Phillip Eldridge-Smith

Red Dead Redemption 2. For me, one of the best single player experiences in my 30 years of gaming, with very few issues. Red Dead Online. Pitifully broken. Lobbies can take ages to load in (or just get stuck on an infinite loading screen); getting kicked out due to a Rockstar server error is too regular an occurrence; regular NPC, horse, animal and other models load-ins and spawn issues (which is progression-breaking); slow disconnects allowing griefers to kill your player/horse when you have frozen during an action; challenges not registering; camp disappearing or not loading in, even when trying to load directly to the camp at the start of a session... All of that was in the space of a week, and all of those things happened more than once. Players are having to find workarounds due to Rockstar not fixing anything that doesn’t assist monetisation - a glitch that was causing players to gain more gold than usual (purchasable with real money and usually grindy as hell) was patched extraordinarily quickly, but the animal spawn issue has only just been acknowledged by Rockstar and yet has been an issue since at least the start of 2019. Live services are apparently all bad, even when done by a company as fine as Rockstar. GTA:Online notwithstanding - it would be interesting to see if they’d bother so much if it wasn’t just a money-printing machine, though.