Out of curiosity, what do you love so much about RDO?
I finished RDR2 recently, after 160 hours of single player, which I loved, I thought "okay, and now it's time for the online" thinking I had a new huge piece of content to do, that a big thing was awaiting me, since I spent hundreds of hours on GTA online.
But I ended up being really disappointed, it kind of seems like there's nothing to do really, every job needs at least 10 gold bars to even try it, I've been doing some bounty hunts but it's very repetitive, and the online feels super dead, I barely see any players, and the world itself is very dead and empty compared to the single player, saint denis doesn't feel the same at all for example, completely empty streets, no NPCs, no interactions.
I really wish I'd love it because I had great expectations given how I loved the single player, but it just feels very barebone to me, not sure how to explain it, I quickly had the feeling that it wouldn't keep me busy for long. I'm quite sad about it.
Also the fact that there isn't a chat contributes to make it feel dead, compared to GTA Online where players can chat and a lot of my interractions and various situations with other players happened thanks to the chat.
As promised,
THE NEGATIVES
Essentially, despite this awesome foundation, R* has bent over backwards to ruin the game.
It launched with only a few story missions and the stranger missions, no roles, no bounties, i understand it was new, but that bare bones left a bad first impression, and also the best missions paid $3 MAX...MAX! Game out of the gate was far grindier than GTA. This got re balanced in a couple weeks, but again, first impressions...not good.
But by May 2019, they were slowly adding new missions, bugs were getting fixed, but it was still lacking a core identity. Story missions didn't even have difficulty select for replay value. Was pretty boring tbh...
September 2019, the 3 main roles were added, and I immediately saw what their goal for the game was. Already explained why their great in my previous post, but yeah, great times. Plus they addeded legendary bounties every week for ten weeks. Things were looking soooooooo up.
Only a few weeks after that update do alarm bells begin to sound. For most people, animals stopped spawning in the world, this would not get fixed properly for MONTHS, they would eventually patch it, it'd break again, they'd fix it in like 5 months, but then it'd still be spotty. This was a CRITICAL ISSUE that took wayyyyyyy too long to fix, hunting is the most essential money making method. Also broken for months on end: Camp spawning, also a critical issue.
I still had fun though, daily challenges rewarded you with gold, and the reward would multiply if you did at least one challenge every day. These were also a fantastic way to engage with the world, forcing you to learn where to find specific plants and animals, using all your options in combat etc...and it was REWARDING.
Game however was in a flux, between that update and Summer 2020, new stuff was fun, but those bugs were not getting fixed fast enough. The summer 2020 update gave us NATURALIST, an alternative to trading, now you can hunt animals by sedating them and selling bio-samples to Harriet. People hated this update since it wasn't that fun...
Christmas 2020... they royally effed the game. Moonshine role was added, cool idea, but slow and not as profitable as existing roles. It did however come with a set of story missions related to the moonshine role which was neat, and a difficulty select was added for replay value. A mediocre new role wasn't bad, it was what else came with it.
THEY CUT THE DAILY CHALLENGE GOLD REWARD IN HALF, AND FORCE RESET THE MULTIPLIER STREAK AT THE END OF THE MONTH NOW
Yep, this killed the game for me, i'd still play for fun but was done with dailies. They did try to make up for it by adding battle passes that cost gold, and these were fun...
until they started locking new skills behind the battle pass.
Rockstar pretty much killed all my enthusiasm for the game in a few days. They did backtrack on the skills thing, but it was obvious what was going on.
TL
R: Making gold and cash was too easy, Rockstar tried to overcorrect, and since then there was only one more update in July 2021, the blood money update, which was an okay update adding discount GTA heists.
The game hasn't gotten even a bug fix patch since August, with no communication from Rockstar, and weekly bonuses are now monthly. Game seems dead. No new battle passes since October I think? And it's still buggy.
Now they want people to buy a half ass sub to a half ass port of a 10 year old game.