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Former RDR lead MP designer says there was never any intention to bring RDR to PC

kudoboi

Member
from his twitch stream
http://www.twitch.tv/robertsmania/v/18099876?t=26m19s

Kris Roberts was the Former Red Dead Redemption lead multiplayer designer

For those who can't watch the video
I don't think was ever an intention to have a PC version of Red Dead Redemption . I was honestly very shocked when they did a PC version of Grand Theft Auto V. Obviously in development, we were all PC based and had it running for win32 clients for the entire development. But as far as licensing for the console and stuff, it was always going to be a xbox 360 and ps3 title. To the best of my recollection, we never even seriously talked about optimising for PC.

Lock if old
 

Rhaknar

The Steam equivalent of the drunk friend who keeps offering to pay your tab all night.
Still makes no sense to me that RDR never came to PC.

Destiny makes even less sense to me. Different companies I know but I still don't understand the reasoning for Destiny not being on PC
 

Iksenpets

Banned
It's so sad that RDR is apparently going to be locked down to PS3/360 hardware forever, with no PC version and the code apparently too busted for them to ever attempt a remaster.
 

CheesecakeRecipe

Stormy Grey
Still one of the strangest mysteries. We got PC versions of GTAIV, LA Noire, Max Payne 3 and GTAV, all sandwiched around the time RDR was in development. Granted, different houses produced the various games, but even considering that there were official PC versions of even most of their older titles, omitting PC made very little logical sense.
 

fastmower

Member
Why was he shocked that they did a PC version of grand theft auto 5? Everybody and their mom predicted that the PC version would get made.
 

Vlaphor

Member
I had always heard that the reason for no PC port was that RDR was so just held together with tape and wishes (in terms of stability and code quality) that a PC version would've been worse than Arkham Knight
 
Shame. Game is great and quite the looker too, would love to see it on PC with GTA style visual mods. I can understand it not being part of the original plan but after so much success its strange they didn't make it happen. May have just been impossible to give up any staff once development for GTAV was at max?

I remember my biggest issue being aiming in RDR. I liked the manual aiming EXCEPT when I was on horseback. I wanted a mode where you got more aim-assist/lock on while on horseback but manual aim on foot. A mouse would probably fix the problem too though!

I never did actually finish the game but I was close to the end and pouring a ton of time into side quests... I have a habit of finishing up games a few years after I come close to beating them though. I probably haven't seen the last of RDR.
 

Harpuia

Member
I had always heard that the reason for no PC port was that RDR was so just held together with tape and wishes (in terms of stability and code quality) that a PC version would've been worse than Arkham Knight

Interesting. This has me thinking about other failed ports. Do they design with console hardware so in mind that they can't focus their efforts on a more ubiquitous software design? Does anyone know or have anything about why PC ports have a notorious history of being bad?
 

Lingitiz

Member
Interesting. This has me thinking about other failed ports. Do they design with console hardware so in mind that they can't focus their efforts on a more ubiquitous software design? Does anyone know or have anything about why PC ports have a notorious history of being bad?

It's more a misunderstanding of how well a game would do on PC, so they throw a skeleton crew at the game with a tiny budget and not enough time. The end product ends up being a mess, leading to low sales and a reputation hit for future games. So the next time the topic of a port comes around the same conversation happens again, with publishers not realizing that they're the ones wrong, not the audience.

Not always the case though. Games like Dark Souls were so good and appealed enough to PC gamers that it transcended it's poor port.
 

Orayn

Member
Maybe some day there will be a 360 emulator on PC

Xenia already boots commercial games, and even runs some at playable-ish speeds. I don't think RDR is among them yet, but the emulator has been making pretty swift progress in the last year.
 

Phamit

Member
but-why.gif
 
Why was he shocked that they did a PC version of grand theft auto 5? Everybody and their mom predicted that the PC version would get made.

Yeah that statement is bizarre. There hasn't been a single GTA major release that hasn't had a PC version and there was little reason to believe they would change that just because they never talked about RDR being ported.
 
They should just release the PC development version mostly-broken and let the community fix it up (do these ever leak?).

