Rockstar Games has announced that its upcoming game Red Dead Redemption 2 will be getting an open-world online mode shortly after its launch, similar to the one that has made Grand Theft Auto V a top earner for the company for much of its five-year lifespan.
Following in Grand Theft Auto’s footsteps, the new mode is called Red Dead Online and will launch as a public beta this November, roughly a month after Red Dead Redemption 2’s own late October release.
The move is far from a surprising one for Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive; Grand Theft Auto Online, which itself comes packaged with Grand Theft Auto V, continues to lead Take-Two Interactive’s game library in terms of recurrent player spending, and has helped boost GTA V to over 95 million copies sold since its 2013 launch.
Those five years for Grand Theft Auto Online have seen a host of free content updates hit the open-world online game in the form of themed events, racing and combat challenges, and, real estate and business management activities. Rockstar hasn’t explicitly detailed the kind of content updates Red Dead Online will see during its lifetime quite yet, but the company notes that the mode will merge narrative with both competitive and cooperative play and will “feature constant updates and adjustments to grow and evolve this experience for all players.”