Open Worlds: Cowboys, Gangbangers, and Conspiracy Theory.

GAME 420 Blog Post #2:

Open Worlds: Cowboys, Gangbangers, and Conspiracy Theory.

Through the years there have been many different examples of open world titles in the gaming sphere— Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky, Ubisoft’s FarCry series, and Interplay/Bethesda’s Fallout series to name a few. However, the utilization and population of open worlds between all of these games varies greatly from game to game— from large scale things like population density and the player’s ability to interact with the world, to small scale things like individual quests. This particular post is going to focus on the disparity between the Rockstar examples— both Red Dead Redemption 2 and Grand Theft Auto V specifically.

Open world games most often thrive on their ability to immerse the player in the world and provide a satisfying enough gameplay loop to keep the player immersed in that world. So, what is the difference between these two games? Aside from quite a few glaring things such as plot and technology available, the key difference in relation to this argument can be summed to one point: setting and density. Grand Theft Auto V was released in 2013 with a plethora of eighth gen ports to PC, Xbox One, and PS4— with support ongoing to this day, due to the fact that it is still making Rockstar a ton of money. Red Dead Redemption 2 was released in 2018 on only eighth generation consoles with a PC port a little over a year later in 2019. Given this information, one may assume that Red Dead 2 is a more advance and critically better accepted game than GTAV— and anyone would technically be correct to assume that. However, there is that “technically” looming within the sentence like a monolith of foreboding doom. While Red Dead 2 is technically (in the literal sense, as in the technology behind the game) more advanced than GTAV, it was (at launch) lacking in a few aspects in comparison— some aspects of which it still lacks to this very day.

Sticking to a purely single-player perspective for both games, GTAV has a more refined and varied gameplay loop than Red Dead 2— and that is no fault of Rockstar. The setting of GTAV is a city similar to the real life Los Angeles, a city of hustle and bustle. The setting of Red Dead 2 is significantly less conducive to population density— 1899, America, the midst of the downfall of the Wild West. The gameplay loop in Red Dead 2 is slower than that of GTAV— and that comes down to the population density. In GTAV, while driving around Los Santos, you are more likely to encounter a random stranger encounter or crime in progress or literally any interactive event than you are to encounter similar random stranger encounters between chapters of the story in Red Dead 2— and this sleight on the part of Red Dead 2 is the fault of its scope, involved tech, and setting. The graphics are beautifully rendered and realistic, the shading of shadows is amazingly rendered, and there is so much intense and wonderful scenery, towns, and forest areas to explore. In GTAV, the graphics are upgraded for the modern versions and the game controls well— but the breadth of content and the density of the population lend to its longevity as a game still dominant in the market, three years short of a decade later.

Now here’s where I get more review-y.

But why do I prefer Red Dead 2 over GTAV both in the factors of single and multiplayer? Due to the breadth of content (especially given that this game has had multiplayer with ongoing support since 2014), there is very little in the way of pure player to player interaction— something that Red Dead 2 essentially forces by its lack of content. Indisputably, the story of both games are good— but we have seen the heist story before, during, and since the prime of GTAV. Long before it, we had Heat, The Usual Suspects, Point Break, Oceans 11 to 13, among various other crime/heist movies released in the past 20 years by the time the game came out alone. The last true spaghetti western before the release of the first Red Dead Redemption was 1978 with the release of the very little known film White Fang and the Great Kid— a solid 32 years between them (and 8 years between the first and second games themselves), making the wild west a perfect narrative setting. But back to the topic of forced player to player interaction— much like GTAV, Red Dead 2 had a multiplayer component that came out about a month after launch. This multiplayer component launched as a buggy, nearly unplayable, incomplete experience. But there were a few factors that GTAV had that Red Dead 2 did not— the chiefest among them being staff behind the two modes. During the time of development of Red Dead 2 (which was in development at the same time as GTAV and after its release), Rockstar North (the office which headed the development of both projects, including their online components) was between 365 (2013, around the release of GTAV) and 605 (2018, around the release of Red Dead 2). While numbers are not concrete as to how many people worked on GTAV before launch, we do know that it was over 1,000 across multiple subsidiaries of Rockstar and the core team was the entirety of Rockstar North which consisted of their full 365 people at the time. Red Dead 2 took 8 years to make, with a total team consisting of roughly 3,032 team members across Rockstar North and other Rockstar subsidiaries.

Now here’s where I get a bit conspiracy theory-y.

That means everything from here on is theory with some facts (aka numbers) sprinkled in. I have no experience myself in this industry, so please take this with the heaviest possible dose of iodized salt.

GTA:Online was an overnight hit once it finally got off the ground completely. People fell in love immediately with how fun the racing, customization, missions, and overall gameplay was. Assets were redirected to ensure that this project was given the full attention that it needed, to ensure content was pushed out at a consistent rate to entertain the players. This model isn’t too terrible to start with— especially considering how well it worked for Rockstar (and it actually worked so well that it is the reason they didn’t do any singleplayer DLC ala the “Episodes from Liberty City” for GTAIV), it makes perfect sense that they would redirect as many people as possible from this project to ensure they make money and keep a playerbase. GTA:Online went from just a cool little additional gamemode where you could play some missions and do a story for your self-insert character in Los Santos to a full blown futuristic heist simulator. This is where I put on my tin hat and started theorizing: what if they intentionally doomed Red Dead Online to promote the development of GTA:Online seeing as it was their big money maker? I did the digging and got the rough numbers— there is no data on firings or layoffs at Rockstar North between the release of GTA:Online and the release of Red Dead 2, meaning we can only calculate an estimated steady growth of about 48 employees per year. It is my theory that Red Dead 2 received a bulk of people from the Rockstar North increased employee pool— but the rest went to GTA:Online, while the development of Red Dead Online was given to a small group of Rockstar North employees and a larger group of employees from Rockstar subsidiaries, essentially leaving Red Dead Online to flounder its way to launch in the wake of its older brother who had grown rather comfortably into its own. I believe that this theory is (partially) substantiated by the lack of actual story or content updates to Red Dead Online since release, as well as the glaring lack of marketing material in relation to it as well. The most recent “large” updated that I can remember off the top of my head was the Moonshiners update, which I only learned about existing from not ads, not Rockstar’s socials, not playing the game— I learned that the Moonshiners update came out (on December 19th, 2019) from Twitch Prime (sometime around January 10th, 2020) offering free stuff in game.

tl;dr – GTAV had the benefit of being a focus of development, having the setting and population density to sell fun and enjoyable multiplayer content, and continued support for 7+ years, whereas Red Dead 2 was developed (and most likely designed) predominantly as a singe player experience.