1911: Life in Los Santos

I grabbed the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V this week. Grand Theft Auto is one of the few games where I’ll happily suckle on the foul teat of triple-A gaming because, unlike a lot of other recent releases, for the most part the games tend to actually work and live up to their potential rather than just being flashy showcases. (Of course, in Grand Theft Auto V’s case, its online component was completely broken at its console launch, but the single player worked perfectly, at least.)

I picked up the PC version not to play through the single-player game again — I enjoyed it on PS3, but not enough to play it again — but instead to delve into Grand Theft Auto Online, which has been gradually evolving since its barely functional initial incarnation into something rather interesting over the months since its original release.

I’m not yet fully convinced that it quite realises the ambition it clearly has, but it’s certainly interesting to play and fun with friends. I had a bit of a tool around with my friend Tim earlier tonight, and hopefully a couple of our other friends will be joining us in short order.

GTA Online starts with a rather overly long tutorial in which you’re introduced to race events, shooty bang-bang events and missions. After that you’re pretty much flung into the game world and invited to do what you want, whether that’s causing the traditional chaos of a Grand Theft Auto game, taking on other players in competitive challenges ranging from races to team-based shooting events, or simply exploring the world. There’s arguably less incentive to explore in GTA Online as in the single-player, since the online mode lacks single-player’s collectibles, but there’s a certain amount of fun to be had from just trying to get to different places and admire the scenery — because by golly, does the game ever look lovely on PC.

The default way a GTA Online session works is that you log on and are put in a “session” with up to 30 or so other players. Each player is wandering around the game world doing their own thing; they might be stealing cars, holding up stores or causing chaos. The latter option — attacking innocent pedestrians and destroying property — causes your “mental state” meter to rise, indicating that you’re becoming increasingly unhinged and dangerous, and once it reaches a certain level you will be highlighted on the map for other players to hunt down and kill for rewards. You can also just kill other players and attempt to take money they have failed to bank, too, but this also has an impact on your mental state.

The meat of the game comes in the form of “jobs”, which are instanced activities scattered around the map. The majority of these are races (in cars, aircraft, boats and on bicycles) or variations on deathmatch (last man standing, last team standing, team deathmatch, capture the thingy) but there are also missions to take on that are a little more like the activities you’d normally be doing in single player — things like chasing down cars, stealing things without the cops noticing and that sort of thing. Once you advance to a certain rank, you can also take on full-blown Heists with a team of four people, but I haven’t had the opportunity to try those yet.

When you hop into a Job, you have the opportunity to invite people. You can invite friends, crew members, the people who were in your free-roaming session or simply cast a wide net to anyone who might be interested in playing that job. Those people who were invited get a text message sent to their in-game phone and can join the Job wherever they are on the map at the time; once everyone is together and everything is in order — whoever is “hosting” the Job gets control over various settings, including the enjoyable ability to lock the camera angle to the new (and very impressive) first-person mode added for the PC version.

Completing a Job rewards you with money and Reputation Points, or RP. RP allows you to increase in rank, with more activities and purchasable items becoming available as you progress. In this way, the game starts fairly simple and gradually expands over time; “rank” isn’t quite the same as “level” in an MMO in that it has no impact on your character’s abilities — these can all be levelled up independently of one another — but rather it simply increases the amount of available content on offer to those of higher rank.

So far it seems like fun, though when playing with random people I haven’t seen much incentive for people to interact or talk to one another. I’ve seen people get into random firefights with one another, but certainly in free-roam it doesn’t seem ideally set up for “cooperative” play — there doesn’t seem to be a way of making a “party”, for example, though it is possible to create a friends-only session to ensure you only play with people that you like or trust.

I think the issue with GTA Online is that it’s not quite sure what it wants to be. It has some rather MMO-esque ideas — advancing in rank; daily, weekly and monthly challenges; instanced content — but the execution is a little wanting in a few areas. Load times are fairly astronomical, for one thing, and there are a few bugs here and there. Being an online game, though, in theory both of these issues can be fixed in time, so hopefully things will improve.

I don’t wish this to sound negative, though, because so far my few hours in GTA Online have been rather fun. Whether or not I stick with it in the long term remains to be seen, but I’m hoping it will be a game that a number of my friends and I can enjoy together on a semi-regular basis for some time yet.