Red Dead Online is, surprisingly, pretty damn good. If you hate GTA Online,w hich I do, then you might like Red Dead Online. There's almost no griefing, the community is really friendly for the most part, people really love playing roles in the game and assisting each other. Sure, you run into occassional ne'er-do-wells, but the game makes it very easy to go into 'Defensive' mode which makes it difficult to grief someone, and it's very easy to gallop away from a griefer if you do run into one.
THere's a lot of PvE content, from good storyline missions to generic task-driven stuff, and the Roles they introduced are a lot of fun for the most part. If you really like the ambient side stuff in Red Dead games like hunting and collecting, the roles play right into that, wqith a more actioney bounty hunting role as well.
Free roam events are decent enough and get better as you get into the roles.
It's not without bugs, but for the most part, waaaay less buggy than GTA Online even years into it's launch.
I fucking *hate* GTA Online, I think it's one of the most poorly designed games I've ever played, but I genuinely like RD Online. I'm not as into it as I was a month or two ago, where I was playing it almost every day or for hours late at night on the weekends, but it's still good and I still enjoy playing it. Right now the game has a good sweet spot for new players, it probably gets good when you're like ~5 hours into it and you strt to figure out the gameplay hooks, and if you do the roles stuff there's a lot of fun to be had in it. The game gives you good rewards now too, both with the basic game currency and the MTX currency ("Gold"). I've got more gold and cash than I know what to do with in the game, legit, and I'm not even an avid player. The stuff I enjoy doing, like hunting and ambient side quests, are also things that the game pays out a lot on which is fortunate for me... It's some of the stuff I like best about Red Dead 1 & 2.
For anyone jumping in, we've got a pretty active community thread:
A while back I heard about them improving the responsiveness of the controls, are they any better? I don't feel like redownloading the entire game to find out.
Not really. They said they improved them, and there are small improvements (they sped up a lot of animations like looting bodies, skinning animals, picking flowers, etc), and there's some nominal improvements to the responsiveness of the controls, but if you don't like RDR2 because of the sluggishness of the controls, you probably won't notice much of an improvement at all. It's still a sluggish to control game. People who play the game a lot will say "omg it's night and day between the changes!" but a lapsed player probably wouldn't even notice they changed anything.
That's awesome. I was feeling a bit discouraged about RDO after hearing it doesn't have a solo or invite only mode like GTAO, but this sounds really promising. Thinking I'll try getting into bounty hunting when I pick up the game this weekend, then trading later on down the line.
YEah, genuinely, I never run into griefers. Infact, I regularly run into players who are there to help you, do good, or just ride side by side for a while, and almost never get griefed. THe game is also designed to help you identify potential griefers and it's really easy to avoid them too... Unlike GTA where a griefer can roll in an armored super car with a machine gun mounted on it or jump into a M16 jet and follow you around the map endlessly killing you, in RDR... everybody is on a horse and you can really only go so fast. It's easy to lose players who might be tailing you to grief you.
The places where you may run into hostility are obvious places: The center of Valentine or the alleys around Saint Denis, but even then, it's easy to avoid trouble makers there or go into defensive mode which makes it a lot harder.
Still the most fun I ever had in the game is when I started out and I spawned near this large posse... I totally expected them to grief me... tie me up, drag me to a train and kill me and grief me for the whole time I was in the server, but instead, they took me under their wing and let me ride with them for the night doing a ton of high level missions.. I even fucked up one of their bounties, killing the target by accident, and they were so cool about it like "oh.... that sucks... but w/e... be careful..."
now I just ride around doing good, donating 3-star animal pelts to people, helping them when getting attacked doing delivery missions, etc., once stumbled upon a person tied up on some train tracks (a victim of a griefer obviously) and their horse downed on the tracks too... I untied them, revived the horse, and rode off into the distance, my job done of the day.
