A month after the release of the phenomenal Red Dead Redemption 2, the online portion is finally here to be devoured in what was already a beefy package. Red Dead Online is Rockstar’s next attempt at creating an online ecosystem after GTA: Online, which did okay for them I guess; it’s not like they made Infinity War money, only Avengers money.
Red Dead Online
Developer: Rockstar Games
Price: $60
Platform: PS4 and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PS4 code for review
Red Dead Online separates itself immediately from GTA: Online by having a very clear story focus. You’re wrongly imprisoned for murder and broken out by the deceased’s widow and tasked with finding the true culprit; it’s nowhere near as engaging as the single player campaign, but the characters are interesting enough to make you want to stick through it. For the most part, Red Dead Online is practically an online version of the main game. You’ve got your story missions, stranger missions are scattered throughout the map, you’ve got a camp you can upgrade, various challenges to do, and you can customize your character like you can Arthur; it’s just that there are other players out there roaming the west with you.
As it was with GTA: Online, friends are a must here; pretty much all my enjoyment of this game came from the various hijinks my friends and I got into. You can form a posse and travel across the map causing whatever sort of havoc you want, assuming it’s towards players of course. NPCs are immune to being trifled with which I’m assuming is because of the game’s “beta” status; at least I pray that’s the reasoning because I can’t imagine not being able to rob a town clean with my friends and escape the law. The one shining light in this player on player slaughter fest is the ability to interfere with another player’s mission. Since stranger missions take place in the free-roam map, if you’re near another player who’s currently in one you’ll get a notification to sabotage their mission for a reward. This adds a fun bit of tension for both parties as you never know if a group of players you’re getting close to will decide to kill the horses you’re stealing for a stranger, or if you and your posse are feeling brave enough to mess with another group of players. Getting into tussles with other players is a bit hit or miss however. Players will, predictably, stroll by and shoot you in the face for no apparent reason which is to be expected. What’s not fun is how close you respawn to your body allowing your killer to immediately take you down for a second, third, even fourth time.
As you’re exploring the wild west a free-roam event can occur, and these can be a lot of fun, if only people played them correctly. There’s a hectic King of the Hill mode (separate from the competitive one) that has 20-30 players vying for a single spot; the problem here is that the map is massive, even for the amount of players in the game. You’ll die and then have to run a good way back to the point only to most likely get shot before you even reached it. Only one player can be in control of the point at a time either which slows things down significantly. At ten minutes in length, eventually the game descends into multiple mini-deathmatches opening up around the map as people give up going for the point. Another mode, a race to score points with the bow by nailing bulls-eyes on various targets scattered around an arena turns to chaos as players decide they’d rather just shoot each other for no points than play the mode correctly. It’s hard to tell if these sorts of players will filter themselves out of these modes as time goes on, but as it currently stands it turns what should be fun free-roam diversions into frustrating messes.
Besides goofing around in the free-roam map, you can hop into three playlists: small scale competitive, large scale competitive, and racing. The last one is pretty straight forward, while the other two are a collection of various modes you’ll go through such as your standard team-deathmatch or King of the Hill modes. The variety modes are where the real fun is though, with modes like Most Wanted where the goal is to end with the most points and the better you’re doing the more points you’re worth. It’s a tense mode that paints a massive target on your back the higher you climb that scoreboard.
Modes like Name Your Weapon, despite being a lot of fun, illustrate a balance issue with the game. The mode grants points depending on the weapon you scored a kill with; the harder to use the weapon is, the more points you get for it. A basic repeater, for example, will only grant you a single point, while a tomahawk will net you seven points. This can lead into some balancing issues because the players with access to the higher value weapons will have an immediate advantage due to having more weapon variety to immediately pick from, and that’s not to mention whatever upgrades they slapped onto their guns as well.
