Another day, another Red Dead rumour. This time, it comes in the form of a leaked map which the poster—who goes by the name of Mideon on NeoGAF—claims is from “a source shall not mention.” Obviously, the poster’s lack of verification on this source makes this seem like a very obvious hoax.
A website by the name of iDigitalTimes has pointed out that the extremely vibrant image not only has areas from the first game in the lower-left of the map, Tall Trees, and Great Plains, meaning that the area would theoretically link to the original map; but that the map also includes a lot of discrepancies.
An area with the name of New Bordeaux is the same name of the main location that’s being used in Mafia 3. While the two maps could have areas using the same name and it isn’t unlikely this is a weird similarity. The article also pointed out that the amount of water being shown in this map is a massive increase over the amount of water in Read Dead Redemption. This, however, would make a lot of sense from an immersion standpoint.
In GTA: San Andreas there was a lot more to explore than just Los Santos but in GTA V Los Santos is entirely surrounded by water so they player doesn’t feel restricted when they attempt to go somewhere only to be hit by an invisible wall. If this map is real, surrounding a lot of the map with water would be a great way to keep a high level of immersion into Red Dead 3.
There is a high possibility that this map is just a hoax by poster Mideon. Not only is the source not verified, an edit claiming that they have “been asked to take it down” is also more suspect with the actions of a troll. While I for one do hope that a current generation Red Dead does get made, the high amount of hoaxes around this certain game means that anything you see must be taken with a grain of salt.
Source: NeoGAF
Lewis is a games journalist, freelance gaming and consumer-tech journalist. They contributed 344 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: has since served as Editor-in-Chief at StealthOptional and Gaming Editor at MSPoweruser, with bylines at Gfinity Esports and FRVR.