Red Dead Redemption 2 launched in 2018 with staggering praise from fans and it has even hit up to 39 million copies sold to date. Rockstar truly brought out one of the most stunning and breathtaking open-world experiences to date with breathtaking landscapes and bustling towns, but the game is still missing the Rockstar Editor three years later with no official word from the developer.
What is the Rockstar Editor?
Rockstar Games have a crazy obsession with adding video editors across some of their game titles, it all started with Grand Theft Auto IV, allowing players to record scenes using a button combination with the ability to edit them later in the Video Editor feature which could be accessed in Niko’s phone. It allowed players to change camera angles, add filters and all sorts of other amazing stuff – but Rockstar wanted to expand upon this concept with its next GTA release with more ambitious features – the Rockstar Editor debuted for Grand Theft Auto V in 2015 for PC and later for consoles.
It featured an array of amazing video-editing features and a much more organised timeline and it even had a separate mode also known as Director Mode, where the player is able to change into a different player model (i.e. a bird, a Cop, or any Story Mode character) with options to place props into a scene and even change the world settings such as its time of day and weather. It was really a revolutionary feature for GTA and the feature is still heavily utilized from this very day with many filmmaking communities creating short films and other incredible filming projects.
But for Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 release in 2018, there hasn’t been a single word on the Rockstar Editor ever debuting the game. Filmmakers in the GTA community have asked Rockstar Games on social media to deliver on the Rockstar Editor post-launch but the studio hasn’t given any announcement or a single word.
Although it does appear the developer had plans in the past according to the game files and reliable insider TezFun2.
The Rockstar Editor & Director Mode is most likely a thing but could shelved or scrapped forever
In mid-2020, Rockstar Games officially shipped out The Naturalist DLC for Red Dead Online, per RockstarINTEL the update contained some small leftover code of a Director Mode hidden away in the game files – the image below shows a file from a patch from 2019’s Moonshiners update to The Naturalist, as you can a new entity was added with The Naturalist update containing a new type named “BLOCKED_IN_DIRECTOR_MODE”, this entity is implying a blacklist of certain character models which cannot be used, which in this intense appears to be only Jack Marston in the list with his character model name listed.
To further back up this, the most reliable insider in the Rockstar Games community TezFun2 even said the Rockstar Editor was supposedly planned to launch with the PC version which later debuted in 2019 but never made it to the release.
Even a few months before The Naturalist update shipped out, there were some activity changes to the Rockstar Editor page on the Social Club, it was clearly in the works but it does appear something must have changed internally to either shelve it or scrap it forever.
What happened to the Rockstar Editor is still unknown to the community but perhaps there were plans to launch it later in 2020 but the pandemic and other internal projects could have caused the feature to be scrapped forever, but we hope Rockstar Games is reconsidering bringing it seeing how successful it was for Grand Theft Auto V and how the filmmaking communities are still evolving to this very day. Perhaps the company may release it for new versions for Xbox Series X|S & PlayStation 5 which indeed new versions were hinted at in the past from its parent company CEO Strauss Zelnick in its investor call in 2020.
There’s no open-world detailed as Red Dead Redemption 2 so it would be a no brainer to bring it out for players to create incredible stories with more YouTube exposure helping the game sell more copies in the years to come.
