Red Dead Online may be a great way to spend an afternoon, pretending to be a cowboy who is making his fortune in a hostile new frontier, but it certainly isn’t easy to do so when the map happens to be populated with all manner of black-hatted griefers. Developer Rockstar Games is looking to curb this destructive attitude in the next big update.

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.

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.

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.

From Rhodes to Valentine, Red Dead Redemption 2 is one heck of a gorgeous game. There’s rugged terrain to gallop over, foggy swamps to wade through and eerie forests to explore no matter where you are in the game. There’s also a slice of Mexico if you’re feeling brave enough.

The beta for Red Dead Online kicks off later this month, but Rockstar has kept quiet as to what players can expect within that mode. New leaks and data-mining (For the love of Clint Eastwood Rockstar, please don’t sue us) paints a picture of an online mode that’s not too dissimilar to GTA Online’s primary focus of owning fast cars and property.

Leaks rarely lead to major court cases. Blacklisting is usually the worst thing that can happen to a website as it finds itself shut out by a publisher, but the idea of being slapped with a hefty bill? Unheard of, until yesterday when website Trusted Reviews and their parent company TI Media forked out £1 million to charity after they published confidential information regarding Red Dead Redemption 2 back in February from a leaked internal document from Rockstar Games.

There’s a culture of crunch in the industry, that is not healthy at all, something that Rockstar Games found out the hard way after they were rightfully lambasted for boasting about putting their employees through excruciatingly long months of development for Red Dead Redemption 2. A problem that seems typical of the AAA game development space, only it really isn’t.