The Old West has been a staple of American media for decades and the last major game to represent the Western genre came out all the way back in 2018 with Red Dead Redemption 2. The massively popular open-world game included all the classic tropes of the Western genre: marshals chasing outlaws, daring train robberies, and shoot-outs in saloons. Strangely, instead of spawning copycats in its wake, it seems that RDR2 instead scared off any potential competitors after its release, which may have cleared the path for any sequel to drop without any challengers.
Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t the only game in recent years to feature the Old West as a setting, but it is the only one to fully commit to the setting without any sort of supernatural or horror twist. Other titles have introduced cowboy characters and settings, with their adjacent bounties and gunslinging ways, alongside zombies, monsters, and other creepy creatures. For some reason, video game developers are avoiding the Western as a genre despite RDR2 showing how well that setting and all the tropes that come along with it can be done.
RDR2 Proved Westerns Could Make Successful Video Games
An Encapsulation Of The Old West
Red Dead Redemption 2 is the perfect Western game. It encapsulates the Old West as a genre setting, condensing every common story trope into a single video game. Whatever scenarios that first come to mind when imagining a Western – robbing a train, a high-stakes card game, a big game hunt, chasing down dangerous bounties – can all happen in RDR2 among hundreds of other Old West plots. Even the action tropes of a Western, with a sharpshooter hero taking down rows of thugs in a shootout by fanning their revolvers, are incorporated into the mechanics of Red Dead Redemption 2‘s pistols.
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This special technique, where someone holds the revolver in one hand and uses the other to quickly cock the hammer for each shot, is something all gunslingers do in the Old West media. In Red Dead Redemption 2, this caricature is represented by the Dead Eye skill, which players use during shootouts to slow time, target their foes, and fire in quick succession after time speeds back up. This mixture of gameplay with a genre trope is the best example of what makes RDR2 such a perfect Western as well as an immensely fun game.
What also makes Red Dead Redemption 2 such a critically acclaimed game is that, while it does include all the fun parts of the mythical Old West, it also never shies away from the grittier reality. Arthur Morgan and his gang are not always good people (though that can partially depend on player choices) and the people they interact with often aren’t easily categorized as good or bad.
Most RDR2 characters are morally complex, but Rockstar does a great job demonizing and belittling morally bankrupt institutions like the KKK.
Like its predecessor, Red Dead Redemption 2 was released to practically universal critical acclaim. The game received an aggregate score of 97/100 on Metacritic, thanks to perfect or close to perfect reviews from many publications. That initial success was not short-lived, as RDR2 still brings in a steady number of monthly players, at least on Steam. According to Steam Charts, the seven-year-old game has a range of roughly 40,000 to 70,000 players in the past 12 months.
Despite Success, Red Dead Copycats Aren’t Common
This Town Just Ain’t Big Enough For The Two Of ‘Em
It’s surprising that no other games have tried to replicate the success of Red Dead Redemption 2, at least in its setting. The Old West is a vast sandbox for any type of fun story, especially involving outlaws. High-speed railroad chases, robberies, bank heists – these types of engaging tropes are ripe for the taking. Yet, no other major games have come out to take advantage of the setting.
Perhaps such overwhelming success has killed off any competition, because there are no other Western games challenging RDR2. Some titles, like Desperados 3, have continued a series already set in the Old West, but no new series have risen to take on RDR2. It’s possible that this lack of Western set games stems from a reluctance of developers to make something comparable to RDR2. When a game is as successful among fans and critics as that, it would make sense that other studios don’t want to create what would ultimately be judged to be a lesser experience.
Red Dead Redemption had Undead Nightmare, a zombie horror mode that was not brought back for Red Dead Redemption 2.
Some games do take a stab at a Western setting, but not in the purest sense, like the Red Dead Redemption series. Titles like Hunt: Showdown 1896 took the setting of late 19th-century bounty hunters and gave it an extreme supernatural twist, as players join together to hunt down monster bounties, like giant spiders and pig-headed brutes, with limited supplies. In a similar horror vein, Dead By Daylight added a cowboy-themed killer called The Deathslinger in 2020, who was a brutal bounty hunter working for an immoral prison warden in the Midwest before being claimed by The Fog.
RDR3 Will Likely Release With No Genre Competitors
A Sequel Has Yet To Be Announced, But Is Likely
If the trend holds of no games coming to challenge Red Dead Redemption’s dominance over the Old West, it seems likely Red Dead Redemption 3, though not yet announced, will come out with no Westerns to compete with. Since both RDR and RDR2 were massively successful games that made significant amounts of money for Rockstar Games, it’s highly unlikely that a RDR3 won’t happen at some point in the future. After Rockstar’s unfortunate history of hacks and leaks leading up to the release of Grand Theft Auto 6, the company is probably keeping all future releases closer to the vest for now.
It’s safe to say that when Red Dead Redemption 2‘s sequel comes out, it won’t have much competition from other games. For now, it seems the popular trend of fantasy RPGs might last for a while longer, since games like Elden Ring, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, and Black Myth: Wukong dominated The Game Awards in 2024, and in past years, similar titles have taken the biggest awards.
Sources: Metacritic, Steam Charts
- Released
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October 26, 2018
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Use of Drugs and Alcohol
