Dan Houser has said he’s "thankful" to be releasing Red Dead Redemption 2 and not GTA 6 this week, because the latter would be "out of date within two minutes."

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Red Dead Redemption 2 Weapons and Dead Eye Images 15 IMAGES

In an extensive interview with GQ , the Rockstar co-founder discussed how his flagship franchise's tone doesn't quite mesh with the current cultural climate:"It’s really unclear what we would even do with [GTA 6], let alone how upset people would get with whatever we did. Both intense liberal progression and intense conservatism are both very militant, and very angry. It is scary but it’s also strange, and yet both of them seem occasionally to veer towards the absurd."It’s hard to satirise for those reasons. Some of the stuff you see is straightforwardly beyond satire. It would be out of date within two minutes, everything is changing so fast."Red Dead Redemption 2's more serious, backwards-looking approach seems preferable to Rockstar, then. However, Houser's also keen to make clear that the new game's approach to presenting history is built somewhat around modern values:“It was oppressive, when you look at what was going on. It may be a work of historical fiction, but it’s not a work of history. You want to allude to that stuff, but you can’t do it with 100 percent historical accuracy. It would be deeply unpleasant.“This is a time when the women's movement had begun in its infancy. Women were beginning to challenge their very constrained place in society, and that gave us some interesting characters. We’re not trying to tap into ‘He’s a black man so he should speak this way, and she’s an Indian woman so she should speak that way’. We’re trying to feel what they’re like as people."Maybe that’s my own idiocy, naivety or delusion about what people are fighting about now; I know that there are some people who believe that the only fiction you should do is basically your own autobiography, but I think that’s really limiting and you can’t tell stories. I hope that we’ve found a sensitive way of discussing those issues.”That approach hasn't gone unnoticed, even pre-release – check out our piece on why Red Dead Redemption 2's black cowboys are important Red Dead Redemption 2 will be released this Friday, October 26, for Xbox One and PS4.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he too is not to be releasing the follow-up to a $6 billion product this week. Honest. Follow him on Twitter