I tried Red Dead Online again...

red dead redemption 2 one of the most impressive games of all time as far as i'm concerned graphically technologically in terms of gameplay design across the board it's tremendous and paired with it was an online mode that rockstar initially intended to put up there with gta online it was going to be one of their big cash cows one of the main money makers for their company however there was one problem the problem was it kind of sucked now i know i know i know some people will disagree that the online mode sucked mainly what i'm referring to is the support for the game was just not there from the beginning rockstar never seemed to be willing to put the money up to actually build something that was worth playing and as a result a lot of players just never got past the opening hour or two of red dead online especially because red dead online is rife with cheaters some of which i will show you in just a moment and it has to be one of the most frustratingly bland experiences ever which is so weird because it's a rock star game they're very good at making compelling worlds with interesting characters that are worth exploring but when it came to red dead online they didn't even put their a team on this it was like their bc or d team like it seems like a total afterthought and players who have stuck with red dead online for the last couple of years have been frustrated with the lack of support from rockstar but they've dealt with it however just last week rockstar confirmed that they are going to no longer be updating red dead online with any sort of major story content new quest lines or anything they're basically just giving up on the game and moving on so that they can take all of their development staff and focus on gta 6 which is a move that i think most of us could see coming from a mile away but it doesn't make it any less frustrating to see because red did online had a lot of potential but unlike a lot of youtubers who talk about red dead online and don't actually play it i figured we should play it so let's do that the first thing you need to understand about red dead online is that it takes a while to get going so i've actually already started a save that i actually initially created back in like 2000 and i think 19 maybe 2020 whenever this came out pretty much immediately i made this save and i started playing and collecting things and i've gone back to it occasionally but i haven't spent a ton of time in the game oh yeah there's also sound i should probably should probably have sound there we go now if this looks basically just like the base game of red dead 2 that's because effectively it is the map is just a gigantic version slightly expanded of the main game map from red dead 2 which you'll recognize all of this from we also get to travel down to new austin and we can revisit tumbleweed and fort mercer armadillo all of these places that you will recognize if you played the first game from what i could gather online it seems like the game just renders at a lower resolution and locked at 30 frames which is nothing too crazy the base game of red dead 2 launched at 30 frames so there's nothing really surprising there and honestly it looks really good for an online mode i'm not gonna beat around the bush all of the mechanics are the same horse riding shooting all of that will be par for the course as far as the main game is concerned however the one major thing you'll notice is the economy everything in red dead online is freakishly expensive everything from a basic revolver that you would get in the first half hour of the base game of red dead 2 to something as simple as a pack of oats for your horse end up costing you dozens or even hundreds sometimes even thousands of in-game dollars which is ridiculous especially because there aren't that many things to do to earn currency in this mode if we go into the menu and click online we can see all of the options we have you see we can free roam where we can just kind of ride around do whatever we want uh as you see they say things such as free roaring missions this month we'll dole out two times rdo cash and xp for the next four weeks plus smashing any gang hideouts you happen upon during your travels will result in three xp all month long okay cool it doesn't change that the payouts are really really low and that everything else is so freakishly expensive you are heavily incentivized to go and purchase premium currency so that you can get a kickstart on the game and actually use reasonable weapons that actually do something especially because there's a lot of trolls and a lot of griefers in this mode i'll show you those in just a second but before we do that let's just look at the other things we've got we've got blood money head to the manicured streets on the west side of sandini and acquaint yourself with guido martelli to begin your journey in crimes and opportunities these are actually relatively high production value story based encounters and quests they're not tremendous they're really short but you know what it's something we just need more of that we have call to arms which allows you to defend allies against malcontents and call to arms and pay out double xp and gold all month long plus participate this week to receive a bunch of extra stuff crimes where you hunt down um basically completing contracts for killers and uh criminals opportunities which are just like mini quests that you can do bounty hunters where you chase people down naturalists where you're gonna go around hunting and collecting things it's relatively interesting and again like there's a lot of potential here there's a lot of quests and things that they've put in that certainly weren't here when the game first launched but the problem is it took them so freakishly long to add all of this stuff very few players actually know that this is here another problem i would say is how all of that is communicated to the player i've said many times that i think rockstar's ui and quest design how they present all this to the player is very outdated like they were doing all of this exact same stuff in terms of ui back in 2007 they're still doing it today nothing's changed and what i mean by this is when certain things aren't communicated to the player clearly they're not going to be aware of different quests that are available of different options they have in terms of gameplay and players will feel as though there's nothing to do even when there are lots of things to do simply because it's not presented well enough and in this case i don't think the opening hours of red dead online have enough guidance they basically help you break out of prison and then you're just out on your own and that's it you can start trying to complete contracts and things but part of the problem is that a lot of the contracts you need to complete to earn money to get better guns require decent guns to get better at and to complete with any sort of reasonable degree of effectiveness so as a result players again are pushed into buying premium currency to get better guns so that those opening