Red Dead Redemption 2 is all but assured to be one of the biggest releases of the year. Rockstar games don't come along very often, but when they do they're typically the story of the year. Red Dead Redemption 2 has all the developer hallmarks from what little we've seen so far: breathtaking vistas, impressive detail and a focus on cutscene narrative. When it comes to the single-player portion of the game, we know what we're getting in broad strokes if not in fine details.
Red Dead Redemption 2, however, comes with a different set of considerations than past Rockstar games. It's launching alongside an online component, much like with GTA 5 did back in 2013. It's practically a necessity, considering the staggering amount of revenue that GTA Online continues to bring in for Take-Two. But we forget that GTA Online was a non-functional disaster when it first launched, and that it took a long time to find its feet. I don't think that people will be as forgiving if Red Dead Online experiences similar outages.
Online disasters were sort of par for the course around the launch of GTA Online, something that the industry has largely solved with the widespread use of open betas. At a certain point, developers had to accept letting the game out into the wild a bit early in order to avoid high-profile crashes, and many found a way to loop the open beta concept into something that served as a demo as well.
The idea doesn't play well with how Rockstar likes to handle the ramp-up to release. Consider the fact that now, mere months from release, all we've seen is one teaser trailer, one full-length trailer and a set of screenshots. This is less uncommon in the video game industry than it used to be, but it's still classic Rockstar: the developer is traditionally cagey, doesn't like big stages, and prefers to drop its games in near-perfect, complete condition. The opening moments of GTA V, Red Dead Redemption and GTA IV are all thoroughly, painfully crafted moments: it's clear that at least part of this caginess is because the developer wants total control of how you enter this world.
An open beta would appear to go against this overriding ethos. After all, there's no way to run an open beta without letting everyone in the world play your game in as close to complete a condition as possible. You don't need to let them play every part of the game, of course, but no matter what they'll be in your world before you're necessarily ready to give them that zero hour introduction that you've so perfectly crafted for the beginning of the story mode. Add into that the fact that betas usually have bugs -- finding them is the whole point, after all -- and you begin to lose a degree of control over how the game makes its way to the public.
If I had to predict, I'd say that Rockstar will have to go with an open beta for Red Dead Online. The prospect of a high-profile launch day crash is just a little too much to swallow for a property this important, even if it does mean eroding some of the developer's traditionally tight control over its content. Which is good news for fans, because it means you get to jump in just a little bit early.
