Rockstar Is Surprised At How Many Red Dead Online Players Embrace The Gritty Old West Lifestyle

A year and a half after it debuted as an online companion to Red Dead Dead Redemption 2, Red Dead Online has managed to create a unique identity for itself in the competitive online gaming space as a gritty and realistic cowboy simulator that offers a more meditative experience.

While you can play Red Dead Online as an outlaw roaming the Wild West in pursuit of a high noon shootout, many of the game's players prefer to eke out a living as naturalists and moonshiners, enjoying a more pacifistic approach to the old frontier that Rockstar created.

"With Red Dead Online, we're trying to deliver every aspect of what it might be like to live in frontier America in the late 1800s, so it offers a huge variety of options for players to create the experience they want within that world," Tarek Hamad, director of design production at Rockstar North, said to GamesRadar. "By designing it in this way, there's room for players of all kinds."

"At the same time, we do see a large portion of the community enjoy some of the more solitary and calm pursuits on offer. We've made sure to provide just as much freedom for players who want to live a peaceful life as a hunter, or tending to their camp, or a burgeoning business owner – or even become a deadly bounty hunter that can protect the peaceful players of the world from the scoundrels. How all these different players interact really paints a picture of what it would be like to live and breathe in that era."

On December 1, Red Dead Online will be available as a standalone game on PC and consoles. Red Dead Online will have an introductory price of $5 until February 2021, after which it will be sold for $20.

GTA Online is also preparing to separate itself from Grand Theft Auto V, although you'll have to wait until 2021 to roam the streets of Los Santos in that standalone game.