Red Dead Online is available to all Red Dead Redemption 2 players, and if there’s one thing that people are finding it’s that the online bits are needlessly grindy. For most players, it takes over 8 hours of play to earn a single gold bar.

Everyone is fair game, bullets are whizzing around you and chances are that there’ll be plenty of griefers roaming the harsh frontier. So how do you enable Passive Mode in Red Dead Online? Here's how.

There’s gold in them there hills! Red Dead Online has begun, and if you’re anything like me, then your pockets are probably emptier than a six-shooter revolver after a game of high stakes poker goes terribly terribly wrong. Much like Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Online wants you to earn your fistful of dollars, by engaging in various pursuits that’ll have you flush with cash and resources that can be spent on some trendy threads.

Like most games of its ilk, Red Dead Online allows you to create a cowboy who represents your activities in the new frontier. Rugged, burly riders whose brawny hands can slap leather and draw iron that delivers some old fashioned justice. Testicles to that, because I’m hellbent on using my digital face as a weapon.

RDR 2 is a fantastic tragedy of characters so stuck in their ways that they refuse to accept that things have and are changing, being so rigid in their ideals that they can’t see past the harm they’re doing to themselves and others. Which is super weird because Red Dead Redemption 2 is also a game that is so super dated and stuck in the past that it hurts the overall experience and leaves me with a strong sense of dramatic irony.

There's a mode in Red Dead Online called Make It Count. It’s a last-man standing game where 32 players face off against each other as the play area shrinks. If that sounds awfully like a Battle Royale, that’s because that’s precisely what it is

A month after Red Dead Redemption 2 launched, developer Rockstar Games is finally ready to unleash its ambitious online component and mosey on down to a whole new sandbox of action, adventure and socialising in the old west. With a catch, of course. Red Dead Online will arrive today, but Rockstar is looking to stagger the release and reward its more hardcore fans first and foremost.

Say what you like about Red Dead Redemption 2 and the odd glitch, but that game felt amazingly polished when it came out in October, with zero large-scale patches having been introduced for the game…yet. A sequel that truly feels like the result of hundreds of people being overworked, Red Dead Redemption 2 a terrific example of quality meeting expectations. A quality that exists as an educational benchmark for CD Projekt RED and their upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game.