Rockstar prepares for a Red Dead reckoning, grants cheaters one last reprieve

The Wild West is about to get a lot more unforgiving. Publisher Rockstar Games plans to purge all cheaters, liars and roustabouts from its Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer badlands starting early next week.

Adopting a no-nonsense approach to justice, Rockstar Games announced on itsofficial blogthat any gamers caught harboring hacked game saves as of Tuesday, August 24 will be 'swiftly and indefinitely' booted from multiplayer play and erased from the game's online leaderboards. Explains Rockstar: “this will not apply to those people who simply took advantage of temporary exploits to rapidly grind up XP a few weeks ago. We are able to tell who actually hacked their save to have impossible scores.”

There is, however, hope for the damned. Though Rockstar Games is making no bones about its intent to clean house, it is also giving errant gamers one week to delete their hacked saved files and sign back into their respective XBOX Live or PSN accounts as repented, born-again gamers. What's more, solo players will need to play up until the MacFarlane ranch safehouse while multi-players will need to complete one full online game or Gang Hideout to completely clear their names.

Filthy cheaters, consider yourself warned.

Aug 19, 2010

Matt Bradford wrote news and features here at GamesRadar+ until 2016. Since then he's gone on to work with the Guinness World Records, acting as writer and researcher for the annual Gamer's Edition series of books, and has worked as an editor, technical writer, and voice actor. Matt is now a freelance journalist and editor, generating copy across a multitude of industries.