It was pretty obvious what Rockstar were going to say in a few days to most of their fans, but still, the official announcement came as great news for many of the studio’s followers. We’ve been seeing some pretty clear hints about “Red Dead Redemption 2” in the last few days, and now that we’ve seen the actual reveal of the game, fans seem to have a lot on their minds that they want to share.
One of the more notable parts of the announcement was multiplayer support. While the original “Red Dead Redemption” already featured online play, it looks like Rockstar quite enjoyed what they did with “GTA 5”, and are going to repeat the same idea with “Red Dead Redemption 2”.
Whether or not they will implement it fully, or if they will just take parts of the multiplayer of “GTA 5” and fill the gaps with new ideas remains to be seen, but it looks like fans of the first game are a bit split about the decision.
The main selling point of the original “Red Dead Redemption” was its single player campaign, and many players were primarily interested in the sequel because of this factor alone. While it’s good to see the studio putting a lot of effort into the multiplayer of the game as well, this hopefully won’t mean that they will focus less on the single player experience.
It’s not just about the initial release either – this could affect the game in the long run. Rockstar have shown that they are more than willing to provide post-release support for their popular titles, and “GTA 5” is a great example of that. But that game also showed us a worrying trend in Rockstar’s DLC development.
Is the studio going to primarily focus on multiplayer content in the post-launch support of “Red Dead Redemption 2”, or are we going to see some nice single player DLCs as well? The game certainly has a lot of potential for both, and it’s no secret that its premise would make it a great multiplayer title with a strong long-term potential.
But many players would be disappointed if it lacks a solid single player component, so hopefully Rockstar are paying attention to those discussions and are going to react accordingly in the development of the game. They still have plenty of time to go, after all, but it might be a bit more difficult for them to make more drastic changes to the formula at this point.
The game is scheduled for a release in the fall season of 2017, so there’s still some time to put work into its development. There is definitely also time for Rockstar to change some key components if it looks like fans are going to be disappointed by them.
However, the studio has lately shown that they are not afraid to put their own interests above everything else, so if they believe they have the right idea for how the game should be developed, that’s how they’re going to do it.
In other news, this also paints a pretty clear picture for “GTA 6”. It’s very unlikely that we’re going to see an announcement for that game anytime soon, as Rockstar obviously aren’t going to split their development efforts between two titles of such significant importance for them. Plus, they are still actively working on additional content for “GTA 5”, so they have no real need to release a sequel right now.