This brings me to my main issue with Red Dead Online and my concern for its future: the economy. The ultimate goal is to earn money to buy new clothes, guns, gun customization, camp upgrades, etc. The problem here is that the game doles out pennies as mission rewards while asking for hundreds of dollars for a basic pistol. Your character has four perks you can equip that add passive bonuses. You get your first for free but the next one? $50. Your usual mission reward? $2-$5 if it’s a story mission which are finite. There are also two types of posses: a temporary one that’s ended once all players leave the game or a permanent one. It costs money to make a permanent posse however, how much would that be? Just a cool $200 for what’s essentially making a clan in any other game. The cost for items just doesn’t match the amount you receive at all, with the much talked about can of beans costing $9 while a gold watch you can sell only netting you maybe a dollar.
On top of this is a premium currency of gold bars. Completing missions or participating in competitive modes will earn you nuggets and you need 100 nuggets to turn them into a single gold bar. You can then use these gold bars to purchase a wide variety of goods in the game, such as cosmetics. Some questionable items are locked behind gold bars however, such as horse insurance. That’ll cost you 5 gold bars, and that number will become more evident of how insane this system is in a bit. You can probably imagine how many times another player walked up and shot both me and my horse and I was stuck having to wait minutes for my horse to return because for some reason I have to be punished for not dropping the 5 gold bars on horse insurance. You can also use gold bars to pay for items instead of dollars, which will cause a balance issue once Rockstar lets you purchase gold bars with real money. Imagine still rolling with just a few basic weapons (because they cost hundreds of dollars each) and another posse rolls up on you. Problem is, these guys all spent money on gold bars to not only buy the best guns, but also the upgrades for those guns as well. It’s obviously not going to be a very fair fight, especially since they can also purchase the items that fill up their cores.
This is where the game’s economy gets especially devious. Missions dole out (maybe) one or two nuggets, with I think the most I’ve ever gotten being 4. Stranger missions may or may not give a nugget, and let’s remember that story missions are finite. So let’s assume you want to farm competitive multiplayer to earn nuggets and let’s also assume you’re doing the large scale session to maximize your nugget gain; you only get one nugget per loss in small scale while large nets you two. At ten minutes per round, you would need to complete, at the most, fifty rounds to get you to 100 nuggets, and thus trade those in for a gold bar. That adds up to just over 8 hours of competitive multiplayer for a single gold bar. This is insane. Purchasing insurance for your horse alone costs five gold bars and some guns or pieces of clothing can even go up to thirty bars.
This, and the already high cost of regular items tied to dollars instead of gold bars, just serves as an immediate bad sign of what to expect from Rockstar’s mentality of how they want players to interact with their game. This is something they want players to sink hundreds of hours into and spend money on gold bars. Now I’m fine with a game having a premium currency, but only if it’s fairly done. A game like Destiny 2 feels almost right when it comes to its premium currency, locking only cosmetics behind them and even allowing you to earn a steady amount of those items for free. Red Dead Online, on the other hand, is gating you from access to some pretty important features like gun modification and the aforementioned horse insurance.
This situation will lead to a pretty severe balance issue when you have posses of players who paid for gold bars to unlock the more powerful weapons running around causing a ruckus on the players who aren’t spending the money and thus stuck in the thick grind. Everything about the economy of the game feels like it’s pushing you to work on that grind to earn a pittance of nuggets and dollars. Even things like the inexplicable stable and camp fee that’s here (but for some reason not in the single player?) feels like it’s there purely to chip away at your funds, even if it’s just a little bit.
To just change the color of the barrel of your gun you’re looking at a good 2-5 gold per color. Considering the 8 hour timeframe we’ve got to just get one gold bar, the idea of spending close to 50 hours to just change the color of a gun is bonkers. Everything seems built to siphon as much money from you as possible from the camp/stable fees to constantly having to rebuy ammo when jumping from competitive and free-roam. All to eventually tempt you into buying gold bars.
Of course, the excuse here is that it’s a beta and will be adjusted later, but that’s honestly a load of shit. The numbers are purposely inflated to see how much the community will deal with it and Rockstar will either keep things as is or slightly lower the numbers until they’re at a place that makes them happy, not the community.
The Final Word
There’s a lot of potential with Red Dead Online, Rockstar just needs to course correct the path they’re on since the game’s economy threatens to careen the entire online community off a cliff.
– MonsterVine Review Score: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
