After two games where the death of the Old West was embodied in the struggles of tragic heroes, Red Dead Redemption 3 deserves a protagonist who is not doomed. Both Red Dead Redemption titles follow members of Dutch van der Linde’s gang of outlaws, a group whose glory days are in the past. Arthur Morgan’s story took place during the gang’s collapse, and John Marston was tasked with hunting down the survivors. Both men are fated for a bleak end, and the one-note sense of futility that carried throughout Red Dead Redemption 2’s lengthy play time cannot be repeated for the series’ third act.
Despite some of the stylish and undeniably cool moments in Red Dead Redemption 2, it left much of the Van Der Linde Gang's story off-screen. Arthur and John were members of Dutch’s gang when it stood for something, a group of robbers with a social conscience who redistributed wealth to those who lacked resources and opportunity. This golden age is alluded to repeatedly in both games, but players only see the gang after its idealism has collapsed. The story only shows men who dedicated their life to a failed cause, unable to escape the weight of their sins.
Red Dead Redemption's Take On Doomed, Conflicted Outlaws Has Been Done
The notion of the romantic outlaw lifestyle as a facet of the Old West that moved on when social structure caught up with westward expansion of the United States is certainly compelling to many. Gritty stories like Red Dead Redemption focus on the grim consequences of a life of violence, and Red Dead Redemption 2’s credits foreshadow John’s death, just as the climax of its story showed Arthur’s end. The two games essentially focused on identical themes, however, and showing the collapse of the gang and the deaths of its surviving members is akin to showing the same train wreck from different camera angles.
Where Red Dead Redemption 2 already arguably kicked a dead horse thematically, a third entry hitting the same notes would be dragging that corpse through the desert. The series has already thoroughly asserted that idealistic bandits are an illusion and gunslingers were ground up by the progress of modern civilization. It is time for Red Dead Redemption to say something different, otherwise Red Dead Redemption 3 is just an excuse for players to again lose themselves in the fidelity of the game’s world. Giving players another flawed but compelling hero to attach themselves to, and then mourn by the game’s end, would be redundant.
The many Western movie homages in Red Dead Redemption 2 include classic Spaghetti Westerns and modern works like Django Unchained, but The Wild Bunch is the clear inspiration for both games above any others. The film presented the same themes of an aging outlaw gang desperately trying to assert their relevance in a world that had moved on. Seeing a movie where the protagonists are inevitably riding toward a bloody end is one thing, but after close to 70 hours of such content, spread between the two Redemption games, the formula is in danger of wearing out its welcome. The series would benefit from a different direction.
Red Dead Redemption 3's Protagonist Needs To Live
The third game could go even further back and finally show the apocryphal period where Dutch was truly a crusader for social justice. This could change the tone, but it would not alleviate the issue of invariably doomed heroes, given the gang’s eventual fate. Though Red Dead Redemption 3 can improve open world mechanics, it is harder for it to meaningfully connect to the earlier stories without simply regurgitating the same ideals. It is difficult to imagine Jack Marston, the son of John and Abigail who took up arms against government agents to avenge his parents’ deaths, has a future any less bleak than his father's in store for him.
There is still potential for a Red Dead Redemption where a hero’s redemption means more than being gunned down. Moving the timeline forward with Jack is one option if the story allows Jack to move beyond the gunslinger life and find peace somewhere. Focusing on a genuinely altruistic member of law enforcement would clash with the established paradigm of the series, given their ruthless depiction in the prior entries. Whether an RDR2 prequel or sequel, Red Dead Redemption 3 needs to be more than another story of a conflicted bandit whose guns are buried with them in the mass grave of the Old West.
Source: Rockstar Games/YouTube