Red Dead Online

Co-op easily outclasses PvP, but Red Dead Online is a promising foundation for a long-lasting multiplayer experience.

Whether you're a wild mustang wanderer in free roam or a hardcore PvPer, RDO delivers pretty amazing fun. I'd be remiss, however, if I didn't mention that it's still a “mostly what you make of it” online experience. New content comes in dribs and drabs. And when you look over yonder at GTA V (where players are getting casinos and all sorts of cool things) it's clear that RDO needs better and more frequent support. Hopefully Rockstar can be spurred into that action, because what's already here is well worth saddling up for.

It’s quite a lot of fun actually, but it’s let down by stingy payouts and the shadow of microtransactions.

There’s a lot to love about Red Dead Online – it’s remarkably stable, vast in scale, and completing storyline missions in co-op is a delight – yet, the unremarkable combat is really a sticking point. Essentially it is identical to what was found in the original Red Dead Online, and how Rockstar adapt to this over the coming weeks and months will prove vital in how long this virtual wild west remains populated. [Beta Impressions]

i feel this game despite needing more polish being much better than gta online and this is my go to game

I love the world of Red Dead Redemption, and living in it with other players is a very welcome addition, but unfortunately Rockstar Games doesn't really care about it. It's fun for a while, there are some nice gamemodes, and the story is interesting for the most part, but the map feels empty... it's an enjoyable experience and it desperately needs more content.

This game had a potential. but rockstar couldn't use it. but I spent 280 hours with my friends so I will give this but It could be higher.

Awful, play the Story mode and avoid Online. It had great potential (who wouldn't want an open-world online game about cowboys and outlaws?), but the new updates are just stupid. Online has a story, I won't write about what happens in it but it's ok, after doing the last available mission you get a notification saying that the story will be continued, but after almost 2 years they still didn't add any new story missions. The game has 3 currencies, first is RDO$ used to buy food, weapons and a lot of cosmetic items, the second is Gold that can be used to buy roles, quicker access to some items and some cosmetic items require it for purchase. The last currency is earned by leveling up roles and is used to unlock (you still need to buy them with $ or gold) some role items. Gold is the only currency you can buy with your real money, but you can also earn it in-game, but since the last update, it's clear that R* wants you to use your real money. The best way of getting gold was by doing daily challenges (and the payouts weren't too big, it was pretty balanced), but a few days ago they changed it so you get only 0.1 gold per daily (instead of the usual 0.2) and they also heavily nerfed streaks (if you did at least 1 daily per day for 21 days or more, you would earn 2.5 times more gold per daily [0.5 per daily] as long as you kept your streak), now the streak resets every 28 days, so you only get the 2.5x multiplier (that now gives only 0.25 gold) for 8 days. There are 5 roles in RDO: Trader (turn animal skin etc. into product you can sell), collector (collect sets of items that you can sell), bounty hunter, moonshiner (produce moonshine to sell) and naturalist (take blood samples from animals and sell them). For a long time players have asked for an outlaw role that would allow us to rob banks, but R* doesn't listen, so they just added a stupid "upgrade" to the bounty hunter role (You even have to pay for 15 gold for it, even if you already are a bounty hunter). Even in the trailer for RDO stand alone, one of the first lines said is "If you wanna rob, rob", something you still can't do, even though 2 years have passed. There are still many glitches in the game from updates that came out around 1.5 years ago, ex. when you deliver a bounty, the weapon on your back will be in a weird and really distracting position (the same position it's in when you carry someone), it shouldn't be that hard to fix for a developer with the most grossing media product of all time (gta5). It's an online game, but I wished I was playing alone. In sessions with more than 10 people, the amount of animals is significantly lower, random events have a lower chance of happening and because of the peer-to-peer servers, you'll probably get disconnected many times. There are many more problems but I don't have enough time to write about them. Just remember: DO NOT BUY IT!

I loved the off-line version. The online version is a hot mess. Rockstar seems to have gone full out ... in placing the most unable in the company in charge of RDR2 Online. By far the biggest issue is connectivity. Random patches, which you must download to continue laying, break the game constantly. The game was unplayable, and it took days for Rockstar to even acknowledge that there was an issue, and haphazard fixes thereafter just made it worse. They seem to have stabilized the game, but only by lowering the number of players per server. This also appears to be a response to massive issues with griefers. Someone at Rockstar thought it would fun to create a game where ever real world 14-year old puppy strangler could be turned loose to wreck stupid havoc and wreck the game for everyone else. The roles are interesting. They become unplayable when a steady stream of griefers shoots your character in the head while trying to accomplish ... anything. You are not allowed to actually defend yourself (except against high hostility characters) so you literally have to lay there while the puppy stranglers torture your character to death - so much fun! If you do defend yourself, well, your aiming function goes out and I have literally been unable to discharge my weapon to protect myself. Worse? Griefing seems to trigger instability, and, after getting tortured by some juvenile mouth breather your game resets and you loose anything you might have had on your horse (which sometimes undoes hours of progress). Griefers are also allowed to randomly target you for 'assassination'. Great! You get to kill the griefers? Nope. You can kill them dozens of times, they respawn right there again, and you kill them over and over, etc., only for the griefer to get a lucky shot in and you respawn ten miles away from what you were doing. The pay system is atrocious. Everything is super expensive, and the payout for mission is paltry at best. The legendary pelts, for example, all make the same thing - a winter coat (which functions only in about 20% of the game area) with a different animal head, and they cost, on average, 20X more than the legendary pelts brings in If you get good at something and start to make money? It's a fair bet that Rockstar will break it. The trader role (which produced some good cash after some effort) was entirely broken after one update. Collecting? Everything got changed to random, so I have literally been searching for one coin to complete a set for two weeks - because 'random' means you get one coin 12 times and another ... zero. (That is definitionally not random). The game issues might be workable, but the connection issues are insane. Rockstar, rather than even acknowledge that there is a problem cycle you through a series of poorly trained ... I would guess teenagers? ... who pose as customer service. When the connection issues were at there worst, Rockstar's response was to blame its customers. They cycled me through requesting youtube uploads, screen shots, error messages, port connections, and, not even once, did they actually answer a question - it's just a constant demand for information. Rockstar's customer service is so broken that they just keep asking for the same information, heedless to the fact that, in many cases, were just provided with the very thing they were demanding. I have been consistently getting the same error message, and Rockstar cannot even tell what the error message means ... ergo, I fix what? But they keep on asking for the error message while utterly ignoring the presentation of EXACTLY what they want. That done deaf response to what their players actually want seems to have infused the game. You want Rockstar to make the game stable? The game becomes unstable. Want some function to ignore griefers? Griefers get their own mission, and protection ... because in order to report them you have to allow them to do pretty much whatever they want. Want a Rancher role? Here's a naturalist! The off line version suffers from none of these issues. The online version is a game that struggles with the basics of staying online for ... you know, an online game.