A Red Dead Redemption 2 PC port looks more likely by the day

As of this week, we know two things about Red Dead Redemption 2. One is that the game is almost certainly coming to PC, and the other is that Rockstar isn’t making any meaty single-player story DLC to accompany said release.

The Australian ratings board last week inadvertently teased a potential new release for RDR2. The board rated it again, something it’d only do if there were another version of the game incoming. And since there’s no DLC to repackage with the game as a “Game of the Year Edition,” the balance of probability swings in the direction of a new port. We’ve contacted Rockstar to see if it’ll offer any comment on that one way or another.

It’s far from the only evidence for an upcoming PC release. Earlier this month the company released its own game launcher, something I posited might be a vessel for an RDR PC release — if only because that’s the only way throwing yet another PC launcher in an already oversaturated market might make sense. Dataminers also uncovered evidence of PC settings in the RDR2 companion app.

As for the DLC, two Rockstar employees confirmed to VG247 that they’re “100% focused on Online right now,” basically killing hopes for a single-player spin-off. They insist they love single-player games and RDR2‘s “absolutely massive story and equally massive epilogue are hopefully evidence of that” — which honestly feels like a coded way of saying,”Really, y’all still aren’t satisfied?”

Serious question: do we really need single-player DLC for RDR2? Without meaning to spoil anything, that game’s story was wrapped up as tight as a burrito. There’s not really room for a story DLC anywhere, at least nothing that would fit with the main game thematically.

When a story is that definitively finished as Red Dead Redemption‘s is, where is there to go? The first game chose to spin a crazy alternate universe involving zombies, unicorns, and vengeful Aztec deities. Undead Nightmare clung to RDR‘s vestiges of grounded realism by the very tips of its fingers. A hypothetical Undead Nightmare 2 would have to let them go completely to be weird enough to justify its own existence.

And when you do that, what happens? You become Saints Row 4, that’s what. And as much as I adored Saints Row 4 — how can you not love a game in which you can ride a velociraptor that sings “Rock the Dinosaur” — the game’s only resemblance to a Rockstar title is as a response to the question, “What would 40 Rockstar devs make if they took speedball for a month and played nothing but Crackdown?”