Rockstar Games provided more questions than answers with its latest trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2.
The creators of the Grand Theft Auto series gave players a richer taste of what to expect in the open world game set in the old West, but failed to announce a firm release date or discuss what they had planned for the game’s online component.
Here’s what we do know, though. The game will have you play as a dark hat this time around, rather than stepping into the heroic boots worn by John Marston, the focus of the previous game. Players will follow the story of outlaw Arthur Morgan, a member of the Van der Linde gang (who featured prominently in the original Red Dead Redemption).
As a bad guy, you’ll rob banks, hijack trains, hunt and generally instill misery on all sorts of local townsfolk. The game will be released in Spring 2018 on both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
This was the first glimpse of the game since its public unveiling on Oct. 18, 2016.
The lack of news about the game’s online mode could upset investors. GTA Online has helped Grand Theft Auto V become the best selling game in the industry’s history by both revenue and units. The game has been on the market 49 months and has achieved 41 Top 10 appearances on the NPD Group’s gaming charts. That’s 16 more times than any other single title in the industry’s history. Publisher Take-Two Interactive Software says fans have bought more than 80 million copies.
The online portion of the game lets players explore the game’s many cities and partake in an ever-expanding number of cooperative and competitive challenges. Recurrent consumer spending (things like the purchase of virtual currency and in-game microtransactions) added more than $460 million to the company’s bottom line in fiscal 2017—26% of the company’s total net revenue. A sizable percentage of that came from GTA Online.
