Red Dead Redemption 2

[Art Blade]

the new update (as of today) requires a new video driver for NVIDIA, 442.29 or higher. If you go to the driver downloads, the only available driver is 442.19.

Solution: Hotfix driver 442.37

https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/4994/kw/Hotfix

[nex]

I have version 442.19 released 03 Feb, just checked for driver updates and got the "you have the latest driver"   

[BinnZ]

I somehow didn't get the updates on this topic since my Best in the West post. Weird. Anyway, thank you all guys, for the kudos! Nice to have gotten to 200 now

I did the last achievements for single player and they weren't easy. Finding and studying all animals, skinning all skinnable animals, something concerning Bear attacks and getting 70 gold medals. That last one was a real pain in the arse.
So, time for multiplayer!
I was actually thinking of making a dedicated topic about it, but I'm not sure yet. Will let you guys know about my experiences anyway

[Art Blade]

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah I got the dialog that it needs the new Nvidia drivers, but it runs on the old ones anyway, so I didn't bother hunting down the beta version, I'll just let it update automatically when the regular version comes out.

Tried to hook up with Binn online but when I was free, he was busy and vice versa.

[BinnZ]

Well, I tried online for a couple of days. In the beginning it was really hard. You start with nothing. No good weapons, a *bleep* horse, *bleep* abilities and no money. And of course, everything costs tons of money and you need to unlock stuff by ranking up. Not only just normal XP, but for some stuff you need to by 'roles'. Bounty hunter, Moonshiner, stuff like that.
I had the luck that a friend helped me get up to steam with his roles. If you are a trader, for example, you have a supply train running from your camp to buyers. And he had everything maxed out, meaning he could sell a full shipment of his supplies every now and then, and unlike GTA, here you get a descent payment for helping your posse leader out. If he sells his full bunch, he gets 650 dollars, and if I help him I get payed 300 dollars as a reward. That helped me get my first 1000 dollars or so, and I was able to buy a proper horse and some weaponry.

First some tips for starters;

• Never use gold bars for stuff that you can but with normal money. There are some things you can only pay for with gold, like the roles. And some special horses, and the rest is mostly cosmetics. So keep your gold for these things. I kept all my gold until I had 15 gold bars, took me roughly 28 hours to get those, and then I paid for the Bounty Hunter role. Now I can start these bounty missions and rank up in that role, unlocking role-specific stuff.
• Get a descent rifle and repeater. I got the bolt action rifle pretty early, you don't need much to unlock it. Probably rank 10 or something. I also bought the Litchfield repeater shortly after that. The normal upgrades, better rifling and iron sights can all be purchased using dollars. No need to use gold for that.
• Get a descent horse. There is an Arabian horse available for 250 dollars from the start. It's a proper horse, 4 acceleration and 5 speed. And it looks nice, it's the blood bay coat. Horses loose their cores and circles around it a lot faster than in SP and you have a lot riding to do. When you ride with other players with better horses the standard Morgan you get from the start is really too slow and all that. Upgrading / buying saddles is also recommended, because it helps your horse a lot, but most good upgrades are hidden behind rank unlocks. But as soon as you can, upgrade them.
• Ability cards. These cards will start unlocking pretty soon, and they help you a lot. For example, there's a dead eye ability card called "paint it black" that gives you the auto-lock option in dead-eye. as soon as your crosshair touches your target, you get the red cross there and you pull the trigger to hit the cross. Helps a lot in messy fights. Ability cards will also be upgradable, making them more potent. So buying some interesting cards as soon as possible is wise.
• Daily challenges. Unlike GTA, you get 7 or 8 daily challenges instead of 3 each day. They are the same for all players. You don't need to complete them all to get the in-a-row-bonus, only one is enough to keep the day counter counting. After 7 consecutive days your earnings for those dailies will raise. Now here's the good part; Dailies give you gold. Gold isn't easily obtained. So using the dailies to get them, is wise. Some dailies are difficult, involving a lot of searching for a specific animal or herb, or getting involved in PvP fights. But there's always some that are super easy. Like 'visit a shop in strawberry'. Simple, and it helps your dailies chain keep running. If you complete 28 days in a row, you will get half a gold bar for each daily challenge. So you can make a lot of gold by just doing some relatively simple tasks.
• A last tip about money making. Once you start as a noob, you'd better first complete the story missions. They pay relatively good the first time you play them, and help you getting started. They are fun, and strictly coop. You are spawned in a story dedicated server, so no other players to fool around with you. They pay also a small amount of gold, so it is quite beneficial. But well, like I said in the beginning, the best way of boosting your income is to help players out who sell large amounts of moonshine or trader supplies. They like your help, because it makes them more secure having you as a hired gun, and they don't loose anything with it.

There's tons of other things to be aware of, but I haven't yet found out how, and how important those are. So I will give more tips as soon as I have them. One last thing to tell you guys about online, not a tip but rather an experience, other players are generally more helpful and friendlier than in GTA. It must have to do with the type of game, but also with the lobby / session design. you can't easily make an empty session, although there seems a workaround for it, being a trader. Anyway, when you are in a session, you can only see the players on the map that are close to you. The rest of players remain hidden. That means there's no easy way for griefers yo go hunt other players down just for the sake of it. I have been head shotted by other players numerous times, but 9/10 encounters with other players are peaceful. Some start helping you, others mind their own business. It really is a different cup of tea compared to the zoo in GTA.

