A new mod has added an admitted revisionist twist to Red Dead Redemption 2.

In Cowgirls Revisioned, Nexus Mods user MaybelleElizabethColter has added more tough female NPCs to the game. These women will change variables in the population so that you can get more women who are horseback riders, wagon drivers, wilderness campers, even armed women, AKA cowgirls.

Depending on the setting you want, you can go for a low spawn rate, which focuses on a 5 % spawn chance for female riders, or the default setting, which gives random spawning at a 50 to 60 percent rate.

It’s an interesting choice, because as MaybelleElizabethColter says in her own words, “99% of the women in RDR2 are either housewives or prostitutes.” This mod gives a different perspective of what the Old West would look like.

As to whether the mod is a more accurate take? Well, the Old West as we know it from popular media is full of a lot of inaccuracies anyway, but this does make things a bit closer to reality than the popular fiction would have us believe.

Without going too deep into the topic, it is true that women took a lot of men’s roles in this backdrop. Most  famous among these are the women outlaws and sharpshooters like Annie Oakley, but if you think about it, the American frontier was a hard land, where laws couldn’t be enforced, and also people built their homes and towns out in the deserts and wildernesses from scratch.

So of course it stands to reason that real women became campers, drove wagons, and did men’s work. Many women in the Old West did the work that isn’t expected of them, like being bounty hunters and run businesses. They also did the work that isn’t glorified in the movies, like raising fruits and vegetables, and starting schools and nurseries. Truth be told, the housewives of that era were probably more important than the women outlaws for real-world feminism. They literally won women’s suffrage in those Western states.

This mod doesn’t address the bigger inaccuracies of Westerns anyway. If it was more realistic, Arthur Morgan and most of the people he fought with or were in the Van Der Linde gang would have been black or Hispanic, even more than what Rockstar wrote in.

In any case, Red Dead Redemption 2 as a game is doing very well. In fact, it recently hit a new record for concurrent players on Steam, an achievement it possibly reached thanks to Valve intervening to make the game compatible with the Steam Deck the month before.

If you had missed the news, Rockstar Games had also announced the holiday events the game has slated for this month, the first events it has had for some time.

Source: NexusMods via GameRant