The release of Red Dead Online: Blood Money brought with it the promise of brand-new ways for players to become dangerous outlaws of the western frontier through the new Crimes & Opportunities. Through these, players would work to help notorious mafia underboss Guido Martelli take down a local politician getting in the way of the Bronte family's criminal empire over a series of robberies and other illicit dealings. It's a fantastic premise with a lot of promise, but it ultimately fails in its delivery.
After the impressive initial meeting with Martelli, the rest of the update devolves into a boring reskinning of the stranger missions already in Red Dead Online, though this isn't even the most pressing issue. The bigger problem is the game's new currency system known as Capitale. The name alone might be an issue to some, given how everyone in the frontier says it with accents that can make it sound a touch ludicrous, but the system itself is clunky and intentionally tedious, leading to speculation that it wants to seem more substantive than it actually is.
The problems in the Capitale system also have heavy connections to Red Dead Online's gold bars currency and Quick Draw Club Pass, which, when all paired together, end up feeling like an elaborate system of filler gameplay and filler rewards tied up in a vicious cycle. While there are at least some new missions, like Red Dead Online's long-awaited bank robberies, after a couple of quick runs through them, it all becomes increasingly lackluster, which is especially problematic considering players will have to run missions any number of times if they want to earn enough Capitale to do Opportunities without spending gold bars.
The process of Red Dead Online: Blood Money's new system is simple: Players do Crimes to collect Capitale, use Capitale to buy an Opportunity run, then rinse and repeat. The point of failure comes in the collection of Capitale, as getting it isn't so simple. It's not merely a reward for doing the mission, but something players have to search for within the missions themselves, and the time constraints imposed upon missions can make this process tricky. Players will have to loot bodies, search through lockboxes, and so on to find it before the timer runs out and the mission fails - oddly enough, a method that can actually be used to speed up Red Dead Online's Capitale grind. Regardless of how they go about it, though, players will find themselves having to make multiple runs through the same handful of missions to grab a few Capitale each time until they have enough to do an Opportunity.
The only other way to acquire the bonds is by purchasing them outright with gold bars or as rewards in the Quick Draw Club Pass. So the system is designed to encourage players to do both things to speed up the process and not have to grind through the Crimes as much. It's a weird dichotomy that falsely expands the missions' replay value and actively pushes players to spend gold to skip it.
All in all, either way players go about it, the whole thing still ends up feeling like a waste of time and resources. The Crimes feel just like Stranger Missions with a new hub, the Opportunities introduced by Blood Money are a letdown, and the entire system combined is less rewarding than any number of things already in the game. For all their hard work and grinding, players will generally be rewarded with a small amount of cash they could probably have acquired more quickly by catching bounties, selling moonshine, or turning in collectibles. So whether players finish their update's content in a day or opt to slog through it time and time again, Red Dead Online: Blood Money will, for many, deliver monotony where it promised excitement.
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