It is a bit of getting used to, and you need to proceed to somewhat higher levels / ranks until the fun stuff is being unlocked, but I am rank 26 now and feel more at ease with my abilities. And I can now aim for cool new features and useful stuff to keep me going. The way they designed the micro transactions in online is clever, if you ask me. The gold can be bought, and the dollars you need to earn. Gold will help you get going. the 50 gold bars from the early buyer award would be really helpful, or just a one time purchase to get you going and buy a role or two. The alternatives to get gold is doing a lot of activities and of course the dailies. Which keep ppl play online, so no worries for empty lobbies. I think that is well thought it, from a developer point of view. and I can live with it. I have considered buying a start-up gold kit, but I chose not to do so. Thought it wouldn't matter that much. Now that I'm this far, I don't regret grinding a little. Like I described, 28 hours was enough to get me going, and it was fun getting there. 

[Art Blade]

sounds like you're enjoying the online experience Keep having fun, Binn.

All I can say is: none of the above makes me reconsider my decision not to go online. On the contrary, it sounds absolutely horrible to me and I'll gladly stay away from it

[nex]

Player's trick

https://www.pcgamer.com/players-are-preventing-fall-damage-in-red-dead-redemption-2-by-puking/

[Dweller_Benthos]

Interesting, though I don't see puking to get around fall damage very useful.

As for the online stuff, thanks Binn for all those hints and tips. I know I have a serious gold shortage and everything I try to do they tell me "Come back when you have more money". Getting gold for doing some of the daily stuff seems the way to go, I've been ignoring those, thinking I had to do all of them like in GTA, and there's always one or two that are impossible, so I've been ignoring them all. Doing one or two easy ones each day might be the way to go.

As for the other players, beyond that one encounter I had, there have been a few others who seemed sketchy so I ran away from them as fast as possible. Mostly in the city, as that's where a lot of them seem to hang out, so I left there as fast as possible and haven't been back.

[Art Blade]

somehow that comment reminded me of DayZ. Most players were going to the big cities and turning them into war zones while the forests were mostly empty.

[BinnZ]

Yes, towns are mostly more populated. But the overall player spread is better than in GTA. That has everything to do with the lack of a big city like Los Santos, and also with how jobs, activities and collectables are spread, too. Funny enough Tumbleweed is often quite busy. There isn't anything special but it's a real old fashioned Western town. And maybe also because of rdr 1

[Art Blade]

WEIGHT CONTROL

I am now able to control not only my horse's weight ("fit" rather than thin or even malnourished) but also finally Arthur's/John's weight ("perfect" rather than underweight) which at least for the player's character is the best balance between core drain and other side effects because "perfect" sets the core drain speed to zero which means, it doesn't get drained faster than normal. Also the damage resistance is better. By the way, "average" is essentially "fat" because "perfect" is if you weigh less than the average.

Going from average to perfect isn't as easy as it sounds: you need to spend two days without eating or boozing and you have to refill the drained cores by sleeping. Sleep is limited as in you can't sleep 10x in a row. After a certain amount of sleep it tells you that you can't go to sleep again after "successfully" sleeping before. So in the end it means, do stuff like riding around, plucking plants, go fishing or hunting, and then go to sleep, do the same the next day, sleep, and you should have lost just enough weight to drop one weight level.

Gaining weight means you need to eat (or booze, or both) and either pass out or go to sleep with your cores filled by eating anything. Crackers takes long, big game meat fills cores instantly but in the end it seems that you just need to fill your cores by eating something, anything seems to w0#k. Boozing (doesn't have to be moonshine) seems to add to the weight on its own, but it may be slower if you just drink yourself to oblivion shifting in and out of consciousness in between.

The best way to maintain weight for your character is probably to keep filling up your cores with cooked meat. I kept doing that, eating any cooked meat every time a core was starting to drain, and maintained an "average" weight for quite some time until I found out that a) it's "fatter" rather than "thinner" than perfect, and b) how to gain/loose weight. Now that I can control it, I know how to gain and how to lose weight. I'm curious how easy it will be, if at all, to maintain the perfect weight as I only just now achieved it for the first time ever but I was never able to control weight before. Let's see how it goes

A horse, if it's underweight, needs 7-9 hay servings to become "fit." Hay is the cheapest and most nutritious meal for a horse to keep its weight in check. I found that constantly monitoring the horse's health core (the heart) .. erm .. "heart-core?" So as soon as it's not completely white (filled) you need to give your horse one serving of hay. That's all. It will remain "fit."

Funny anecdote: I wanted to see how much a horse could actually eat. Would it stop and refuse, or continue eating until it exploded? The answer is: it will keep eating as long as you feed it. Other than the player character's physical appearance, a horse's doesn't change. A horse thin as a railway spike or fat as a receptionist in a luxurious hotel in Hong Kong, it will always look the same. So when I stopped feeding it and checked the stats (they change "in real time" unlike the player character which only changes after sleeping/passing out) it read not overweight but obese, lol. When I rode into the stable with it, the guy in there exclaimed, "What did you feed that horse, CAKE?!" 

[Dweller_Benthos]

Cake is good for horses, little known fact. lol But I'll keep that in mind, though it seems when I feed a horse it picks any old thing from my inventory to feed it, sometimes it's hay, sometimes oat cakes, occasionally an apple. But when I'm riding and go to the inventory wheel I can then pick a specific thing to feed it, but when standing next to it after a good brushing, I pick the feed prompt and it just gets whatever.

[Art Blade]

what you described.. I think it only happens when you've run out of hay. Then it picks the next item. I keep stacking up on hay (so I never run out of it) and whenever I use the feed prompt next to the horse, it only picks hay.

[Dweller_Benthos]

It could very well be, I probably ran out of hay and then oat cakes before it picked an apple. I forget to stock up and after a while don't have any food left lol.