hours can be grinded with a decent amount of ease and so it just leaves a bad taste in the player's mouth where they feel like they're just being shoved into a position where they need to spend money to even start to play the game and that's just it doesn't feel good okay so like right here we're in a gunfight with a bunch of other players uh i don't know if they're in a clan or a squad or a gang or whatever but right here we're just hiding behind a rock you pop up but we're using a very very beginner's rifle a starter rifle and it takes like 10 rounds to kill anybody there's no such thing as a headshot it's all just like hope that you land and like right there you see that we hit an npc that was five xp okay okay then we move over here oh we're getting raged uh he's racing he's running towards us and like right there 10xp for uh for a human player so that that's not that's not tremendous um it's just kind of frustrating because the aim assist also is so extremely powerful in red dead uh too and read that online that it makes these encounters feel like you're cheating like right there we had a guy oh we got that's a good shot like right there we were fighting with a guy and he's hiding in a bush as he's bum rushing us and we track him through the bush as he's running at us and we're able to shoot him and kill him through the bush even though we can't see him but because the aim assist is so strong it just tracks his head all the way through the bush and that just doesn't feel good ah you see like god damn it right there so if you have a good gun and you can hit those snipes like yang just did i bet it's yong yeah i guess he took a break from reading articles and making youtube videos where he reads the articles and instead is shooting me in red yeah there we go shooting me in red dead online does it feel good bro this is kind of what i mean like once you find another group it's true that you can go and avoid them and they have a system where you can basically just stop uh engaging with them if you feel like they're trolling you but they respawn you super close because they want to give you the option to re-engage and fight them but it just it doesn't feel very good because unless you have a decent gun you're just not going to do it okay so i got like there's a headshot that works that felt good but it's really inconsistent because we got other headshots that didn't yeah jeez yong get a day job i mean like even right now like am i having fun i don't i don't think i am i'm quite angry right now it's it's frustrating because it just doesn't feel like players on are on like level playing fields because yong here is rocking out with an awesome weapon and is dealing some serious damage to me with one jesus my ass okay we're back okay um so what i was saying is that it doesn't feel good when it feels as though players are on opposite starting points when you aren't using the same weapons and you're not dealing similar damage we're having fun we're having fun we're having a great time we're the red dead online save red dead online it's so it's so much fun leave it be right there there's young you [ __ ] i hit a tree mother [ __ ] i'm gonna kill this dick if it's the last thing i do i swear to god but i'm i'm angry now i'm feeling but this is what i mean when you don't have decent enough weapons to put up a fight you just can't even really compete like this guy's got an awesome rifle that's able to deal basically one shot one kill damage if he hits you in the dome walk it off walk it off feeling good i'm having a great time rock and roll baby oh god oh god yong you can eat my [ __ ] ass okay so let's take a break from that for just for just a minute what i'm trying to say is that when you build your game around forcing players into microtransactions in the first two hours or so what inevitably happens is that there's a lot of players who don't want to give you money before they're enjoying the game so they start playing the game hoping that they'll enjoy it and then they'll probably buy cosmetics and things like that but they're not going to do it until they have fun and then they come across somebody like yong here who's riding around on a horse and considers killing me to be a passion project and because they don't have weapons because they don't have money in game to buy the weapons they can't put up a reasonably fair fight against him so from 50 yards 100 yards away he's able to just quickly snipe us in the head especially using the extremely powerful i would argue possibly even broken aim assist we can't put up a fight because we've just got like a six round revolver and and it's not fun what inevitably happens is players will just hit their head up against the wall get pissed off and then quit and because there's no fun that's been had at that point there's no reason for them to go back so they open the game play 30 minutes and then quit and then rockstar is like wait why is nobody playing red dead online why don't people find it as compelling as gta online and the reason is because in gta online the fun to be had can be had whether you just started or whether you are 500 hours into the online campaign because you can just go steal a car and start having fun you can go you can play with your buddies and start competing in races where they provide cars to you sure there's pvp and stuff but there's pvp and a lot of other things that allow you to have fun it's not just trying to get through the pvp so you can get to a quest marker to start engaging with something that makes you money there's a lot more which is why gta online from the very beginning from the conceptual stage just worked better than red did online now like i said this isn't the first time that i had played red dead online i've tried it other times i've even played it over on stream on twitch by the way you should jump over there say hi i'm streaming every day that these videos go live on mondays and fridays so pop in say hi i would love to see you uh who knows might be a super fun thing that becomes a regular thing i'd love to see you over there anyway one day we were playing and decided to launch red dead online and i turned this into a video that we put up on my luke stevens clips channel where we post like stream highlights and stuff again links in the link tree in the description box below the like button check it out if you're interested but in this little highlight video i showed off the first time we encountered somebody in red dead online through my steam save which is separate from the one we were just playing on through playstation you can see here he does some interesting things he does he stay with me if i run he does that was one of the weirdest things i've ever seen okay well uh you know what oh he's using hacks is that what's happening call of nature yeah yeah using hacks i wasn't in the game for more than a few minutes before a hacker found me and started spawning in dozens of clones of me providing late-game specialty items to me that i could grab and sell but what i was told by somebody in chat is that they actually had a friend who did this