Red Dead Redemption Multiplayer Was So Buggy That Developers Suspected Sabotage by Hackers
Former Rockstar Games Senior Designer Kris Roberts participated in the KIWI TALKZ podcast. During the conversation, he talked about the launch of the original Red Dead Redemption.
At that time, the developer was appointed as a juror in a criminal trial, and then problems with the multiplayer began to emerge:
I was on a criminal jury, and someone was going to jail around the time our project was released. When Red Dead came out, the multiplayer was broken. Just absolutely broken.
Roberts and his colleagues had to return to work because there was real chaos in the multiplayer. The developers had thoughts that they might have been hacked:
There were people riding chickens, old ladies flying everywhere, and all sorts of crazy things we had never seen before. And at that moment I thought: "Were we hacked? Is someone trolling us? What's going on?"
After an investigation, the Red Dead Redemption developers found that the problem lay in the game assets. It turned out that gold bags from the competitive mode could, under certain circumstances, remain with the player and end up in free roam. These bags consumed a lot of game resources, causing scripts to break.
The Red Dead Redemption team was never able to fully determine exactly how the gold bags were brought into free roam. But the problem with them was solved — one of the programmers wrote a script that searched for bags in free roam and deleted them.
Thanks to the title storage system on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, developers were able to send the necessary script directly to players — without releasing a full-fledged patch:
It was intended that, for example, notifications about tournaments or events would come there, which would be displayed on the client, but it turned out that we could send a script through a title storage update.
This approach helped the Red Dead Redemption authors send the fix to public sessions within 24 hours.
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