Six Years After RDR2's Success, Red Dead Redemption 3 Will Have No Real Competition

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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 . 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 instead scared off any potential competitors after its release, which may have cleared the path for any sequel to drop without any challengers.

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 showing how well that setting and all the tropes that come along with it can be done.

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 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 's pistols.

Rockstar Games' Red Dead Redemption 2 is already one of the biggest video games of all-time, but does it live up to the hype?

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, this caricature is represented by the Dead Eye skill, which players use during shootouts