Red Dead Online Is Filled With Glitchy Horses

Red Dead Online’s last update, Blood Money, added some new missions and small features to the game. It also seems to have broken something. Now, whenever players log on, they are encountering dead random horses or living ones that just round around forever, causing mayhem.

On July 13, Rockstar released the latest update for Red Dead Online. It was a small update that added some new missions and a fresh Outlaw Pass to level up. Nothing too exciting. But soon after it went live, players began noticing some odd horses around the large RDO map.

Many of these horses appeared to be player-owned since they had nice saddles and accessories like lamps. Yet their owner was nowhere to be found. Sometimes these horses just show up dead in random locations. Other times they are seen standing around, forever waiting and watching. The weirdest and funniest are the random horses that are running across the map, seemingly with no destination. These horses have even crashed into players, sending them flying into the air.

I’ve personally encountered all three of these random player horses while playing RDO over the last week or so. In fact, I saw them so often that I started to wonder if something was wrong and looked it up and saw that I wasn’t alone and that, yes, something was very wrong.

As mentioned earlier, these horses appear to be player-owned and sometimes folks are finding clones of their own horses out in the middle of the game’s large open world. Often these random horses can’t be interacted with in any way.

While these horses have been causing some minor crashes and random injuries, there is at least one confirmed case of a random, out-of-control player horse saving someone. Even weirder that person was dressed like Fat Albert. (Video games are strange things!)

Where are these out-of-control and cloned horses coming from? Well, a few theories have been passed around on Reddit and Twitter, with many pointing towards a bug involving in-game stables. When you enter the stable, sometimes you can see your horse running out of the stable during the cutscene. Others think some of these horses are being left behind when players are disconnected, something that still happens more often than you’d think in Red Dead Online.

Kotaku has reached out to Rockstar about these random horses.

This is far from the first time Rockstar has updated one of their games and then broke something in the process. In 2017, Rockstar updated GTA Online and all the convenience store clerks disappeared. In 2024, Rockstar update Red Dead Online and players reported their horses were much dumber afterward.

As with those previous mistakes, it’s very likely that these random, wild player horses will get patched away soon. In fact, by the time you are reading this, it might already be fixed. And though this will be patched away one day, it is a reminder of just how complicated and hard it is to make and maintain a large online video game.