Steam game: Red Dead Redemption Files *untested as-is* - 99 cents
are we still on this subject? come on people, let it go.
It's one of the stranger absences of a PC version though. Already multi-platform and a big seller from a company that has done PC versions before.
 

Denton

Member
So awesome when great games are restricted to shitty locked down hardware that gets replaced forever. So awesome.

...not releasing PC moddable version of RDR was one of the great injustices if the last gen. At least Dragon's Dogma is coming out for eternal platform soon.
 
Destiny makes even less sense to me. Different companies I know but I still don't understand the reasoning for Destiny not being on PC

I think it's because they were developing for so many platforms so close to the launch of the next gen consoles. In the docs that came out from the Activision/Infinity Ward lawsuit, they mention that Bungie wasn't even sure if it would come to PS3 (because the studio had never worked with the PS3 and needed to develop for 3 other platforms already).

The docs also mention that Destiny 2 and 3 will be coming to PC. No idea if that's still the plan, but given how big the PC is nowadays I expect it to happen.
 

Lingitiz

Member
It's one of the stranger absences of a PC version though. Already multi-platform and a big seller from a company that has done PC versions before.

The market was pretty different when RDR was released I suppose, or at least publishers' understanding of the PC market was significantly more ignorant. It would certainly be crazy if a RDR2 was released and no PC version was in sight.
 
I imagine part of it is that RDR did well enough on consoles that they didn't need to do the extra (seemingly frustrating) work on porting it to PC. Nowadays, not factoring PC in is a notable omission, but at the time, developers like Rockstar could pick and choose.
 

Yoshi

Headmaster of Console Warrior Jugendstrafanstalt
It's so sad that RDR is apparently going to be locked down to PS3/360 hardware forever, with no PC version and the code apparently too busted for them to ever attempt a remaster.
BC should make it run on Xbone further down the line, don't you think?
 

Einchy

semen stains the mountaintops
It blows my mind that they haven't done a port by now or that we still have no idea if a sequel is coming.

It's probably their biggest hit aside from GTA and it seems like they aren't doing anything with the IP.
 
It's one of the stranger absences of a PC version though. Already multi-platform and a big seller from a company that has done PC versions before.
But theyve said its not going to happen a dozen times already, in what language do they have to say it for people to finally let it go? Your best bet is to either wait for an emulator or buy a ps360. Maybe if it gets a hd remaster it might get ported to pc but the current rdr as it exist today will not be on pc, end of story.
 

CheesecakeRecipe

Stormy Grey
But theyve said its not going to happen a dozen times already, in what language do they have to say it for people to finally let it go? Your best bet is to either wait for an emulator or buy a ps360. Maybe if it gets a hd remaster it might get ported to pc but the current rdr as it exist today will not be on pc, end of story.

Have you noticed the trend where games that were previously exclusive to consoles (or even a single console) have shown up on PC with various degrees of port quality over the past few years? It's stuff like that which gives people reason to ask companies even years down the line why it hasn't happened yet.

Rockstar's gone on record several times for sure, but that doesn't make it any less baffling. Positive attitudes get things done, negative ones don't.
 

Iksenpets

Banned
BC should make it run on Xbone further down the line, don't you think?

Maybe, but if the rumors about how sloppy that game's code is are true, then it would probably be among the most difficult games for them to get running on emulation-based BC.
 

Qassim

Member
Whilst it's not hard to believe given the situation, I'm not sure how clued up he was if he was surprised by the GTAV port. It would have been surprising for a GTA game not to get a PC version, despite how late this one was in comparison to other PC ports since GTA3 - even if this one had some interesting circumstances around it (next-gen console launch in between).
 
Our intention was never to make more money.
Really?

Do you think Rockstar will make more money out of a PC port of RDR or its sequel which is potentially easier to port to PC?

Rockstar usually keeps most their studios busy and they're certainly not contracting a 3rd party to make a port of a 6 year old game.
 

Joey Ravn

Banned
One day. Still no emulator for the original Xbox.

That's not entirely true, nor entirely accurate. The original Xbox and the Xbox 360 have very different architectures, so whether there's an emulator for the former doesn't affect whether there's an emulator for the latter. And both XQEMU (Xbox) and XENIA (360) are making very fast progress these days.
 
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