Still, all was not lost; the beta for Red Dead Online was set to open for late adopters like me yesterday. I've played a lot more Grand Theft Auto Online than I have GTA V story mode, and I held out home that the same would be true of RDR2 and RDO, so I spent most of the week looking forward to that.

You may, then, possibly get a sense of my annoyance when, yesterday morning before work, I tabbed on over to the Online Beta menu in the game, and what confronted me was not a welcome screen, but rather an Xbox system screen inquiring how I would like to pay Microsoft for the privilege of being allowed to do multiplayer in a game they don't even publish. No similar thing happens to GTAO on the PC, I assure you.

I raged about this development to the gang in the studio, and that evening Phil said "oh hey, try this code," which turned out to be for a year's worth of multiplayer access that he got as a promotional pack-in with a completely unrelated item many years ago. That rather defused my disappointment, though I'm still annoyed that Microsoft (and I assume Sony?) are allowed to tollbridge other publishers' games that way—and that neither the game's packaging nor the RDR2/RDO menu gave any indication that a perpetually recurring additional cost is involved in playing the latter. Back in my day, this kind of thing didn't happen.

Anyway, with that generous gift, I was able to get into the RDO beta, create a character, and get started last night. It's... well, it's GTA Online, except in the Old West, just as you might expect. Just as in the single-player game, Rockstar's distinctive mechanics—and Rockstar's distinctive weirdnesses—are very much in evidence, and the gameplay experiences are very, very similar.

One of RDO's Distinctive Weirdnesses is that, just like GTAO, it takes what feels like forever to get from menu to freeroam for the first time. Before that, there's character creation (which mercifully dispenses with that odd "pick your character's grandparents" thing in GTAO, in favor of an Elder Scrolls-style face configurator), a number of lengthy explanatory cutscenes, some introductory navigation, and a Forced Multiplayer Mission Experience (which fortunately is not very complicated, and doesn't require the players thrown into it together to communicate or even really know what the hell they are doing). Took me about an hour to get completely through it all and out into the world.

Along the way, I belatedly realized in the middle of one of the cutscenes that, entirely accidentally, I had made my character Ian McCollum from Forgotten Weapons.

As for the game itself, well, like I say, it's basically GTAO in the Old West. It's in very early beta, so a lot of the stuff isn't in place yet, but it uses the same game world as RDR2, so the environment itself is pretty much fully implemented. (I'm not sure if it's set slightly before RDR2, like GTAO is to GTAV, or what.) The mission system is in place, but seems pretty sparsely populated so far, which I assume is just a matter of time. There's a menu item for an in-game store, which I assume will work like the "buy in-game currency" thing in GTAO, but it's not live yet either.

Most annoyingly, there doesn't seem to be a way to get into a solo instance, like there is in GTAO, but I'm not sure if that's coming later, or already there and I'm just not good enough at navigating console menus to find it, or not planned at all, or what. (Passive mode seems to be missing too, although there is at least a way to set it so other players can't attack your home base. I sure hope they're planning on more robust anti-griefing tools than that, because it's only a matter of time before RDO is as overrun with vicious eight-year-olds as GTAO.)

Another really familiar thing is the world design. The RDR game world has the same kind of "the real world, but not" thing going on as the one the GTA games are set in, with familiar-seeming places that have made-up names and aren't where the real equivalents are in relation to each other. In GTA, Los Santos is on an island, but is Obviously Los Angeles just the same; in RDR2, the State of New Austin is plainly a kind of miniature Arizona, but is located immediately to the southwest of a swampy area that contains a city which is Obviously New Orleans—that kind of thing. The designers have done a GTA-ish sort of thing with brand names, too. For instance, you can buy a lever-action rifle that is plainly a Winchester Model 1894, but is called a Lancaster.

That all made me wonder if the RDR games are set in the past of the GTA series, but a few characters in RDR2 mention New York (and not Liberty City), so I guess that's not actually the case. It sure feels like it should be, though.

So, that's some very quick consideration of Red Dead Online. I don't know if I like it yet—not enough data, and I don't know yet whether some bits I consider important (like solo mode) are missing because not implemented yet, or just not going to be there at all. I can, however, report that I don't dislike it, at least not yet. Which is good, because it was expensive, and like I said before, the single-player story pissed me right off after only a few hours.

Also: you can name your horse, which I always appreciate in a game where you have a horse. As is traditional, I have named mine "Horst".

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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