There’s nothing quite as bad in gaming as wasted potential. There are no shortage of MMOs, MMORPGs, and multiplayer games that reached for the stars but ended up falling short, either through hubris or publisher greed or losing the plot somewhere along the way. Yet the ability to still play some of these abandoned games means we can revisit them anew or even discover them for the first time. And I’m glad that I got to discover Red Dead Online.
Now I’ll admit that I stacked the deck in this game’s favor. I am playing the game almost exclusively with family and close friends. We worked out how to make a private server. I’ve engaged almost entirely in PvE activities (though the times PvP did break out initially wasn’t too awful). But even in spite of all of that, I’m still happy that I’ve bought into this one and I completely understand why it garnered so many fans who tried so hard to stop Rockstar from abandoning it.
As I mentioned in last week’s column, I was pretty much leaving myself to my own devices for the final week of November’s play time, which meant that I hopped into the game whenever my posse members were around either in part or in total. That also means that most of the activities we were doing weren’t exactly deviating from prior weeks; we did bounty missions, we did whatever popped up in the open world, we did supply runs, we ran moonshine. The digital Wild West was all ours at our leisure.
And even as we were doing what would be considered the same old activities at the brass tacks level, every session satisfied. There was always a little more progression earned, a bunch of money raked in, and plenty of moments among ourselves. We had awesome moments of coordination as we moved into enemy camps without raising any alarms. We had things go very wrong and clawed victory from the jaws of defeat. We had multiple horse-related spills.
On a personal level, I also found myself a wonderful long-tail grind to get stuck in to. Moonshining in RDO is the perfect blend of pastoral, combative, and establishing roots in a game world – all three things that I love doing in sandbox titles. I would be able to spend some time by myself harvesting various ingredients for recipes, cooking them up as I chased the highest profit mixes, then cart them over while my friends protected my carriage with incredible gunplay.
All the while, I made progress on both a character level and profession level; I’ve added a bar to my shine shack and can now serve my family buff-granting drinks as well as create a little revenue stream for them to take advantage of. It’s oddly wholesome in a game where we play bad people gunning down even worse people with near impunity.
But the best part of it all is RDO’s pacing. I’m not getting any younger, and my twitch gaming skills have left me quite some time ago, but even if I’m not a cracked hot shot gamer with the swiftest aiming and firing skills, I still feel like I’m doing my best and contributing in RDO. Sure, there are sessions where I absolutely goof my shooting or one of my posse members in my inner circle go completely pro level, but it’s still all slower-paced in even its most intense moments.
Frankly, it feels as if I’m rewarded for going slow. Money and gold just slowly builds up. I have to slow down in order to find the plants I need to harvest. Traveling my shine via cart requires me to drive the carriage slowly so no bottles break. This game just… well, it moseys, to fit its aesthetic. It’s Mosey Simulator.
I’m focusing on the positives in order to brush away the negatives here. It’s a damn shame that Rockstar has ignored this gold mine of a game and let hackers mostly come to roost now (at least in my free roaming experience). It still has some weird bugs that I know will never get fixed ever. It has some eccentricities of UI and menuing that kind of suck. But I can’t really harp on that. Not when I’m having so much fun. Not when my family and I are getting lost in this world together.
You can perhaps call this game abandoned and dead, and you’re technically not wrong, but I prefer to call it a buried treasure. A lockbox full of gold that was crammed into the dirt and ignored, yet unearthed and found and shared. That’s my hope with this wrap-up, honestly. I want to share that with you all because sharing joy is much better than spreading dourness and gamer rage.
I don’t see myself walking away from this game anytime soon. I never would have expected my ideal sandbox title to be from Rockstar, of all studios, but here we are. And here we stay. We’re gonna play this thing ’til the wheels fall off.
Of course, we are moving on from RDO for the purposes of this column and into our final adventure for the year, and due to a tiebreaker coin flip, that next game will be Star Trek Online. It’s been long enough away from that game that I think I can come back to this one with a refreshed eye and an eagerness to learn and explore. But that does require me to determine just how I’ll be making a comeback. So obviously that means it’s time for a poll.
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Polls will have their usual closing time of 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, November 29th. Until then, I absolutely plan to keep on returning to RDO in my spare time. Even if Rockstar and the wider gaming community has walked away, I don’t plan to anytime soon. Sometimes it’s OK to be fashionably late to a game, especially when it ends up being a discovery such as 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.
