This is not something I say very often or very lightly, but I’m glad that I was pressured into spending money on a game.
I’ll admit that I was resistant to buying gold in Red Dead Online purely from an ideological standpoint. Why would I spend cash on easing the grind in the game? You should ease the grind instead, Rockstar. But faced with the poll’s choice from last week and the studio’s documented lack of give-a-damn, I relented and purchased the smallest gold bundle I could in order to fully unlock the Moonshiner role. And boy was it worth it.
I went into this thing completely ignorant. I’ve never played GTA Online and so never did any of the roles that were offered there, and most of what I was doing in RDO was perfectly serviceable as a thing to play with family and friends on the occasion. But now that I’ve started to dig into the Moonshiner profession, I have reasons to play the game regardless of whether my posse is with me or not.
I had already made the very first possible step to getting into shine makin’ (look I can’t type about this and not suggest a southern drawl, OK?) by speaking with the main NPC associated with the role, one Maggie Fike, a former shiner with a chip on her shoulder and a whole lot of piss and vinegar, so working with her some more was great. I freakin’ adore this woman and would do anything to help her overall goal of getting back at the top of the heap, so I was mentally all in on the opening missions to get the still set up.
First, we had to retrieve a cook to handle making the spirits, then it was a matter of taking some materials needed to cook that hooch. Both of these were simple enough missions that involved raiding rival shiner camps and rescuing our good French chef Marcel and guiding a wagon back with the hardware I required. Not too stressful, particularly since I had my best friend along for the ride the entire time.
After those tasks were done, it was time to get right down to the business of making a mash. Obviously the stuff I’ve got access to is pretty menial – weak, specifically – but the ability to add flavors to my mash and make tasty-sounding shine definitely appealed to my cook’s brain. Luckily I had most of what I needed to craft apple cider moonshine, which would end up turning a tidier profit than unflavored stuff.
This is where the hooks began to set in. Adding flavor to the currently brewing batch requires finding ingredients both in the wild and from store provisions. And finding things in the wild folds right in to simply wandering the game and finding stuff to do, which I found to be the best way to play RDO. So now I’ve got even more incentive to just wander the wilds as I now look for both plants and trouble.
After 30 minutes’ worth of waiting, my first batch was ready to be sold. This was also more involved, as instead of simply clicking a button to sell the goods, I had to manually drive a wagon with my hooch to an interested buyer. Naturally, this wasn’t just plain sailing as the wagon was beset by attacking bandits and an attempted roadblock, but once again I had my friend with me to play gunner while I drove.
I still ended up breaking a couple of the 20 bottles, which naturally bit into my profit, but it was still pretty rewarding from a monetary standpoint and definitely rewarding from a gameplay standpoint. Perhaps this will get old in time, but I was having a lot of fun with this loop of gathering goods, starting batches, and running the product from my shack to a buyer.
In-between it all there were extra bootlegger missions to take on that had benefits like progressing in the Moonshiner role ranks, which in turn grant me specific currencies I can spend on unlocking rewards or the ability to spend cash on business upgrades. Most of these upgrades and earnables don’t come cheap, but it all fed into the overall gameplay that I was enjoying already, and after a bit of time I stood down my posse and joined my best friend’s group for some of her own missions, which in turn paused shine production so I could simply earn cash to feed into my burgeoning business.
It’s still early days for this activity yet, sure, but this role really is an additive layer to my enjoyment of RDO. I felt as if I had a bit more of a purpose in the game beyond being another gun to help with my family’s fun (although that’s not a complaint). It gave me something of a house in the game such as it is, with money that I could generate for myself and those I play with. Also it just sort of fits my headcanon for my character; he looks like the sort who would worry about alcohol making than much else.
I’ve still got one more week of RDO play time for the purposes of this column, but I also don’t really have any poll choices I can make for this game specifically, so essentially I’m just going to live in the sandbox and try to summarize my overall feelings about the time I’ve had in-game. I think I’ve come to a conclusion here (spoiler alert: it’s effusive) but I still want to give myself a bit more time to lean into this new role and consider how it ultimately affects my thoughts as well as give this role time to lose that honeymoon sheen.
That’s not to say I don’t have a poll for this week, though! After all, we are nearing the end of the month and so it’s time to decide our next destination!
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Polls will close up at 1:00 p.m. EST as usual this Friday, November 22nd. For the time being, now that the decision-making is done, I’m off to live my best nasty Moonshiner life in this world with my family. I’m really excited for more of this.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
