Bartski
Gold Member
TL: DR - the 5 years in, "post-mortem" Red Dead Online is a mighty fine game, partner.
Short preface - Being a fan of RDR2, I played RDO just for a few hours at launch and I absolutely hated it. As if everyone thought it's a great idea to turn it into a griefing contest - every encounter with another player was an instant firefight, people camping and sniping everywhere, squads all about roaming around killing everyone in sight - just impossible to explore unless you're into playing RDR as an open world shooter and a bad one at that.
Long story short, how I got back eventually, reinstalled RDR2, and went fishing. Stil blown away by the game and decided to give RD:O another shot.
Sure, it's been years and many tweaks and iterations along the way, but as a NEW player starting from scratch in 2023 - the game is pretty amazing, and I can't stop playing it.
There goes the first popular point of concern: The game is dead. No it isn't.
Almost no downtime for matchmaking on missions and packed world events. Constantly meeting players in the world.
Best of all - everyone seems to just wave and go minding their own fucking business! I had been grifed a handful of times in couple of days but overall my experience interacting with people has been totally positive. Without even resorting to the new anti-grift defense mode.
Another common point of concern - no new content. For a new player, there is an overwhelming amount of content.
While Rockstar might be done with major future updates - too bad as the story ends in a way they were certainly planning to - available missions are almost RDR2 campaign quality. So many types of missions: team story missions, solo telegram missions, blood money missions, stranger missions, random encounters and so on. Let alone all the PvP group world events some which are pretty cool.
And then there are the roles.
I've unlocked 3 so far, but defintely plan to work my way up to the remaining 2. Collector kind of sucks but it's great for XP cheating with the online map, while Trader and Moonshiner feel a bit like playing the Sims, in a good way. Just perfect to have a posse team up and make tons of money together. Especially the latter is just great, comes with it's own story set of missions and it's such a damn shame we won't be seeing more of those.
On that note - economy is painful, but way less than you hear it does on reddit and other places. Shop items are super expensive but at my level, if I wanna buy something I can easily make 200+ $ an hour playing solo. While you can earn gold in game, just excruciatingly slow which is how the game incentivizes buying it for real money. Still there. Slimy. I fully understand how that can riun it for many people but thst's a dead horse I don't plan to beat.
I'm sure I'll keep going and if anyone here wants to jump back, hit me up so I can help ease you into my relaxed, peer pressure free posse.
Short preface - Being a fan of RDR2, I played RDO just for a few hours at launch and I absolutely hated it. As if everyone thought it's a great idea to turn it into a griefing contest - every encounter with another player was an instant firefight, people camping and sniping everywhere, squads all about roaming around killing everyone in sight - just impossible to explore unless you're into playing RDR as an open world shooter and a bad one at that.
Long story short, how I got back eventually, reinstalled RDR2, and went fishing. Stil blown away by the game and decided to give RD:O another shot.
Sure, it's been years and many tweaks and iterations along the way, but as a NEW player starting from scratch in 2023 - the game is pretty amazing, and I can't stop playing it.
There goes the first popular point of concern: The game is dead. No it isn't.
Almost no downtime for matchmaking on missions and packed world events. Constantly meeting players in the world.
Best of all - everyone seems to just wave and go minding their own fucking business! I had been grifed a handful of times in couple of days but overall my experience interacting with people has been totally positive. Without even resorting to the new anti-grift defense mode.
Another common point of concern - no new content. For a new player, there is an overwhelming amount of content.
While Rockstar might be done with major future updates - too bad as the story ends in a way they were certainly planning to - available missions are almost RDR2 campaign quality. So many types of missions: team story missions, solo telegram missions, blood money missions, stranger missions, random encounters and so on. Let alone all the PvP group world events some which are pretty cool.
And then there are the roles.
I've unlocked 3 so far, but defintely plan to work my way up to the remaining 2. Collector kind of sucks but it's great for XP cheating with the online map, while Trader and Moonshiner feel a bit like playing the Sims, in a good way. Just perfect to have a posse team up and make tons of money together. Especially the latter is just great, comes with it's own story set of missions and it's such a damn shame we won't be seeing more of those.
On that note - economy is painful, but way less than you hear it does on reddit and other places. Shop items are super expensive but at my level, if I wanna buy something I can easily make 200+ $ an hour playing solo. While you can earn gold in game, just excruciatingly slow which is how the game incentivizes buying it for real money. Still there. Slimy. I fully understand how that can riun it for many people but thst's a dead horse I don't plan to beat.
I'm sure I'll keep going and if anyone here wants to jump back, hit me up so I can help ease you into my relaxed, peer pressure free posse.
Last edited: