Wholesome Gaming: Dozens of Horse Game Fans meet for virtual Trail Rides in Red Dead Online
Screenshot by Christine Sutcliffe, playing on PS4.
Red Dead Redemption 2 – and by extension Read Dead Online – is not strictly speaking a horse game. The gameplay focus within the story lies on outlaw life and gunplay, and from what I’ve heard, that very much applies to the Online mode as well. And yet, due to its budget and scope, Red Dead Redemption 2 is the game with the most detailed and realistic-looking horses available today.
It should therefore come as no big surprise to regular readers of The Mane Quest, that there are plenty of horse-enthusiastic Red Dead fans out there for whom the horses were a big factor in their purchase decision.
In the past few months, our Horses & Video Games Facebook group has grown to over 2500 members and gets daily posts about the equines in Red Dead Redemption 2. And more recently, a part of the community has started organizing horse-focused virtual get togethers for the kind of players who simply want to share in the joy of riding across the virtual countryside on well-animated horses.
Updated: It’s been brought to my attention that the concept of Red Dead Trail Rides was originally organized through yet another Facebook community: the Official Kickass Ladies of Red Dead Redemption 2.
Screenshot by Christine Sutcliffe, playing on PS4.
Trail ride video by Obsi Violetta (Instagram)
So what are Red Dead Trail Rides? It’s simple: players exchange usernames in horse-oriented gaming spaces and then meet up in Red Dead Online for a trek around the open world map. While the average RDO player may be more inclined to spur their horse to a full gallop as a means of transportation, the goal of Trail Rides is not to get from A to B quickly, but to spend time together, enjoying the Red Dead environments. The journey is the destination, with horses going at a walk much of the time.
Screenshot by Brittany Christie, from the Xbox trail ride on April 28th. Instagram
“I like the idea of having a whole herd of like minded folk coming together to just simply take in the scenery and enjoy the game, without it all revolving around violence, as online games so often do,” H&VG community member Christine Sutcliffe explains. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a good old fashioned bar fight or whatever, but it’s just refreshing to be able to relax with a bunch of strangers and not worry about getting shot in the back.”
“It’s a pretty moderate pace trail ride through some very beautiful scenery,” says trail ride co-organizer Kristina Heller, of the Red Dead Trail Blazers group for XBox. “Everyone gets to talk, and we see some funny stuff like horses not seeing trees or rocks. On the latest ride, we all decided at the very end to do one big race and it was a blast for everyone.”
The most recent Trail Ride event on Xbox reached the limit of Red Dead’s server capacity, with 32 people being present for the ride and several more waiting in a queue to join.
Obsi Violetta, who plays on PS4 and PC, says: “Some Trail Rides I've been on have been just silent riding with nobody talking, some have had us chatting over our headsets while we go. The opportunity to chat with people is nice – there's a lot of laughter and fun.”
Amid a global pandemic that keeps people in their homes and within an online game not exactly known for peaceful player behavior, seeing the RDO Trail Ride community flourish is nothing short of amazing to me. It is wholesome emergent gameplay at its finest. It is horse-loving players coming together and creating their own experiences wherever possible.
It is a wonderful community of (mostly) women coming together to make their own space in a game where that is not always easy. And it also once again proves that “horse girls” don’t need their games to be pink and frilly in order to feel at home in them.
While I personally don’t play Red Dead Online and haven’t joined one of these rides, seeing people’s screenshots of dozens of players lined up for some peaceful horse riding brings me incredible amounts of joy. I cannot wait to see this particular sub-community grow and prosper, and I am thrilled to see something so cool and creative emerge from TMQ-related groups.
If you would like to join a RDO trail ride, I recommend becoming a member of the Horses & Video Games Facebook group and checking out our pinned post for links to the organization groups for PC, PlayStation and Xbox.
Screenshot by Brittany Christie, from the Xbox trail ride on April 28th. Instagram
Here at The Mane Quest, I got pretty damn excited when press information in September started to promise that Red Dead Redemption 2 would include “Dressage” moves if you bonded enough with your horse.
Now that the game is out and I’m at least a few hours and several levels of horse bonding into it, let’s have a look at which dressage moves you can perform in Red Dead Redemption II, how you execute said moves, and how they look in real life.