Fans of Rockstar's games have previously had a chance to augment their future Red Dead Redemption 2 experience by playing a special mission in Grand Theft Auto Online and it seems like a similar promotion will be held once more in the upcoming weeks.
Only this time instead of unlocking a special skin, you'll unlock the whole weapon for use in Red Dead Online.
The promotion was discovered by data miners who went digging through the game files of the latest GTA Online DLC, After Hours.
As usual, Rockstar used the major update to pre-load assets for upcoming content into the game, so later on they only need to flip the switch on tunables instead of forcing players to download the content then and there.
This means that unreleased content is sitting in the game files and it doesn't take too much expertise to dig these assets up. Miners quickly found not only the 3D model for the weapon, but all the code references they needed to load up the entire promo in-engine and give players a full walkthrough of it.
The last time Rockstar did a promotional cross-over between the two games was a few months ago when players went on a scavenger hunt for a series of clues, taking them across the in-game GTA Online map to eventually find a new weapon, the Double-Action Revolver. The weapon was gold plated with an ivory grip, though unremarkable in terms of performance.
Things didn't end there however, with a special headshot challenge being triggered once the weapon was found.
Players had to score 50 headshots with the pistol in order to unlock the skin in Red Dead Redemption 2 - just the skin. The challenge wasn't particularly difficult, since PED headshots also counted towards that number. In case the exclusive skin wasn't incentive enough, players also stood to earn in-game currency by completing the challenge.
This time, things are being switched up a bit.
Instead of a scavenger hunt, players will be contacted by a character who appeared in GTA 5's story mode, Maude Eccles, and given 5 bounties. This mirrors the character's story appearance where she provides Trevor Phillips, one of the three protagonists, with bounties. Upon completing all bounties, Maude reveals the location of the special weapon.
The weapon is a Stone Hatchet, based on Native American design, with a special Rampage ability that increases health regeneration and damage reduction for your character so long as you keep scoring kills with the weapon.
This ability, called Rampage, hints at the challenge you need to complete in order to unlock the weapon in Red Dead Redemption 2.
The Rampage Challenge tasks you with getting 25 kills using the hatchet. Again, killing random PEDs also counts towards that goal, so this challenge is trivial. Once again the reward will be a small sum of in-game currency and the weapon in Red Dead Redemption 2's multiplayer mode when paired with the same Social Club account.
News of this upcoming promotion was unearthed by TGFGuru, TheMagixian and tehGramz. So far we don't know when the promotion will go live in GTA Online.
