One thing I take strange pleasure doing in Red Dead Redemption 2 is going to a saloon and ordering a meal. The game requires you to eat every once in a while to fill status cores, but you have some reasonable leeway about how often to do so. So after a long day on the trail, I would push past those signature swinging doors, sidle up to the bar and order up whatever was on offer before wolfing it down and watching my red, scraggly indicators return to a pleasant gold. Afterwards, I usually get a bath to clean up before hitting the general store. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a game where simple things are rendered with painstaking detail, and these little rituals fill out what feel like the best parts of the game for me. When I started playing Red Dead Online, I noticed my cores were low, and so I sidled up to the bar to take a load off.
There was no food on offer, only drinks: beer and whiskey. I ordered a whiskey. The bartender either gave me a beer or a very good deal on an entire bottle of whiskey. This is somewhat indicative of Red Dead Online so far.
I’ve been looking forward to Red Dead Online ever since Red Dead Redemption 2 came out. Before it, actually, because I was playing about 10 days before release. It’s the essential problem with this game that I talk about in my review: the world that Rockstar built is one of the most meticulous, beautiful video game creations I’ve ever seen, sown together with fascinating slow, meditative pace that feels perfect when the game is operating as a strange sort of cowboy sim. The story I couldn’t stand, well-presented though it was. The fact that it gated off huge portions of the game and lasted for 60 self-indulgent hours made it feel like Dan Houser had come over for drinks and hadn’t left six days later. And that’s why I’ve been looking forward to this online mode: I want a chance to live in this world without living in this story.
A day in, did I get what I was hoping for? Yes and no.
There’s still story in Red Dead Online, but it’s not nearly so onerous as that of the main game. So check that box. And that’s a big one, honestly. All I want from this title is a straightforward cowboy sim: I want to hunt pronghorns and sell their hides in camp. And I can do that now, with all the calming slowness in the main game with none of the sense of impending doom. I can earn a few pennies to save up for a hat, though removing the need to go to a tailor again flattens the world out. I can stick up strangers on the road, I can get mauled by wolves if I’m not careful. I can ride across the map and see the most beautiful game ever made, and there’s quite a bit of mileage with that.
And yet I find myself having to work to make my experience feel like the cowboy sim I want. More often The world of Red Dead Online is nowhere near as filled out, grounded or real as the one in Red Dead Redemption 2 to a mysterious point. I understand why there’s no dynamic beard growth on player-created characters, but can’t I at least order some catfish in Saint Denis? I cleared out a hideout at one point, which was a perfectly pleasant moment of combat. When I went to get my spoils, I found none of the cigars, bottles of whiskey or moneyclips that had lovingly littered the tables and floors of gang camps in the main game: instead, there was one empty lockbox. It was a similar feeling I got when I went into a what I remember as a busy saloon and didn’t see another soul save the bartender.
There are more formal game modes, too: racing is fun and hectic, but anything combat-related just makes me want to play a multiplayer game where the controls aren’t terrible.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is noteworthy not necessarily for its breadth but its depth: it’s so stacked with intricate moments of small beauty that the game feels real in a way I’ve never really seen right now. That feeling doesn’t yet carry over to Red Dead Online. It’s a barebones experience right now, a sort of a thing Western cosplay playground than a living western world. It needs to feel more like an MMO than it does right now, and it needs much more depth, even if it can’t quite get the full depth of Red Dead Redemption 2. Maybe what I really want is an offline version of Red Dead Online.
