Red Dead Online public beta set to launch later this month

Take-Two Interactive revealed this week it’d be opening the public beta for Red Dead Online, the multiplayer component of its unbelievably popular Red Dead Redemption 2, sometime later this month.

CEO Strauss Zelnick wouldn’t give a specific timeframe, but we can take it to mean players still have some time to work the main game out of their systems before joining the chaos of Online. And that’s about all we know about the mode so far.

Having finished the game (no I won’t stop bragging, thank you very much), I’m a little baffled as to what form the gameplay of Red Dead Online is going to take. Before GTA Online was revealed, the single-player campaign had a number of heists and set-up missions to prepare users for what some of its biggest multiplayer components would look like. I’m racking my brain, and I can’t think of anything comparable in the story mission for RDR2 that would tell us what would be in the Online mode.

It’s possible we could take part in house robberies and train hold-ups the way the Van der Linde gang does in the story, though that might not be as grandiose as some of the heists in GTA Online. I suppose it’s always possible the player could join one of the six other gangs shown in the story mode, but they sucked so I don’t see why you’d want to.

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Depending on how well the initial gameplay goes over with gamers, you could very likely be hearing about Red Dead Online for years to come. Several years on, and Take-Two reports a major portion of its revenue comes from in-game purchases and currency, specifically for GTA Online.

Take-Two also boasted about RDR2‘s sales figures — namely, the game has sold over 17 million units, outdoing its predecessor in just two weeks. For our thoughts on RDR2, read our gameplay review here, or our spoiler-ific story analysis here. We’ll be diving headfirst into Red Dead Online when it eventually surfaces, so stay tuned.