Not too far back I remember getting really heavily into Red Dead Redemption 2's Online features, just as I did with GTA Online back in the day. It honestly does fascinate me for the reason that these particular Online experiences mimic the stylings of your typical MMO/Live Service and yet still appear to be entirely distinct entities as of themselves. Even folk who find themselves deadset against all things 'live service'-ey seem to be able to make an exception for a little of Rockstar's Online games in their life, and I wanted to explore just why that was. That meant taking an objective look at all the individual elements which made up RDR Online and seeing where they excelled and where they fell short and, unsurprisingly, there was one huge omission from the base product; the endgame.
'Endgames' are a very important aspect of 'Live Services' as they represent the point at which the player has overthrown all the pedestrian challenges of the main game and then must submerge themselves into the nitty gritty of higher play. In MMO's like The Elder Scrolls Online, this would mean grinding different dungeons and Raids in hopes of getting the exact right roll on your gear which will make your specific class pop. In looter-shooters like Borderlands this would mean playing through the campaign on various raised difficulty settings in order to roll the best guns with the right stats. For open world live-services like Red Dead and GTA, however, what can you really grind for? All the games really have to lust for are new outfits and/or horses; so what's going to keep you coming back for more? When Grand Theft Auto Online first launched, the answer to that question was absolutely nothing at all, and somehow Red Dead Online launched with the exact same failing.
Later on in GTA O's life, the game was finally blessed with an endgame in the form of a multi-stage heist. This was essentially a raid-difficulty scenario that required peerless teamwork and communication, as well as a substantial up-front investment,in order to pull off. Of course, the endgoal of this content was still just to acquire an influx of cash, buy that money ended up going towards some of the new content that Rockstar would be adding throughout that game's life cycle. Each new chunk of content would come with an in-game money barrier that would either require high-level grinding or a back-door microtransaction to get in. This was the endgame loop that would go on to make GTAO the most profitable game of all time whilst keeping fans entertained for as long as humanely possible. So it would only be fitting for Red Dead to follow that example, right?
Except it would seem that Rockstar hit a bit of a roadblock with RDO, because that hasn't been what they've done with the game. (At least not exactly.) There is still a substantial monetary roadblock that is set-up between players and new content, but there's no high-level raid-esque content to grind through, and that really does hurt the desire to partake in the traditional gameplay loop. When the first new gameplay update was added to the game, professions, (although Bounty Hunter was the only one really worth paying attention to) players were met with a hard moneywall of Gold bars in order to take part, which could only be overcome with days worth of grinding. (Or a microtransaction backdoor.) I'd imagine that anyone who actually had a braincell to work with would have instinctively been repulsed by such a proposition and thus would have spent their free time on any number of other games that seems to treat them with respect, but I'm a sucker and so I went for it. (So I can relay that it took roughly 2 weeks of 3-4 hours a day of play time.)
But was it all worth it in the end to get ahold of the Bounty Hunter license? Pretty much, but honestly this sort of content feels like it should have been in the game at launch. Bounty Hunting in Red Dead Online pretty much boils down to this; you roll up to any town and pull a wanted poster off the wall, afterwhich your bounty will spawn in a location near to you and it's up to you to proceed however you want to. (Dead or Alive, and all that.) Complication can arise, such as locations in which your target is yet to arrive, requiring you to stake out the spot, or even situations where the bounty is currently in the middle of a high-speed train robbery, making your job just that much more high octane. The point is, these bounties can be taken one after the other and they form the backbone of a gameplay loop that should have been available to everyone at launch, rather than something that people had 'earn' through boring themselves silly.
That isn't all that the Bounty Hunter mode had to offer. You see, whilst Red Dead Online has yet to implement anything on the shear scale of GTA's Heist's, they did implement high difficulty missions in the form of 'legendary bounties' that were easily the most challenging content in the game. The targets would all be fleshed out with an introductory cutscene and a specially made mission, and would all require a different level of care to be taken by the hunter in order to successfully reach them. One target may have you scale a hill in order to take a heavily defended point whilst your target, a trained sniper, rains down lead on you; whilst another might have you battle wolves and bears in the middle of a snow storm while they make their grand escape. Additionally, everytime you fell one of these targets you are treated to another shot at it with an increased difficulty level which could translate to anything from giving every enemy a more powerful gun to requiring the capture of additional targets on the field.
If there was one let-down for this whole affair, which stops me short of declaring this content raid-esque, it's significant incentive for completing each mission. Sure, the player will be treated to the odd boost in revenue but it's barely more than could be earned by simply grinding missions in the same amount of time and so it makes these challenges feel somewhat redundant. There's not even some special medal or achievement to be collected by doing these, it's just a challenge for challenge's sake. It's for this reason that I keep finding myself worried about Rockstar's ability to keep Red Dead Online feeling fresh if they can't master the basic routine for hooking players, I've already grown sick of the whole routine in a fraction of the time it took for me to feel the same way about GTA Online. How long until others start to follow suit?
Of course, I'm not the expert on this topic, in fact if we're talking about pure success in this market than no one is actually more qualified than Rockstar in putting together this sort of game, but that doesn't make them immune to mistakes. The main dev team have likely already come back from their break and are hard at work creating the next industry disrupter and the GTA Online team have clearly moved their talents back to working on their game, leaving the Red Dead Live team to work by themselves and currently I'm not sold on their talents. This year will really shine a light on their ability to pull out something special on amass a following for this title that's even a fraction as loyal as the GTA O audience, and I, for one, will be really interested to see what the team has up their sleeves. Perhaps Red Dead Online will be the next big online game of 2020, but that will be a title hard won and even harder kept.
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