Red Dead Redemption 2 legal jobs mod finally gives Arthur Morgan the quiet life he deserves

Red Dead Redemption 2 flows like amber: thick and slow-paced. In fact, its brief moments of madness—those enormous shootouts with cops and bandits—only really get in the way of your real business of ambling slowly around on horseback in the midday sun. Well, no longer. A mod from creators Bolmin and Shtivi (via Rock Paper Shotgun) will finally let Arthur Morgan hang up his six-shooters and fulfil his true destiny: Becoming a Taskrabbit guy in 1899.

Jobs – Expanded and Enhanced is the mod in question, and it's actually a remake of an earlier project made by Bolmin themself. It adds job boards to "every major town" in RDR2, giving you the opportunity to take on any of six new avenues of legal work. Those are:

Chauffeur: "Take some passengers from A to B, and protect them if needed".
Ranch Hand: "Doing chores around ranches to earn money".
Pest Control: "Ranches need your help dealing with animals that are causing damage to their properties and livestock".
Wagon Protection: "Make sure it gets to its destination safely".
Postman: "The post offices need your help delivering letters to people [in] town".
Dock Worker: "The docks in St Denis and Annesburg need more working hands".

Honestly? It sounds great. RDR2 is an excellent game, but I often had more fun treating it like a cowboy life sim—heading out, hunting, fishing, setting up camp—than I did shooting my way through its missions. The painstakingly realistic rendering of its world, the laborious animations, the way everything felt like I was doing actual physical things in actual physical places all made me want to exist as part of RDR2's world rather than wage war against it. If I can use a mod to turn the game into American Mundanity Simulator 2023, well that's just fine by me.

I will say that I'm not sure these salaries are quite historically accurate, though. Doing a quick chauffeur job, for instance, will net you $15. That apparently adjusts to about $535.06 in 2023 dollars, which I'm pretty certain isn't what your average Uber driver is netting per ride. Maybe things really were better in the old days.

You'll need to drop tools called Scripthook and Online Content Unlocker (you can also use Version.dll as an alternative to the latter, if you want) into RDR2's main folder to get this one working. Once you've done that, just plunk the files for the Jobs mod into the same place.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.