[Steam, Rockstar, Epic] Get Red Dead Online as a Standalone Game on December 1st (4,99$)

You don't even need microtransactions, the premium currency used to be easier to obtain than the "dollars". But yes it's very grindy, grindy in time and energy.

It's basically the same (for the most part) as the sandbox experience outside the main story, in the main game.
Except the rewards are much smaller, and the prices much higher.
So for example, in the main game you can go kill a couple of animals, skin them, sell the skins/meat, and pretty soon you'll have enough money for a better weapons, upgrades, bullets, etc.
Pretty fun actually.

In the online version, you get hardly any money for the same meat/skins, even the simplest weapons are much more expensive (so you need to kill like 50-75 animals to afford a better gun), and most of the guns, upgrades and bullet types are locked either behind paywall or level-wall.
So you need a serious grind to get anything.
Even side quests (kill a specific animal, catch an outlaw) are locked behind a paywall in the online version.
They basically took the base game and decided to make it X100 times longer by making everything a grind.

So I'm not saying there isn't anything to do there, and I think it's certainly is worth $5 (compared to other games you can get for $5).
But the main game is much more fun than the online version - even if all you want to do is roam around and do your own thing.

No, its a feature, comes free with every Rockstar game on pc.
You might want to invest on a vpn, a cost of having p2p connection in 2020.

Then you know it's bad. Thanks, won't purchase it.

Nope