Red Dead Redemption 2 is a weird one. Never have I seen a game that’s sold so well and been beloved by so many, yet been treated by its creators like some kind of failed side-project– something to be brushed off under the carpet so that its creators can focus on the next big money-making thing (which, in Rockstar’s case, is of course the ongoing support of GTA Online as well as the development of GTA 6).
Rockstar’s disinterest in Red Dead Redemption 2 (and its predecessor, for that matter) has been apparent for a while. Despite being a prestigious blockbuster, with estimates suggesting its development cost was as high as $540m (over double that of GTA 5), Red Dead 2 didn’t get a ton of support from Rockstar post-launch. It never received single-player DLC (despite Sadie Adler hollering out for it), and its multiplayer component, Red Dead Online, stopped receiving support last July (making its life span 3.5 years versus the 10 years that GTA Online is fast approaching). Apparently, supporting one of the most critically acclaimed games of all time for more than a few years just isn’t worth it for Rockstar.
Ok, so Rockstar doesn’t want to continue supporting RDR 2 as an ongoing project. Fine, we get it, they don’t want to get bogged down in maintaining the 7th best-selling game of all time when they’re making obscene money from the online component of the 2nd best-selling game of all time. But is Red Dead Redemption not at least worthy of a final hurrah? An immortalisation with the graphical bells and whistles of the new generation?
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In this console generation in particular, there’s a certain expectation among gamers that you’ll be able to enjoy a previous-gen blockbuster game with the perks of current-gen hardware. Just look at The Witcher 3, which at the tail-end of last year received a pretty extensive free next-gen update seven years on from its original release, and well past the window where its ongoing sales are going to amount to anything meaningful for its creator CDPR. The Next-Gen update for The Witcher 3 was absolutely not something CDPR had to do, yet even though it had a bit of a rough landing, a few patches later it became the ultimate way to play the game (if I say so myself). It was a labour of love from a studio that clearly has a lot of fondness and time for its creation, delivered to the adoring community that helped propel it to success. Crucially, it was nothing less than a game of The Witcher 3’s prestige deserved.
What twists the knife here is that Red Dead Redemption 2 was pushing at the limits of its console generation. It’s kind of unbelievable (and impressive) that a game of such scale and visual fidelity managed to squeeze onto the PS4 and Xbox One, yet somehow it did. Red Dead 2 was released way close to the launch of the PS5 than the PS4, and there’s no question that a next-gen update for the game with crispy textures, ray-tracing, and proper 60@4K support would stand to gain a lot more visually from this than 2015’s The Witcher 3 did.
Bizarrely, even though Red Dead Redemption 2 is backwards-compatible on the PS5, it’s still locked to the same 1920x2160p resolution and stodgy 30fps frame rate as you’d get on the PS4 Pro. Likewise, the game’s performance on Xbox Series X is the same as it was on the previous-gen Xbox One X. Meanwhile, last year the ancient GTA 5 has received its own PS5 version as well as a ray-tracing update for it, once again showing the abject disparity between the resources Rockstar dedicates to its GTA IP versus Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar even saw fit to dip deeper into their GTA back-catalogue before bumping Red Dead 2 up to current-gen standards, launching the infamous GTA Trilogy: The Definitive Edition–a lazy cash grab targeting our nostalgia for GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas, which remains buggy and incomplete to this day.
Rockstar has always been a bit weird about the Red Dead IP. The original Red Dead Redemption has had fans crying out for a remaster for years. Released in 2010, the game came out three years prior to GTA 5, and since then has appeared only on two platforms (PS3 and Xbox 360) while GTA 5 has been launched on seven platforms across three gaming generations.
Rockstar’s treatment of Red Dead Redemption 2 is a bad look, because if they do so little to nurture a successful and much-loved game like Red Dead 2 in this era of remasters and next-gen patches, and multi-generation releases, then how can we trust them to support other IPs they may choose to work on in the future? Perhaps it doesn’t matter to Rockstar all that much, considering that the last fully-fledged game not called GTA or Red Dead Redemption they released was Max Payne 3 11 years ago. Even if Rockstar were to just become ‘the GTA company’ going forward, a game like Red Dead 2 deserves its current-gen update
