Red Dead Online launched in a beta state to a pretty strong playerbase back in 2018 despite being extremely light on content right from the get-go. Slowly over time, Rockstar would begin updating Red Dead Online, adding different types of new story missions and taking the game out of its initial beta state.
Unfortunately, during the beginning of Red Dead Online, Rockstar wasn’t really sure what it wanted it to be, in some ways it was just GTA Online in the Wild West; in others it was trying to emulate the Story mode’s structure of missions and stranger side missions. And famously, RDO launched with an economy that was egregiously priced considering how low rewards were for activities at launch. And Gold Bars, which is the microtransaction currency of RDO, took centre stage, a sign of what’s to come. Thankfully, Rockstar quickly got to work addressing most of those complaints, reducing prices across the board, and increasing rewards for actually playing the game, plus adding in Daily Challenges, which became a fan favourite feature as it encouraged getting on the game daily and getting your tasks done for extra rewards.
Identity Crisis
Despite all that, Red Dead Online still wasn’t getting anywhere near the attention that GTA Online was receiving by Rockstar in terms of the actual scale of updates, When Red Dead Online was getting smaller incremental updates, GTA online was getting entire new storylines, many new vehicles, and new properties. The first 9 months of Red Dead Online were its toughest as Rockstar struggled with finding a niche for the mode. From adding a Battle Royale mode that almost nobody played to experimenting with PvP modes a bit too much when the company was craving PvE content, Rockstar didn’t really seem to understand what they or the playerbase really wanted from Red Dead Online.
That pattern was consistent until Frontier Pursuits, arguably Red Dead Online’s biggest ever update. Frontier Pursuits added RDO’s first ever roles in Collector, Bounty Hunter, and Trader. This update in all senses was a huge gamble for Rockstar, it was features they had never tested in any of their other online titles before, and it was a huge success. What Frontier Pursuits added ultimately became Red Dead Online’s core identity, the ability to role play as different famous jobs from the Wild West and truly encompass that role by constantly rewarding you for engaging with its systems. Bounty Hunting will slowly unlock you more bounty hunting tools, more dangerous bounties to hunt down, and Bounty Hunter-themed outfits.
Frontier Pursuits
Frontier Pursuits really allowed players to develop their characters into their own identities and gave completionists a ton of content to grind through to unlock all the role levels and their gear. It was a huge revelation for Red Dead Online, and it brought in many new players to invest their time into this experience and immerse themselves in RDO.
Bad signs, however, started to appear right after Rockstar released the Moonshiners update, Initially seemingly like a pretty natural continuation of the Frontier Pursuits update, Moonshiners launched in a pretty broken state and it’s initial price being double of other roles (30 gold bars) meant a large portion of the player base couldn’t even access it without grinding Daily Challenges or just paying for microtransactions. A lot of the items felt egregiously overpriced, and the broken state of the update resulted in animals, which are supposed to be pretty common, becoming insanely rare, Combine that with infinite loading screens and crashes, and it’s safe to say Moonshiners was a low point.
Moonshiners
The content of Moonshiners, however, wasn’t bad at all, it added an in-depth storyline with strong set pieces, especially towards the end, it was by far Red Dead Online’s best-written story. Despite the protagonist’s silence, making things still quite awkward overall compared to the main single player game of Red Dead Redemption 2. The actual grind content, aka the “Role” of Moonshiners, left a lot to be desired, mainly a passive business similar to GTA Online’s warehouses, the bar was a fun distraction, but the lack of friendly bar fights with fellow posse members resulted in that also becoming dull overtime. However, the most disappointing aspect of all this was while Red Dead Online was getting a subpar, broken update. GTA Online received a massive casino heist that pretty much completely overshadowed Moonshiners in every possible aspect, making Red Dead Online feel as though Rockstar doesn’t really value the mode as much as it does GTAO.
