My only experience playing a Rockstar game online is GTA 4 which was basically just a ffa deathmatch. But apparently there's careers and stuff in RDRR online?

Honestly roaming a round with a posse of friends is a lot of fun. Sometimes cool emergent stuff happens, like starting a feud with another posse. The bummer is that there's only a handful of story missions, and the job roles require a considerable amount of grinding to unlock.

TLDR: really incredible open world, not much to do in it

If you have friends to play with maybe its fine? If not, you basically spend your time slowly acquiring currency to do any basic job and then you have to grind for additional currency or some kind of bullshit to progress in the job you just spent all that time getting money to unlock. The competitive modes are weird as hell and all have some weird twist on basic death match but there is no straight forward regular competitive playlists. There's not even a horde/survival mode. I didn't like it.

Wonder when "the online is fun with friends" will stop having any real merit, cause like, most things are more fun with friends.

Here are the roles: https://www.rockstargames.com/reddeadonline/features/roles

Disclaimer: I haven't played RDO since like April or May so my info may be out of date.

As far as having to deal with real people: it's totally fine, and I don't like or normally play games with a multiplayer component (except co-op).

The more aggressive someone is the more visible they are in the world and on the maps. The less aggressive the less visible. This makes it fairly easy to be able to mind your own business and be left alone out in the wilderness if that's what you want.

You can also set yourself as passive which means other players can't lock on to you when shooting at you. If you fight back, though, all bets are off.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I think they also lowered the maximum number of people in a session. Hopefully that fixed the camp spawning issue they were having the last time I played.

Or "it's good as a thing you can do in the background while you voice chat." Real high praise that is, LOL.

Wow, I was thinking about playing RDR 2 again. But after hearing this, I might as well just replay the single player.

And the whole "Online is better with friends thing" is 100% true. But I don't have friends that play online (and I'm a bad online friend). So literally all of my online multiplayer is with randoms.

It's a good concept ruined by monstrous grind and griefing. It's a huge yawn ending up in a pvp encounter where the other guy has dual shotgun pistols and sniper rifles and you have a lever action.

It's the sort of thing that makes you wish all of the characters and little adventures you can get up to were, y'know, activities John Marston could get up to while trying to establish his homestead or something.

Two middle fingers, Take Two. Loud and high!

That's my experience with every Rockstar game.
They make a great worlds and there's not much to do in them except wreak chaos.

It's a massive time waster, the kind of game that feels like i'm being bent over as i play it. the freemium progression is at a snails pace, and there isn't enough interesting content, so you end up playing the same shit over and over. It's also extremely buggy, and you will often lose the progress you worked so hard for.

I've actually gotten into it very recently, over the past month or so, and I'd say it's a very pleasant multiplayer experience if you have a group of like-minded people and you have a good chunk of time to play regularly.

It's slow paced, much like the main game, so you're looking at quite a time investment to get a lot done. And a lot of what you're doing might well be considered "meandering busywork" - you'll likely be doing some combination of hunting animals, delivering goods across country, clearing out camps of enemies, and scouring the landscape for collectables.

That said, to counter some of the comments in this thread, I think there's genuine merit to games that are fun things to do while you chat to your friends. It's nice to have a game that doesn't require too much heavy co-ordination so that you can just chat casually with your pals, and personally I do find the mechanics of the game fun. Yes, lots of things could fill that role, but we're enjoying this one a lot right now.

I've played a good chunk of it by myself as well as with friends, and I'd say if you liked the slower, more meandering aspects of the campaign then this fulfils that feeling incredibly well. I don't think you'd be nearly as satisfied if you want the wacky, high-octane action offered by GTAO. It also makes a great "podcast game" when playing solo.

My biggest caveat aside from the slow pace is that they _really_ want you to log on every day. If you aren't at least checking in and doing one daily challenge (which you'll get 7-20 of a day depending on your level and can be as simple as "skin two deer" or "emote at three players") then you'll be earning a lot less Gold (the "premium" currency) due to their streak-based multipliers. Miss one day of that (admittedly brief) check-in and you lose a multiplier that you might have spent weeks building up.

To their credit, they've been relatively forward with good events of late - last week all horses & weapons had no level lock and were 40% off, so I was able to load up on high-end gear that I might otherwise have taken a while to unlock. This week if you start a new role (the "jobs" that they added) you can get a free horse of your choice, which can be a great early pickup for something that's otherwise a longer-term goal.

TL;DR - it's a fun slow-paced thing if you like the mechanics of RDR2 and want either a podcast game or something to play casually with friends. It's fine to just take slowly, but if you want to get the most out of it you will probably be wanting to at least briefly check in every day.