The Red Dead Redemption games may star gunslingers, but both take place long after the golden age of outlaws. The first game is set primarily in 1911, a bold choice by Rockstar that borders on intentionally anachronistic. Even Red Dead 2’s main plot, set in 1899, explores a world where gangs like Dutch’s are already relics of a bygone era, the subject of biographies, campfire songs, and collectable cards. The gang is stuck in the past, while their enemies – whether they’re the Pinkertons or the Italian mob – have a noticeably 20th-century feel. Red Dead Redemption 3 will need to find a way to explore the series’ main themes from a new angle.

After the first game released, many Red Dead fans hoped to see a sequel starring Jack Marston, John’s son. While there are arguments against making Jack the main player character in the next game, there are also reasons that setting Red Dead Redemption 3 during Jack’s adulthood could deliver a unique experience that takes some of Red Dead’s major themes to their natural conclusions.

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Red Dead 1 And The Death Of The Outlaw

John Marston stands off against an army.

In Red Dead Redemption 1 John Marston is a former outlaw who is now completely subject to the federal oversight that the Old West famously lacked. He may be on horseback under the sprawling western sky, but John is anything but free.

After John’s wife Abigail and son Jack are taken by the Bureau of Investigation, he is given no choice but to hunt down his former comrades on the government’s behalf. To the extent that John is an outlaw at all in the first game, he’s one who has lost all pretense of freedom.

The message is clear – by the time Red Dead 1 is set, the Old West is dead. The Bureau forcing John to kill his former friends is practically house cleaning. The government is powerful enough not only to wipe out the last remnants of the golden age of outlaws, but to have the problem solve itself.

Red Dead 2 And The Death Of Nostalgia

arthur morgan john marston goodbye red dead redemption 2

Part of the genius of Red Dead Redemption 2 is that, despite being a prequel, the situation the Van der Linde gang finds itself in isn’t too far removed from John’s in the first game. The game starts with the gang escaping the fallout of the failed Blackwater ferry heist, the event which kicks off their spiraling decline. Although there are spots of hope, in retrospect it’s clear that the entire plot takes place during the gang’s death rattles, and their flailing attempts to get back on top only solidify their fate.

From the perspective of Red Dead 1, Red Dead 2’s story looks like the gang in it's prime. They may be doomed, but unlike John’s story in the first game there’s still some pretense of freedom. The second game almost suggests that if the series were to continue to go backward in time the main characters would still find themselves struggling with the perceived decline of their way of life.

Red Dead 2 suggests that the golden age the Van der Linde gang strives to emulate might never have existed at all outside of Dutch’s romantic notions. The original Red Dead makes it clear that its characters don’t have a future. What the second game subtly suggests, however, is that they never really had much of a past.

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Red Dead 3 And The Death Of The Western

Jack Marston RDR 1 epilogue

The series' exploration of nostalgia could be an argument to set Red Dead 3 before Red Dead 2. Another prequel could show how even the gang’s best days saw them struggling to keep one step ahead of the law, and that they only ever really looked like the good old days in light of the gang’s total collapse at the turn of the century. If Red Dead 3 is going to realize the full potential of the series’ themes, however, it should explore what happened to Jack Marston after the events of the first game.

A Red Dead game set in Jack’s young adulthood would stretch Red Dead’s exploration of nostalgia to its absolute breaking point. Although Red Dead 1 was already extremely late for a Western, if there’s one thing the first two games make absolutely clear, it’s that no matter how hard its characters struggle, time moves on. Dutch van der Linde’s final speech sums it up perfectly – “we can’t fight change. Can’t fight gravity. We can’t fight nothing.”

The next game shouldn’t take refuge in the past, as it should instead explore how Jack’s failure to let the past go could doom his future. Red Dead Redemption 1 ends in an act of revenge, with Jack shooting Edgar Ross, the Bureau agent who set up his father. John might have grown up in a world where a man could cross state lines to avoid a murder charge, but it’s clear that is no longer the world his son lives in.

A Red Dead 3 story set shortly after the events of Red Dead 1 would pose one major question – can Jack let go of the past, or will he doom himself by repeating it? It’s a story that would likely either end in Jack’s death or true redemption, escaping his attachment to the outlaw lifestyle instead of dying with it. It could explore whether Jack, like Dutch, is unable to resist fighting a losing battle against time, or whether or not Red Dead’s last outlaw can embrace the changing world around him without being destroyed by it.

John and Arthur might have lost their fight against changing times, but they also died – they never had to face the futures they feared. As Red Dead’s sole surviving player character, Jack does. Exploring what it means for Jack Marston to live the life of a Western gunslinger after his father’s death could be the perfect conclusion to a Red Dead trilogy, exploring not only how men like John and Arthur were chewed up by changing times, but also how men like Jack might escape the same fate.

Red Dead Redemption 3 is not confirmed to be in development.

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