The pattern unfortunately only began to get worse from here, it took Rockstar many months to fix the animal spawning issues and constant crashing. And Moonshiners was followed up with RDO’s strangest update, which was the Naturalist. While the community was clamouring for more “Outlaws” themed content which RDO was severely lacking despite it being directly built off RDR2, a game about outlaws.
The Naturalist
I have a personal bone to pick with the Naturalist update, in that I straight up don’t understand how this update even got off the drawing board. Centering an entire update around the mechanic of sedating and sampling animals was one of the weirdest concepts they could’ve possibly gone for this early in RDO’s life cycle. Legendary animals were a really strong addition to Red Dead Online alongside the trapper, but everything else that involved sedating, and gathering animal samples was just… strange to say the least. Harriet and everything around her just didn’t feel very “Red Dead” in any sense, especially when the playerbase was crying out for Outlaw based content such as robberies and heists.
It also didn’t help that very shortly after the launch of the Naturalist update, Rockstar followed it with the infamous update 1.21, which completely broke the game in every sense. Causing Connection problems, Low animal spawn counts, difficulty pitching camps, and entering Moonshine shacks. 3 days later, this update was reverted.
Bounty Hunters
As we get to the closing days of 2020, Red Dead Online’s player base was still very strong despite some less than strong updates. The Bounty Hunter update was an interesting case, as this was when Rockstar began selling Red Dead Online as a standalone game for just $4.99, Many players thought this was a sign that the demand for the mode was so high that it allowed for a standalone edition to be sold.
The Bounty Hunters update itself was again, a smaller-scale update in contrast to GTA Online’s massive new Cayo Perico heist. It added in some new bounty hunter-themed equipment, more legendary bounties, new weapon variants, and infamous bounty, which were actually a really strong addition to the mode that went a bit under the radar for most of the fanbase, they were handcrafted unique bounty storylines that spanned multiple bounties. Getting through them all was rewarding and a really fun gameplay challenge.
Unfortunately that was all swept under the rug by the fanbase as the Bounty Hunters update delivered a huge nerf to Gold Bar earnings through daily challenges, Rockstar effectively handicapped themselves with this change, by halving all gold bar awards and limiting daily streaks, Instead of selling more gold bars, it ended up severely punishing new players who wished to join in on RDO by making sure they can’t afford to get into the roles without paying a premium or grinding for several weeks first. The outrage around this was huge, yet Rockstar seemed firm on continuing to make earning Gold bars harder for new players.
There were still solid quality of life improvements being added with each update that made RDO overall a lot more enjoyable as an experience, but a foundational issue since the beginning has been how payouts are handled in RDO. Basically, in Red Dead Online you get higher payouts if you play a mission for longer, this system is supposed to reward you for these longer, harder missions, but it has the opposite effect, as most players simply opt to do every objective and then AFK for 10 minutes until the payout is maximised, making for an overall pretty monotonous gameplay loop that was seemingly never addressed. Combine that with the Outlaw Passes, which were RDO’s take on the standard Battle Passes, they would rarely release, sometimes only once or twice a year, and would take almost no time at all to max out, and it started to feel as though Rockstar wasn’t really balancing payouts/rewards in RDO properly, mainly punishing new players by making it far harder to get started but making it too easy and downright boring for more veteran players.
Blood Money
Red Dead Online’s final update: Blood Money, seemed to be what the entire fanbase had been asking for up to that point—finally an Outlaws themed update focussing on robberies and illicit activities after a 7 month long wait. Unfortunately, Blood Money was arguably Red Dead Online’s worst ever content update. Introducing “Capitale,” the currency required to play the new robbery missions, this update was just… strange. Being extremely sparse on content, and while the quality of the newly added robbery missions was fine at best, they felt nothing more than more of the already available Stranger missions, and the rewards for completing these missions were so laughably low that there was no reason to even engage with any of the new content. There was also a huge lack of actual new items to purchase, and The Outlaw Pass was seemingly split into four smaller Quick Draw Club passes that were released over a several month period without really much rhyme or reason.
