Featuring a wide range of Honorable and Dishonorable co-op missions and an in-game currency system, there’s no question that Red Dead Online provides players with a vast range of opportunities to stare at horses. And, to be upfront, the game’s horses are beautifully animated with impressively rendered manes and detailed reactions to your character. But that nonetheless falls far short of the emotions that arise while staring over a zoo’s fence into the beautiful eyes of a stallion as it prances and capers mere feet away from your face.

Not only do zoo horses look and sound more realistic than those in Red Dead Online, but you can also smell the horses, an immersive feature that RDO lacks entirely. After voicing this complaint repeatedly to RockStar after the release of Red Dead Redemption 2, I thought they would fix it in patches. But, sadly, this glaring misstep remains as intact as ever in the online world.