‘Red Dead Redemption’ Follow-Up Heavily Teased By Rockstar, Is This Gaming’s ‘Magnificent Seven’?
Rockstar Games has Red Dead Redemption fans salivating for the announcement of a sequel. The developer behind Grand Theft Auto 5 teased an announcement Monday its next PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC game with a distinctly Western feel.
The teasing began with Rockstar Games changing its logo on all social media sites to the studio’s logo on a red background. The gaming community blew up with that subtle jab. Things exploded even more when the developer released the following artwork on Twitter and Facebook, which clearly teases a Red Dead Redemption follow-up announcement coming soon.
— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) October 17, 2016
While there doesn’t appear much to go on with this image, there is actually quite a bit of speculation floating around already. The fact that seven characters are shown suggests the next entry in the Red Dead follow-up will work with multiple characters. It’s possible the game could go the GTA 5 route by allowing players to switch between characters in a group or these may simply be a cast of characters or companion characters in a posse. In fact, the seven characters on the screen come across as a nod to the classic Western film, The Magnificent Seven.
The other possibility is this is a tease for multiplayer. Red Dead Redemption featured multiple multiplayer modes from the traditional team deathmatch to an open-world style free for all to a Horde-like zombie mode added with the Undead Nightmare pack.
Naturally, there are several unconfirmed rumors floating about with anticipation for a new game in the Red Dead series being so high. Those won’t be reported on here until some kind of verification can be done or until the inevitable announcement by Rockstar Games.
This is actually the studio’s modus operandi. It holds back announcing a game and then build up anticipation through a series of teases. Grand Theft Auto 5 was full of a series of teases and reveals without much information to send the fan base scurrying to identify information in screenshots and promotional art.
It is hard to argue with the approach, however, as Grand Theft Auto V is one of the top-selling games of the last 10 years, behind only Minecraft and Wii Sports. More than 65 million copies of the game have been sold since its 2013 release. Additionally, the title has been a consistent driver of digital revenue for publisher Take-Two Interactive. The company reported $172.1 million in digital sales during its last fiscal quarter, via Seeking Alpha, with GTA 5 being a primary contributor.
Xbox One owners can take Red Dead Redemption for a spin while they wait for Rockstar Games to make an announcement. The Xbox 360 game was added to the current-gen console’s backward compatibility library of titles this past July, as previously reported by Inquisitr.
Red Dead Redemption runs better than ever on the Xbox One. Framerate tests on the game show it holding a steady 30 frames per second (fps) on the console through the majority of tests. This includes areas where the performance tanked on the last-gen console. Issues with screen tearing were also fixes. The quality of the graphics remains the same, but the performance is much improved and makes for a great opportunity to catch up for those that haven’t played it before.
Xbox One manages backward compatibility by emulating the entire Xbox 360 operating system, as previously reported on by the Inquisitr. This allows Xbox 360 games to run on the Xbox One without any special coding or other workarounds. The major hurdles remaining are the licensing agreements with development studios and publishers to allow the games to be played on the Xbox One and listed for sale in the Xbox Store for the console.
The PlayStation 4 does not support the ability to play backward compatible titles. Sony as released remastered games for the console, but there has been no mention of Red Dead Redemption being brought forward by Take-Two Interactive or Sony.
[Featured Image by Rockstar Games]
