GTA Online’s “The Doomsday Heist” update will tie into the Red Dead Redemption universe and will perhaps solve a mystery in both franchises, based on findings from a recent datamine.
Players have been digging through the game’s files and found assets and code that indicate a Red Dead Redemption-themed mission, where you can ultimately earn a new revolver as well as a bonus in the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2, is in the works.
#RDR2 "treasure hunt" discovered in the GTA Online game files! We believe hints in-game are going to lead us to this chest and a new double-action revolver, which comes with its own challenge to unlock an exclusive RDR2 reward. Credits: @GuruTadd @TheMagixian @SpiderVice pic.twitter.com/Pg5Bvc4uhO
— Red Dead Network (@RedDeadNet) December 12, 2017
While the content isn’t live yet, players and dataminers have been attempting to figure out what they’ll need to do if the quest does appear in-game, in order to unlock the gun in the shortest amount of time.
So last night Shishya (our little guru, who's not so little anymore) managed to work out where the box will be and where the trail will end… quite a fitting place really considering this is an RDR2 EE 😛@SpiderVice @FoxySnaps @TezFunz2 @WildBrick142
( 📸 by @Xzibit143 ) pic.twitter.com/E0INr64XXn
— 📁 TGF Guru: Tadd 🕵 (@GuruTadd) December 14, 2017
This is what developers are up against when it comes to hiding content in their games these days: players dig through code, and they aren’t willing to wait until anything is live to find out what’s coming next. Datamining takes a bit of the mystery out of things, we suppose, but this is its own kind of treasure hunt.
“Beyond the eventual unlockable, one of the coolest things about this apparent mission is that it seems to close the loop on an ongoing myth within GTA V,” Kotaku reported. “Years ago, GTA players found an unmarked grave on the eastern coast of the map. Nobody knew who it was for, or what it referred to, though one of the theories was that it belonged to John Marston, given the events of Red Dead Redemption. Well, according to data miners, the clues for this RDR-related mission lead to that exact unmarked grave. Perhaps folks were right all along.”
This is an interesting way to get people talking about both GTA Online and Red Dead Redemption at the same time, and being able to hide this sort of content in an update to an online game is yet another advantage to treating at least some of the games in a developer’s catalog as services that will never truly be “finished.”