I immediately hated Red Dead Online, even faster than how my high school self hated GTA Online but forced myself to play it for a while before admitting that it sucked. Red Dead 1 just had aimless free roam with no purpose and yet it worked considerably better.
What especially cheeses me is that somehow the Showdowns, or whatever they called deathmatch, had all the soul taken out of them. Somehow more awkward (I remember RDR1 multiplayer being genuinely skillful) and getting shot down immediately and no standoff, at least not that I recall. The coolest part of RDR multiplyer was having the "line up and face each other down" standoffs.
I quickly hated RDO because I saw it for what it was: Yet another poor attempt at a bethesda style open world.
Start as a prisoner, given a half assed push to follow the main "story" if you wanted, but otherwise free to fuck off from the moment you're given free reign to do whatever you want and make your own fun. Except R* forgot to include any of the fun.
Roles all boil down to shitty radiant quests. Either deliver goods, hunt animals or capture bounties. And there's never any true variation. You either do a local delivery for the max amount of goods you can carry or a long distance one where you're immediately ganged by a hoard of real players which is unwinnable without a posse of your own, hunt the same animals/bounties that net the largest reward over and over etc.
And there's none of the finer details that the single player gives. Clothes are worse quality. Animations are gutted across the board. You have voice select for the sole purpose of death/hurt/falling sounds etc.
If the general outline of RDO was used for the actual single player, we would have gotten a true bethesda killer. A game as painstakingly detailed as this, with the option to actually invest in actual roleplay(bounty hunter, pure tradesman, hunter/preservationist etc), while also being open world? Fuckin hell, that would have actually been worthy of the praise.
Instead what we got was a game that failed to be the spaghetti western it desperately wanted because God forbid you show any of the ugliness of the west, with an online mode that amounts to "go here, do x, maybe engage in the shitty pvp if you're desperate for gold/money/xp".
Rockstar really thought this installment would live as long as GTA5 because they mistakenly assumed the player base was the same sort of hyper active zoomer who would use their parent credit card to endlessly buy gold bars and shit. Instead they accidentally cultivated a very patient, mature audience who had no issue playing the long game and earning everything legitimately and wanted to truly roleplay as the white hat do-gooder or the stoic native. And as a result, they pessimistically doubled down on trying to nickel & dime the players while refusing to add any of the things the players wanted/knew were in the works like homesteads.
The online is fun for a few hours, but much like the main game itself, there just isn't enough to do in free roam to hold your attention. It's like elden ring. A massive, beautifully crafted open world with fuck all to do other than mindlessly kill shit over and over.
