This week, Rockstar Games finally released a new update for Red Dead Redemption 2’s online component. And after a bit of a drought of new content, many fans were hoping the update would not only inject new life in Red Dead Online, but fix its plethora of issues.
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However, while the update was pitched as the big one that will fix the game, it’s actually made the game worse, at least according to a large number of its players.
Since it launched, fans across the Internet — particularly the hardcore base on the game’s official Reddit page — have had nothing nice to say about the update, which seems to have made the game worse and more grindey.
For example, one post from Reddit user “desmondao”, titled “This ****** update made Online even worse,” shot to the top of the Reddit page very quickly with over 26,000 votes-up, which is a lot for the page that has died down considerably over the past couple months.
According to the user, and many others, there’s numerous new issues and a lot of the same issues that were plaguing the game pre-update.
An example of the former is that hunting rewards have strangely been nerfed, which is a puzzling decision by Rockstar. Not only is hunting not the best way to farm money in the game, but with it hampered, there’s now one less good way to earn money in the game. And this wouldn’t be such a problem if the marketplace had friendly prices, but it doesn’t. If you aren’t willing to grind, then you ain’t going to be buying much.
Meanwhile, a lot of the bug issues players were encountering, seem to largely still be present in the game. This means even if a lot of the tweaks the update did make weren’t bothering you, you may still not be able to enjoy the game.
Perhaps what’s most egregious though is the fact that the update seemingly encourages griefing — which was already a big problem. With new daily challenges that encourage players to headshot other players and the ability to easily escape a player’s radar after griefing them, griefing is apparently a bigger problem than ever. But what makes it even worse, is if you decide to take out a griefer before they take you out, your dot will be lit up as if to say you were actually the griefer.
Of course, there’s also a lot of complaints about the new items in the marketplace and how much they cost, but that’s been a complaint of GTA Online for a long time and seems par the course for Rockstar Games at this point.
Anyway, players are somehow less happy post-update than before it, which is not a good sign that Rockstar Games has a finger on the pulse of its game’s community.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is available for PS4 and Xbox One. For more coverage on the critically-acclaimed open-world western, click here.