and uh encountered a hacker who provided them with a bunch of really really nice end game gear and they're like wow how nice yeah i'll use it they added it to their inventory started using it but what they found was that rockstar actually receives reports from those hackers saying x-player is using hacked items rockstar will check it and then ban the player who accepted the items from the hacker for containing items that they didn't acquire by reasonable or legitimate means so it's just like a fun troll that these hackers have where they provide you really cool stuff you go oh thank you i get to skip that agonizing grind and i don't have to buy microtransactions and then rockstar permanently bans you from red dead online for daring to engage with a hacker that shouldn't be in the game in the first place and you see the new players they don't know that this isn't normal like they don't know that this isn't supposed to happen they're just playing the game and like oh i'm glitched and i'm i'm inside the guy when in reality he's just having a really really good laugh at my expense because i'm looking like a real idiot doing all of this but you see he spawns in like a couple of legendary alligators and and then he just starts cloning me all over the place and there's just nothing you can do it's so weird but this guy exists in red dead online and is playing this like this is all he does and then like there's npc versions of you and he spawns these chests that have like every item in the game because again he's trying to get you to take items out of it so that you get banned it just sucks it just sucks and these guys are all over the place yeah here you can see nobody knows i'm gay over on twitch a good buddy he's in a ton of our streams again if you jump over say hi you can meet nobody uh really good guy and we have a blast but he said pardon the word vomit but on my first day i had a hacker show up and chat with a friend and i in our ignorance we took some gold and money from a chest he gave us and then he moved on about a day later someone sent me a link to a youtube video of us taking the gold pretending to be a rock star admin as well as some fishing links threatening bands etc not only do they often report you direct to rockstar but they will even go in and pretend to be rockstar going in and like trying to get you to sign up for fishing links and stuff it's crazy like when you're playing an online game that's not what you should be spending your time doing you shouldn't be juggling the threats of bands and worried about whether or not you're gonna get hacked or have your your rockstar social club account permanently flagged or anything you should just be having fun and because rockstar can't get their crap together they can't even manage something as simple as keeping out egregious hackers like this and so let me be clear like i'm not saying that red dead online was never fun i'm not saying that red dead online didn't have potential i'm not saying that red dead online wasn't at some point really remarkable and tremendous what i am saying is that as it stands now it's a train wreck it is a mess and rockstar doesn't seem to have any intention of fixing it they didn't have any intention of fixing it a year ago and it's not changing it just goes to show you like rockstar worth hundreds of millions of dollars billions of dollars by some accounts with thousands of employees under their umbrella if anybody could make this work it would be rockstar but instead of doing that they just gave up on it because it wasn't worth it and i like people ask all the time how could this possibly happen you know rockstar has plenty of money they could put a few hundred employees on this why wouldn't they just do that the reason is simple gta online makes billions with a b billions of dollars every single year and so to put in say like a 50 million dollar investment into red dead online and to have it come back and maybe they make like 75 million off of it which for this is probably a stretch because not many players are engaging with it anymore but maybe they make like profit 25 million gta online puts out a random cosmetic and it will make that 25 million easy and that probably only took one designer or a few designers like a weekend or like you know a week to throw together that was not something that took teams of people actively working on new expansions and content so for rockstar it just doesn't make sense on paper to put manpower and money behind red did online when they can make a lot more money way easier by focusing all of that talent and effort on gta online it sucks i mean in a perfect world we would just see them put the same effort from gta online into this and it would be great but i just don't i don't think that was ever really in the cart the other unfortunate element to all of this is that i i don't think red dead as a concept ever really jived with an online multiplayer as well as a gta does there are some people absolutely who love the idea of a cowboy online multiplayer game but that number compared to the people that play something like gta online is just far far smaller i never thought red dead online was going to do fantastically well but i definitely did not expect them to just give up on it and to put so little effort into it uh but you know what say what you all about rockstar they always come in with surprises so i guess mission accomplished but let me know what you think of red dead online is it something that you play did you enjoy it do you think that they should kind of re-neg on their their position and go back and put more effort into red dead online or should they just move on to gta 6 because that's what everybody's super hyped about let me know let me know i also want to know how many of you guys think that gta 6 will live up to the hype and potential that people see in it because i'm not actually sold that it will live up to the hype i'm i'm not convinced that's it for me if you have a video you want to see me make or a game you want me to tackle and analyze let me know in the comment section below i love reading through those and i love hearing what you guys have to say and of course head over to twitch we're live streaming whenever these videos go live like i said on mondays and fridays so jump over if you're seeing this roughly close to when it goes live and say hi i would love to see you we've got a ton of new people coming over to twitch in the last like month or so that are coming straight from these videos when they go up so jump over say hi i would love to see you it'd be great but that's it for me i love you all i'll see you in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 234,090

Keywords: luke stephens, red dead, red dead redemption, red dead online, rdr, rockstar, rockstar games, rdronline, red dead gameplay, online, red dead redemption 2, video games, games, gaming, john marston, cowboy games, wild west games, gta, Luke stephens red dead redemption, red dead online 2022, rdr online, rdr2 online, red dead rp

Id: ulHZy5hTtys

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022