“Call to Arms” was added shortly after,, which was the horde mode for Red Dead Online. It’s pretty fun for what it was but didn’t feel substantial enough to really bring players back into the mode, especially while GTA Online was still receiving high-quality, far bigger content.
Unfortunately, Red Dead Online’s playerbase began to decline, Blood Money was a subpar update that let down pretty much everyone, and the struggles the mode went through with Moonshiners and Naturalist updates didn’t help the situation at all. While RDO was finally a relatively stable game, Blood Money ended up being Red Dead Online’s final ever content update.
How did it go so wrong?
What happened? Well, exploring back through the history of RDO, it seems that Rockstar’s constant attempts to monetise the mode consistently failed, and in response, instead of building up the mode to be bigger and more rewarding for new and veteran players alike to encourage spending, they focused more on nerfing and practically beating down new players, which made it very hard for a new player to really get started in RDO, leading to lower new players joining, and a lower retention rate as rewards kept being nerfed or optimised to be earned as boringly as possible.
Combine that with strange update concepts such as Naturalist and subpar quality updates like Blood Money, and ultimately Rockstar realised Red Dead Online could never be as big or earn as much as GTA Online. And so they decided to cut their losses and simply focus on GTAO and GTA 6’s development instead.
That’s not the entire story though, just because RDO wasn’t as big as GTA Online doesn’t mean it wasn’t massive, Most game developers wish for a fanbase as dedicated and as active as Red Dead Online’s fanbase, who held an entire funeral event for the mode after the end of support announcement. And even two years later, after major support for the mode ended, there are sects of the community still dedicated to RDO and its preservation.
What next…
Officially speaking, Red Dead Online is dead, so… now what? Well, as the broader gaming community’s focus has shifted to GTA 6, a question still remains: What next for Red Dead Online and RDR2 in general? Both games are still stuck on the PS4/XB1 generation of hardware and therefore do not support 60FPS nor any advanced PS5/XSX/XSS features such as Ray Tracing. From what we’ve gathered from various leaks and rumors over the years, it seems like Rockstar is planning a re-release to modern systems of Red Dead Redemption 2 at some point after releasing GTA 6, Does that mean Red Dead Online will ever be updated on the same scale again? Most likely not, however, with RedM being officially under Rockstar ownership, it may not be the end yet. As modders and role players have been developing that tool to encompass all that Red Dead Online could’ve been over the years, it’s not too far off possibility that RedM could one day be an official part of the main Red Dead Online package where the community gets to develop Red Dead Online into whatever they desire it to be.
As for now, Red Dead Online is dead in the official sense, but in the unofficial sense, it may yet still have much life in it. Are you still playing Red Dead Online? Do you think there’s a future for RDO? Let us know in the comments.
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3 Comments
One thing you didn’t mention is the lack of anti-hacker effort by Rockstar. I played RDO for a while in 2023, but ultimately stopped due to the amount of hackers and griefers and Rockstar seemingly not caring that hackers were spawning bears on other players, teleporting around and flying, or literally reskinning Valentine in giant Russian flags.
I’m part of a group of Native American players who meet regularly on RDO and maintain community across the country. At one point we had over 100 members. The game became vital during lockdown for many of us to maintain connections with other Indigenous people. We have trail rides honoring MMIW and Residential School children. It’s been heartbreaking to watch the game die. It has a special place in the heart of Indigenous gaming community
RDO was too limited in the things that make GTAO appeal to a range of players. You only need 1 horse, not a stable full of them in different types. There were no fancy yet attainable properties all over the map. Clothing options and character customization was too limited. The jobs all felt exactly the same and weren’t really that fun. Tons of people play these games solo with the hope of finding decent people to match up with, but that was never there. Being hogtied by every rando, or griefed during a difficult/annoying mission was not worth it.