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Two days ago an image of a Wild West town was posted on the GTAForums, in a thread the OP called ‘Something interesting.’ The scene, showing a cart, horses, and frontier buildings including a church, a general store and a water tower, was picked up as a potential leak for Rockstar’s upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2.
It now transpires that this is very much not the case, despite a man in a cowboy hat leaning against a porch being in both this photo and the RDR2 trailer. The screenshot is from a new PC MMO called Wild West Online. In other screenshots on their site you can see buildings in the original shot but from different angles.
WWO will reportedly be launching a Kickstarter soon. In conversation with PCGamer, Stephan Bugaj, the creative VP for Wild West Online’s publisher, revealed this new game is intentionally a bit Red Dead-y:
‘There’s an audience for this that just wasn’t being served on PC,’ Bugaj explained. ‘So we wanted to make this big, open Wild West world with a bit of a twist that, like the best MMOs, is a place where people can really live in.’
The ‘leak’ was posted by an account called David.E, which was registered on the forms the same day the image went up. It looks very much like it was created specifically to post the image.
Now, we’re not saying that a screenshot of a game obviously set in the Wild West (given a vague title and put on forums related to Rockstar games) was posted to deliberately look like a Red Dead Redemption leak, in order to get people’s attention just before another Wild West-themed game was announced…
But if it were, that’s a pretty smart way to get eyes on your game.
