The natural inclination with any game series is to keep going until you can’t. For example, Grand Theft Auto is now up to its eighth mainline title. The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario have been going since the 1980s. The mark of a successful or good video game is often whether it gets a sequel or not.
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Red Dead Redemption doesn’t need to do that. While it couldn’t avoid becoming a series, it doesn’t need to continue on, milking this world and its characters forever and ever. It doesn’t even need to be a trilogy. The two Red Dead Redemption games have been out as one full story for the last seven years, and that story doesn’t need to continue.
Red Dead Redemption Should Remain Untouched
Any good game that comes out is often met with calls for sequels. This is a multi-faceted thing. On the one hand, fans will always want more of their favorite things. There’s a reason some of these franchises have dozens of games.
On the other hand, if there is that demand, it’s an easy way to make money that helps studios stay afloat. It’s a lot easier for studios and developers to work on games if they have that successful franchise in their back pocket.
That shouldn’t be the case with Rockstar and Red Dead Redemption, though. The developers have the GTA franchise, so it’s not as if they need to milk another thing to keep the studio going. This would just be overkill for a series that doesn’t deserve it.
The biggest reason to leave RDR alone is that the story is complete. Sure, there are gaps missing, like a few years between Red Dead Redemption 2‘s epilogue and the original game, and the events leading into RDR2. But those are pretty inconsequential to the overall story, which is told in two parts and focuses on two characters. We see the fall of the outlaw in the old western United States, so there’s not much else to explore there. And to that end, the options for a third game, be it a prequel or sequel, do not make much sense.
Obviously, as the name of the franchise would suggest, it’s all about redemption. With that in mind, some of the potential storylines for a third game don’t fit. Following Dutch van der Linde in the early days of the gang wouldn’t work, because we already know that what he ends up with is the exact opposite of redemption.
In fact, one could argue that Dutch begins as a decent man and regresses from there. I’m not totally sure the gang’s leader was ever that good, as he was clearly pretty selfish and manipulative even early on. But still, there’s no redemption in his story.
Showcasing the origin of the gang with Hosea, John, Arthur, and Dutch wouldn’t make sense, either. We know how all of their tales end, and the two that do get redeemed have already been explored.
The same is true of virtually all other characters in the gang. They either meet their demise in the first or second game or have been redeemed. The only real exclusions to that are Sadie Adler and Charles Smith, and they end Red Dead Redemption 2 on a fairly “redeemed” note, so that doesn’t quite fit, either.
Jack Marston’s journey is an option, but Rockstar runs the risk of it being far too similar to John’s path as well. The options for existing characters don’t work. There’s always the ability to create a new character in the past, like Rockstar did with Arthur Morgan, but then again, that’d be repeating the same process a second time.
Finally, the biggest reason the third game doesn’t need to happen is simply because Rockstar doesn’t need to mess with perfection. By the account of many, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the best video game ever made. Its predecessor has plenty of acclaim, too.
Rockstar already played with fire by creating a prequel to a beloved game. They managed to come out completely unscathed, but doing that a second time without a really good reason would be foolish. Rockstar can let a good thing be, unless they come up with another beautiful story to tell that can be connected, which doesn’t look likely right now.
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