Red Dead Redemption 2's online highly-anticipated multiplayer portion, Red Dead Online, has been launching throughout the week. It's similar to GTA Online in a number of ways, one of which being that players can purchase the game's main currency with real money.
While GTA V's multiplayer allows players to buy virtual dollars for your character, Red Dead Online features gold bars. You can farm gold bars, which are used to buy purely-cosmetic items like decorations for your Camp or skins for your weapons, or you could simply buy them with real money.
Although microtransactions aren't live just yet, Rockstar has confirmed that players will be able to buy gold bars at the in-game store. In a post detailing what to expect in the beta, Rockstar said the following:
"You may notice some areas of the in-game menus are not yet accessible or available during this early period of the Beta, such as the Red Dead Online in-game Store which will eventually open up to provide the option of purchasing gold bars to directly acquire cosmetic items like Camp décor, or a special style for your weapons."Fortunately, it seems that the gold bars won't allow players to acquire items that'll give them an advantage over other players. However, unless you want to purchase some gold bars in-game, they could take a long time to unlock.
One user originally calculated that gold bars, which are made up of 100 gold nuggets, could take 50 hours to earn. Although according to Reddit user UnavailableIDs, the accurate figure seems to be closer to eight.
"Played around 4 hours yesterday. You need to get 100 nuggets to do one gold bar. You get in between 0.02 and 0.04 (0.02 gold bars = 2 nuggets) from series (deathmatch, races, etc.) which take 10 mins each or less. Assuming you always get 0.02 and there's no loading time it takes 50 games (500 minutes) to get 1 gold bar. That makes 8h and 20 mins, and that's assuming you get the worst nugget reward and you always reach a time limit."One user claimed that they had seen a Twitch streamer with almost 10 hours played that had earned 1.65 gold bars, so your mileage may vary.
Either way, the grind seems pretty unforgiving. Hopefully, Rockstar rebalances the rate at which players can earn gold bars without paying.
Stay tuned for updates on this story and more on Red Dead Online.
In the meantime, why not check out our review of Red Dead Redemption 2's single-player component?
What do you think? Have you been playing Red Dead Online? Let us know in the comments!
