GTA 5 News Roundup: Oct. 15. — 21.

If you want the GTA 5 news highlights of the past week without having to scour through previous posts, our weekly news roundup posts are for you. Published every Friday just before (or after) City of the Week, we'll collect everything worth knowing that happened in the past seven days in one neat post.

The main headline-stealer this week was none other than Red Dead Redemption 2, the recently announced follow-up and presumable prequel to 2010's hit game Grand Theft Horse Red Dead Redemption. However, the hints that the new game is about to be announced weren't dropped until monday, and the weekend saw some interesting posts too.

With the season to get spooky being upon us, many players have been clamoring for a Halloween Surprise-like DLC for GTA Online this year as well. While in most likelihood we're going to see a rerun of last year's Halloween DLC, a few neat ideas for new content had floated about the community. We collected a few of these and added our own in a post exploring what an all new update would be like.

Following this light-hearted Halloween post, we tackled one of the most controversial topics related to GTA Online: the prices on in-game items. The idea that things in the game cost so much just to boost Shark Card sales in a greedy cash-grab has become widespread — however as a matter of fact, that isn't the case. We elaborate on the relationship of prices and endgame content in GTA Online in our post here.

Finally, we topped off the weekend with a public service post giving new and returning players a guideline as to what items are necessary or good to have in GTA Online. While it isn't a guide per-se, the post is intended to help players gain more enjoyment from playing the game, while also getting better at it by saving cash that they would have wasted otherwise.

And that's when the RDR2 bomb dropped. At that point, we thought that it will be given a unique title following Revolver and Redemption, so we simply referred to it as Red Dead 3. Initially, Rockstar simply teased the new game with two new logos sporting red and black.

Soon after the official confirmation — and name — was posted. Red Dead Redemption 2 (why call it that? Seriously? It's a prequel!) was announced to be arriving fall 2017. The reveal also indicated that we'll be getting a multiplayer mode much like GTA 5's, called Red Dead Online based on a domain registration by Take-Two.

In the midst of all the Red Dead news, we slipped in our scheduled Foreign City of the Week post with a day's delay. Taking readers to Jamaica, we took a look at the capital Kingston to evaluate how well it would work as a GTA setting. While the city doesn't exactly have an iconic skyline, it nailed pretty much every other category. Check out the whole article here.

Veering back to RDR2, we broke the saddening news that in light of the game's announcement, chances of GTA 5 getting that long-promised story DLC has just dipped down to zero. Things looked pretty grim anyway, but this announcement of a major project brewing behind Rockstar's doors all but confirms cancellation.

Even though the game was only just announced, analysts have already weighed in with predictions about how well RDR2 will sell once it releases. While it doesn't take an analyst to know that it won't match GTA 5's success, Michael Pachter offers concrete numbers as to how many copies he thinks the upcoming game will ship.

Soon after that story, Rockstar released the first teaser trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2 right on schedule on thursday. While only a few seconds of footage from the minute-long trailer were in-engine, and the rest was pre-rendered cinematics, it gave viewers a good feel for the atmosphere and tone of the game. Plus, we all know what the gaming community is like — the hype was extreme.

We also covered a recently announced exclusive deal between Rockstar Games and Sony, which states that PS4 players will get access to RDR2 content earlier than Xbox One players. While the specifics of this deal aren't nailed down yet, we're pretty sure all it means is that Red Dead Online DLC will launch on PS4 a week or so earlier.

Are you as hyped up about Red Dead Redemption 2 as everyone else seems to be?