Red Dead Online: A fond farewell to Rockstar's multiplayer Western

red death Online has reached the end of its lifespan. It’s both a fantastic experience that I’ve spent hundreds of hours exploring, and a game that will never reach its full potential, forever in the shadow of its bigger (and much more profitable) sibling, Grand Theft Auto Online. Now that Rockstar has said it will no longer pay much attention to the western, it’s worth revisiting the frontier to judge the game on what it’s accomplished since its launch in 2018.

Red Dead Online starts with your character being betrayed, accused of crimes they didn’t commit and being hanged as an outlaw. You escape, thanks to the efforts of high-class lady Jessica LeClerk, who has her own revenge mission in mind since she was recently widowed by scavengers trying to get her husband’s fortune. The player becomes LeClerk’s instrument of justice, and once unleashed on the frontier, it’s time to get to work fulfilling bounties, killing robbers and getting a stable of beautiful horses to polish.

Following the LeClerk missions will take you through a short campaign where you will have to make a moral choice every now and then. Will you bring a wayward daughter back to her father, or will you let her run off with her lover? Do you tie a few idlers to the track and let the train do justice, or are you more merciful?

Image: Rockstar Games

The game tracks your actions with an honor system, and at first you might think you’re going to do some really deep role-playing. However, this idea falls away after LeClerk’s missions and never really returns; the honor system remains, but tends to fill up automatically over time as you do things like brushing and feeding your horse. It is usually quite obvious what leads to a loss of honor or recovery. When you clear a gang’s hideout, you can spare the leader or execute him, and self-defense is fine, but executing witnesses is a no-no.

Other than a few cosmetic rewards, it’s just never real Affairs. It feels like there were some great plans that got scrapped at some point, and characters like Old Man Jones – who feels like the angelic answer to the diabolical Stranger in the Red Dead franchise – are just… there. Jones spends the early campaign with cutscenes begging you to treat your fellow man with honor and dignity. It feels like it’s leading somewhere, but Jones kind of disappears after dropping all his foreshadowing.

So it’s up to you cowboys to have your own fun once you’re done with the campaign missions, and there’s plenty to help you do that. You can hunt and fish, set up camp and cook delicious stews, hunt for expensive criminal bounties or run your own moonshine shack. When I log in, I can easily fall into a comfortable cadence of activity. I start in my camp, cook up some stew and coffee and eat my breakfast manually by pulling the trigger with every bite and sip. Then I hop on my big horse Hayseed and wander off in search of missions in the vast, pristine wilderness.

Image: Rockstar Games via Polygon

The core of these activities is always basically the same: you ride your horse, swing a lasso or shoot a rifle. While there isn’t much variety in the actions on paper, Red Dead Redemption 2The awesome wrestling, fighting and physics systems add spice. As with most open world games, there is also usually an engaging context for everything, be it thrilling or melancholic. My friends and I have spent hours and hours in a muddy yard.

The world also feels organic, albeit not as fleshed out as the single player experience. On my way, I can find someone trapped under a rock, only to discover it’s a dastardly trap set by bandits. Or maybe I find someone who really needs help getting home after a wolf attack, and when I take them home I find a mission on their ranch, which of course leads me to Valentine, where I pick up a bounty from the board.

Red Dead Online can be both serene and zen – just the experience of enjoying a horse’s hooves against crammed dirt and the open air of the US frontier. It could also be an absolute clown party, where my friends and I enjoy an old-fashioned game of Stab Battles in a debonair mansion. It’s a great social sandbox, but one that can never quite match its sibling in GTA Online. It stays grounded and accurate, and the action rarely escalates past a firefight in the middle of a city or a frenzied horse change.

Image: Rockstar Games

Rockstar’s huge open world is still beautiful to explore and full of little details to discover. There is much joy to be found in individual moments, but there is no overarching vision that led Red Dead Online to a tangible and concrete destination – and now there probably never will be, as Rockstar continues to focus on GTA 6 and continues to devote time and resources to the mammoth that is GTA Online.

There’s something tragic about that, because while… Red Dead Online can’t host flying cars and parodies Elon Musk, it does offer gravitas. My friends and I were always half in character while hanging out at the border. In GTA Online, we blast through the streets at 160 miles per hour while listening to the Backstreet Boys. In Red Dead Online, we would gaze thoughtfully into the fire and drink coffee from a tin cup before galloping away on our horses. The joy was in the journey, and for all the game’s missed potential, I still loved those serene moments punctuated by root-in-tootin’ cowboy action.

It’s a disappointing ending for the fans who made it through new character roles and the occasional event waiting for greater Rockstar recognition or justification. The game was plagued with content concepts and periods of inactivity – other than battle passes – in life, and now it’s in purgatory. Only time will tell if the community the game has pulled sticks around or elsewhere has a brighter future.