GTA V in its original state hit shelves in September of 2013. The next generation version came roughly a year later, with the PC version hitting in early 2015. Rockstar has been gradually updating GTA V online since then and working on Red Dead Redemption 2 . Rockstar is known for taking a long to release games, but five years between projects is long, even for them. When GTA IV released in 2008, Red Dead hit only 2 years later in 2010, which was followed by GTA V three years after that. The company must have known what their next game would be for some time. Maybe this prolonged development cycle is another sign that the game is in a very rough state and the delay is for more than just pol

In fall of 2016, Rockstar teased us with several images that hinted towards the existence of Red Dead Redemption 2 before finally dropping its first trailer. It’s now been almost a full year since that trailer released. The game was originally slated to hit shelves in the fall of 2017, but the recent delay means that the total time between announcement and release will have been roughly a year and a half. While many are still incredibly excited about the game, these long, drawn out pre-release cycles tend to detract from a game’s impact upon release. Rockstar would have been better off announcing the game in one fell swoop six months before release and then going quiet until lau

While loot boxes continue to dominate the discourse of legality in video games, it is the community of gamers at large that have actually forced changes to happen. The microtransaction controversy surrounding Star Wars Battllefront 2 is a prime example of the gaming community bringing a fundamental change to a game, as is the more recent removal of the "Death Tax" in _ Sea of Thieves. _ It will be interesting to see if the online element in _ Red Dead Redemption 2 _ follows some sort of play-to-win platform, which many would argue is currently the case in _ GTA Online _ . Regardless, unless Rockstar manages to exceed expectations with the game’s online experience, the studio may be forced to play nice and enter into a collaboration with the community that will ultimately deem the multiplayer mode as a success or fail

You know how we control the champions in League of Legends ? Well, someone has to control the monsters, right? You didn’t think they were NPCs, did you? It’s true that minions feed, dragons are in a lot of fights, and Baron is The Rift’s Most Wanted. In their world, they are victims who must watch their own backs or be attacked by potentially ten people at once! That’s scary for the poor dragon who is in the middle of a team fight. All he can do is fight them off for a few seconds before he’s completely destroyed and his brethren must take his pl

It was the moments of quiet that were most enjoyable, just wandering the prairie through Redemption was enough to satisfy western fantasies. Both games also took place in the classic dusty west audiences have come to imagine from spaghetti westerns, now veering toward more recent films such as The Revenant, which seems to be the direction Red Dead Redemption 2 is going. Not a bad thing.

What adds to the wariness is the fact that Rockstar - a Take-Two Interactive subsidiary - had originally intended on releasing DLC for _ GTA V’s _ story mode, which never actually came to fruition. Then, Www.Openworldpilot.com when asked about the planned release of the DLC during a 2015 earnings call, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick stated that story-based DLC was never discussed. In 2017, Rockstar finally shed some light on the lack of story-mode DLC, when Director of Design, Imran Sarwar, stated that, "it was not really a conscious decision, it’s just what happened." Sarwar went on to state, "At Rockstar, we will always have bandwidth issues because we are perfectionists and to make huge complex games takes a lot of time and resources. Not everything is always possible, but we still love single-player open-world games more than anything." The latter sentence gives some hope that _ Red Dead Redemption 2 _ will receive the attention and treatment that it rightfully deserves, but while any game is in development, the mention of studio "bandwidth issues" is sure to send shivers down gamers’ spi

In a time where open-world games are a dime a dozen, my problem with most titles in the genre is that they rarely force you to engage with the world that has been laid out. Instead, developers just use the confines of an open-world to place the structure of their game inside of, because it's the normal thing to do more often than not nowadays. Simply existing in an open-world though isn't enough when you don't feel any sort of connection to the environment that you're within. Forcing you to explore and take your time in the world allows you to get to know the area which you find yourself in. This is something that I think The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild did so perfectly last year , and it's something that I think finds success here in Red Dead Redemption 2 as well.