In a fresh update to Red Dead Online, Rockstar Games has added a new game mode called Call to Arms.

The mode tasks players to protect various locations from up to 10 waves of incoming enemies. Players will have to position themselves around the map to defend all the areas.

The locations are Blackwater, Fort Mercer, Valentine, Strawberry, and MacFarlane's Ranch.

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Rockstar has dropped Red Dead Online's PlayStation Plus requirement for two weeks to coincide with the release of its new Blood Money update.

PlayStation players can play Red Dead Online without a PlayStation Plus subscription from 13th to 26th July, Rockstar said. It costs £17.99 from the PlayStation Store.

Red Dead Online currently requires Xbox Live Gold to play, but it's worth noting it's included with Xbox Game Pass.

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Rockstar has given Red Dead Online players a glimpse of what is to come in next week's Blood Money update.

In a new trailer, below, fans are introduced to Guido Martelli in Saint Denis, and can expect to receive new clothing, passes, and robberies when the Blood Money update launches on 13th July.

Blood Money offers a new type of work known as Crimes. This ranges from cloak and dagger coach holdups to multi-stage robberies including kidnapping and brutal debt collections. You can play Crimes either by yourself or with a full team alongside you.

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Red Dead Online players can now enter some of the banks.

In a recent post on reddit, one player shared a video of them walking into Rhodes Bank claiming the bank was unlocked.

The banks have been closed since Red Dead Online launched in May 2019.

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A Red Dead Redemption 2 VR mod has launched in early access form.

It's the work of developer Luke Ross, who has form when it comes to VR mods. He built the eye-catching VR mod for Grand Theft Auto 5 our Ian Higton enjoyed last year.

The video below from UploadVR gives us a good idea of how it works in combination with a gamepad. It's early days, but it's cool to see Rockstar's epic in VR. The cutscenes work in VR, too.

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Red Dead Online has gone standalone today (December 1st, 2020), making it far more widely available than it was when bundled into Red Dead Redemption 2 itself.

With that in mind, we've gone back to our original set of 11 Red Dead Online tips and expanded them to a beefier 16, freshly updated for those looking to reintroduce themselves to Rockstar's wild west opus.

Whether the standalone version will breathe new life into Red Dead Online's still up in the air of course, but it's still as pleasingly chaotic as ever.

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Red Dead Online's community had often looked for ways to amuse itself while waiting for further content updates, and the latest obsession across Reddit and YouTube is... a bridge. But this isn't just any sort of bridge, as this one can hurl you across the map - or even into Mexico and beyond.

Although it's unclear who exactly discovered the glitch (it looks like this post by user jaitom may have been the first), for the past few days the Red Dead Online subreddit has been filled with videos of players using the bridge to launch them high into the air and out of bounds. It's even become slightly competitive, with friends attempting to outdo one another's launch distances, and see who can fly the furthest. The bridge has launched some players to Mars-like landscapes, while others have taken the opportunity to explore some of the unused buildings in Mexico.

After carrying out experiments on the bridge, players discovered that horses become injured then miraculously heal themselves when bounced on the wooden trampoline. Placing a whole lobby full of players on the bridge may sound like a fun time, but unfortunately this doesn't seem to work particularly well, as the bridge can only launch a couple of players at a time. Form an orderly queue, please.

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If you've ever eyed up Red Dead Redemption 2 but walked away on the basis that there's just too much darned single-player game in there for your tastes, Rockstar has good news; it's giving the game's multiplayer component, Red Dead Online, a standalone release next Tuesday, 1st December, on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.

Red Dead Online, you might recall, initially launched in beta form around a month after Red Dead Redemption 2's October 2018 release, giving players the chance to root and toot against fellow humans across the single-player game's expansive map. It didn't have the smoothest of starts, admittedly, particularly as Rockstar struggled to remedy what many felt was an especially egregious griefing problem, but by the time it left beta the following May, there was a sense it was beginning to move in the right direction.

Since then, Rockstar has continued to update the multiplayer experience (if not always regularly and without incident, to the frustration of fans), adding new missions and features ranging from competitive fishing to class-like Roles, including the recent naturalist role. And now, as the second anniversary of its beta launch - and the imminent arrival of its Bounty Hunters expansion - approaches, Rockstar is giving Red Dead Online a new shot of life by severing its solo component and dramatically reducing its price.

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Red Dead Online has been something of a roller coaster in recent months: after the community protested the lack of updates by wearing clown costumes, Rockstar pushed a major update to introduce legendary animals and the naturalist role, and players appeared to be relatively satisfied. The celebrations didn't last long, however, as a subsequent bug fix update brought a range of issues so severe that Rockstar had to roll back the entire patch.

The latest chapter in the Red Dead Online saga is a particularly strange one, as many players have experienced significantly reduced lobby sizes in recent days - and some believe the game has improved as a result.

On a normal day, you might expect to encounter lobbies of around 20 players on Free Roam, but this week players have found themselves placed in lobbies with around two to seven people. This seems to have occurred across all platforms, although the change to smaller lobbies hasn't always been consistent, and some players have been able to access full lobbies at varying times over the past few days.

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UPDATE 13/8/20: Rockstar has rolled back its broken Red Dead Online update which caused all sorts of problems for players.

In a new update to its support post on the game's current issues, Rockstar today said it has "reverted back to the previous version" of the game on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One which originally launched on 28th July.

"This should address these recent issues and restore stability," Rockstar wrote, "meanwhile we will continue to work to eliminate any remaining issues through future updates."

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