Highlights

  • Red Dead Redemption 3 could benefit from adding official roleplay features and servers to enhance the multiplayer experience.
  • Roleplay mode has been successful in GTA Online, creating unique storytelling opportunities for players.
  • Red Dead Online has potential for immersive roleplay scenarios, adding depth and longevity to the multiplayer aspect.

While Red Dead Redemption 3 seems like a faraway prospect, there are many questions as to what the game could end up looking like. A lot of this discourse focuses on the single-player setting and narrative for the project, yet the online mode of the title is more than worthy of debate.

The multiplayer mode of Red Dead Redemption 2, known as Red Dead Online, was an ambitious but short-lived foray by Rockstar, with some fans hoping for a more robust online mode in RDR3 with greater longevity. Red Dead Online was always going to struggle against the backdrop of the massively successful GTA Online, and Red Dead Redemption 3 needs to borrow one heavily rumored roleplaying feature that Grand Theft Auto 6 may introduce to its own multiplayer offerings.

While rumored, Rockstar has not confirmed that official roleplay servers will be built into Grand Theft Auto 6 's online mode.

red dead redemption 3 storytelling device
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Official Roleplay Servers Could Be the Future of Red Dead Online

Roleplay servers have become a surprising staple of recent Rockstar releases, with the immersive and breathing worlds that these titles usually possess being the perfect staging ground for multiplayer RP. While RP communities have existed as far back as GTA 4, it was Grand Theft Auto 5 that really brought this mode of play to the forefront of the gaming industry.

GTA Online has been a massive success for Rockstar and has contributed greatly to the continued relevance of GTA 5 as a whole, with online streamers making roleplay more popular and accessible in recent years. RP in GTA Online allows players to move away from the uncontrolled chaos of the base game, creating their own characters with unique backstories, personalities, and jobs, that they then act out on a given server.

There is still a huge amount of entertainment and storytelling value in RP gameplay, with the success of roleplaying in GTA Online leading many to believe that official RP servers will be built into the multiplayer mode of Grand Theft Auto 6. This would make RP widely available across platforms while making the framework of these servers much more thorough, and there is no reason that this cannot extend to Red Dead Redemption 3.

Red Dead RP Could Surpass Grand Theft Auto's if Done Correctly

Of course, RP has its own place in Red Dead Online as much as it does GTA, but the lack of continued support for the former has meant that the full potential of Red Dead roleplay has not yet been seen. If anything, the Old West setting of the RDR franchise is much more conductive of roleplaying scenarios when compared to GTA, and official RP servers in the next RDR game could breathe huge amounts of life into the title's multiplayer.

While traditional free-play should still be available in the next Red Dead Online, built-in RP servers would open up a huge avenue of gameplay possibilities, with players being able to work their way up through a variety of warring outlaw factions or even different branches of law enforcement. With some circles of fans seeing the small window of post-launch support for RDR2's online as disappointing, official RP servers in the next game akin to GTA would be the perfect step forward to make up for this.