- Stuff is expensive and many items are locked until you reach a certain level: that means no fishing and using a repeater for hunting until you reach level XX - You can set your character, horse and camp to "Defensive": other players won't be able to attack you (or at least suffer severe penalties if they do so - not quite sure what these are), won't be able to steal your horse or raid your camp - I only saw a handful of other players and they seemed to be as shy as me. Certainly not the chaos I was expecting. The only grief I got was a herd of wild boar overrunning my camp - There does not seem to be any text chat and you can turn off all character labels, so visually there is no difference with single player - It seems that when you die, you do not lose any money or inventory items, so no difference with single player - As in single player, there appears to be no way to discard unnecessary weapons... For now it is not a problem (I only have 1 Cattleman and 1 Repeater), but I imagine it will be annoying later on
It seems to me that if you just want to free roam doing hunting and fishing and the occasional bounty hunting without the story constraints, RDRO is a good place to do it, but you'll have to spend some time first to get the gear that you want. From what I have seen, it should not take too long to level up (just do a few story missions and skin animals).
