The 19 in COVID-19 is for 2019, so that gives you a pretty good idea of when it was first being talked about. Of course, the world didn’t really start taking it seriously until about March of 2020. I certainly wasn’t taking it seriously before that — I went to a writers convention and then flew to Arizona and back in the weeks before the lockdowns started.
So really, I’ve been taking this seriously since the tail end of March of 2020. And I did take it seriously after that. I locked down hard for the first 18 months, which is how I acquired an addiction to Red Dead Online. During the pandemic, my Red Dead Online game time reached almost 1,000 hours, according to the Rockstar Social Club app. But more on that later.
I managed to avoid getting COVID-19 throughout the entire lockdown phase of 2020, then through the soft reopening and re-closing during 2021. And in the first half of 2022, when caution was pretty much thrown to the wind, I still managed to stay pretty safe.
But then, in July of 2022, I tested positive for COVID. I was at my sickest while the rest of the country was celebrating the Fourth of July, and I’ve been getting progressively better with each day since then. After 27 months of successfully avoiding this plague, the dice finally stopped rolling in my favor.
After I got the news that I would be going back into quarantine while the rest of the world was out enjoying summer, I started getting pretty bummed out. But then, a small devil on my shoulder started whispering into my ear, reminding me that Red Dead Online is still a thing, and I could always reinstall it.
So I listened to that devil, and got this tired old dog running again.
One thing that was startlingly obvious when I first logged back in is that nothing has changed since I logged out. If I recall correctly, I burned out on the game sometime after the Blood Money update, which launched in July of 2021.
And… Holy crap. There hasn’t been an update for a year now. It’s been a year, folks, and nothing here has changed. How is this even possible? How is it that one of the most ludicrously wealthy game studios in the world is dropping the ball on a games-as-service property that sold more than 44 million copies? It’s gotten so bad that fans are actually holding an in-game funeral for the game itself. What dystopian reality are we living in where that’s even a thing?
But even then, I have to admit that Red Dead Online‘s world continues to be a compelling one. I enjoyed returning to it, even after whining about how negligent Rockstar is being here, because the core game is actually really damn good.
Am I back in the saddle for another 1,000 hours? I highly doubt it. Just a few days into this project, I’m already starting to feel a bit of the ennui that sent me running for the hills the last time I played RDO. But I do have to admit that, during yet another quarantine, it was nice to know that the wilderness of Red Dead Redemption 2 was still there waiting for me. It’s been there this whole time, in fact, and it never changes.
It. Never. Changes.
