The multiplayer component to Rockstar’s new Western will be out this week, the developer said today, promising a beta for Red Dead Online that will launch on a staggered schedule for Red Dead Redemption 2 owners starting tomorrow.
Here’s a quick breakdown for when you’ll be able to play Red Dead Online. (Update 0950 AEDT: Australian times now available.)
Wednesday, November 28: All Red Dead Redemption 2: Ultimate Edition owners. Please note, players who purchased the physical Ultimate Edition must redeem the Ultimate Edition code in the packaging to be eligible.
Thursday, November 29: All players who played Red Dead Redemption 2 on October 26th according to our data.
Friday, November 30: All players who played Red Dead Redemption 2 between October 26th to October 29th according to our data.
Saturday, December 1: All players who own Red Dead Redemption 2.
We still don’t know much about how Red Dead Online will work, but The Verge got a smattering of details from Rockstar that are worth sharing:
With the gameplay of Red Dead Redemption 2 as its foundation, Red Dead Online transforms the vast and deeply detailed landscapes, cities, towns, and habitats of Red Dead Redemption 2 into a new, living online world ready to be shared by multiple players. Create and customise your character, tailor your abilities to suit your play style, and head out into a new frontier full of things to experience.
Explore this huge world solo or with friends. Form or join a posse to ride with up to seven players; gather around the fire at your camp; head out hunting or fishing; visit bustling towns; battle enemy gangs and attack their hideouts; hunt for treasure; take on missions and interact with familiar characters from across the five states; or fight against other outlaws in both spontaneous skirmishes and pitched set-piece battles; compete with other players or whole posses in open world challenges and much more.
Rockstar is calling this a beta that will eventually morph into a full release, so expect bugs, strangeness, and lots of changes—not unlike GTA Online when that first launched in 2013. Good luck to all of you intrepid aspiring gang leaders.
Comments
18 responses to “Red Dead Online Goes Live This Week”
How are microtransactions going to work in the old west??
Golden chicken nuggets. All in all with the recent announcements I just hope that the character creation and customisation elements are very extensive. Give me two bandoliers!
At the end of a 6-shooter, presumably.
Horse bling. Fancy vests. Houses and home steads, fancy golden pistols and tall hats by the mantle… these are a few of those micro transaction things.
If there is a will, they will find a way to Shark card this game into microtransaction hell.
I predict that in twelve months I will be riding around on a gold plated hover train with leopard skin interiors covered in maxim guns that fires high explosive olde timey rockets at 1000rpm.
Instead of shark cards its Alligator cards this time.
Well that’s welcome news. I think RDR2O is when my GF will re-engage more enthusiastically with Red Dead. She wasn’t a fan of how the story was panning out, but is much more excited by just moseying with a custom character.
I just… really, really hope this isn’t a manipulative, anti-casual, gankfest griefer paradise like GTAO ended up. And that the opening days don’t result in repeated character deletions like GTAO.
it would be nice for it not to be a toxic hell hole. But lets be honest…. It’s gonna be.
Well there’ll be no bulletproof horses or drones or nukes so I think it should be okay in comparison
I’m more concerned about trying to do some casual moseying with my partner and getting jumped by PVPers. I really hope they’ve added better options for PVE’ers to ignore malicious players.
I got blown up a couple times by fighter jets in GTAO while I only had a hundred bucks to my name, and somehow killed by enemies I couldn’t even see when I was just trying to rob a gas station, but the far more common nuisance was people ramming me with their cars, hoping to push me into traffic, or following around, shadowing me unflagged, looking for any opportunity to flag up and get the drop. It didn’t take multi-million dollar superpowered gear for people to be monumental pricks, and if the ruleset is similar for RDR2O, I expect much the same.
If you approach a bandit hideout and the only way for you to attack it is to allow Captain Douchenugget McFuckface the opportunity to finally snipe you with his rolling block rifle from where he’s been watching you approach the hideout, then the mode is a garbage write-off.
There’s a pretty significant difference with all the problems you’re talking about… It’s clearly MUCH slower to traverse the map in RDR2 than it is in GTA5.
If it works anything like GTA5… People coming up on you, you’re going to see on radar before they get to you. It’s simply not going to be you suddenly getting hit by a car going 200km/h, or blown up by a plane that flew across the map in mere moments.
The point is, if RDR2O is like GTAO, that won’t matter one bit.
The fact that we’ll be able to see someone coming to fuck up what we’re doing is not going to stop them from fucking up what we’re doing.
So I’m hoping for better options to stay PVE only.
Yea BOAH!
I’m so ready. Hated GTA Online but have high hopes for this.
Should probably lower those hopes a little. Rockstar have made a lot of noise about how proud they are of the money GTAO has made them, I honestly don’t see RDRO being all that different other than the setting (and with GTA now having flying cars and rocket bikes even the setting doesn’t mean much)
Didn’t Rockstar release a statement about how any future content would be accurate to the time period?
Even still, if you think we’re going to see flying horses or something in this (hackers aside) I’d say you’re being just a tad ridiculous.
Pegasus!
I’m not expecting flying horses, wouldn’t be shocked by ‘steam-powered’ carraiges that drive around at 400km/h with explosive gattling guns though.
I haven’t seen them say anything about staying accurate but you are probably right, with that said though they did say GTA V would be getting single-player DLC too…
I love RDR2 and RDRO but it’s Rockstar, be prepared for micro transactions up the wazoo. It most likely will become the toxic hell hole that was GTA5O and with people already exploiting single player it most likely will
I can’t see any way that RDR Online could possibly be fun and have anything to offer, surely it will sink like a stone in terms of player numbers. And that’s before the impact of microtransactions.