the mission before getting to John, while I did not do much searching after finding John or after fighting the wolves, and there might be a point where you can bail on Javier and John without the mission failing.
Yeah I think the animation is just the pose. The character model is probably saved in a neutral pose like a T or A pose so when he's loaded into the game he "animates" into the "frozen" pose and stays that way. No need to save two character models to the disk when you can have one and an animation.
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u/CSEnzley PC Mar 11 '20
...it was labeled under 'discoverable'.
Like a lot of the other points of interest.