1954: I Want to Like GTA Online

I want to like Grand Theft Auto Online. But man, does it ever make it difficult.

The frustrating thing, in a way, is that when it works well, it’s a lot of fun. 30-player races across an airport in supercars in the pouring rain is incredibly enjoyable. Deathmatches are, for my money, more fun than those in more conventional shooters. Survival events are great. And I haven’t even tried a Heist yet.

Unfortunately the whole thing is wrapped up in some of the most poorly implemented online functions that I’ve ever had the misfortune to endure in a game. And I played Final Fantasy XI with its dumbass PlayOnline Viewer and indecipherable friend request system.

Part of the problem, I think, is to do with how Grand Theft Auto Online is structured. There’s the “free mode” stuff, in which you can tool around in the open world with a bunch of other players, all doing your own thing, and there’s the “Jobs”, which are structured events. And the two clash quite a bit.

In free mode, You can steal cars, buy property, deliver things, clear out gang hideouts, rob stores and a bunch of other things. You can also kill other players, or set Bounties on people, or pursue Bounties yourself. It’s enjoyable, if a little directionless and lacking some of the incentive to explore that the single-player mode of Grand Theft Auto V has — there’s no collectibles, for example, and while there are occasional weapons scattered around the map, there’s considerably less than there are in single-player as, for the most part, in Grand Theft Auto Online you’re expected to earn your weapons and pay for them yourself with your in-game money.

So far so good. The problem, then, comes when you launch into one of the Jobs. These effectively become private game sessions in their own right, and much like other multiplayer games out there, feature a system whereby people who want to stay on after an individual race/match/whatever can vote on what the next activity should be, and everyone who does so will be in the next race/match/whatever with one another.

When playing with random people, this isn’t a huge issue, though Grand Theft Auto Online is plagued with the same problem a lot of other popular online games have: people joining sessions and leaving either when it’s not going their way or, in some cases, if the lobby doesn’t fill up in less than five seconds. Multiply this by the number of people who are doing it and it can be a good few minutes before the game manages to successfully assemble a group of people to play a single event — and you can’t do anything while you’re “queued” like this, though there is an “On Call” system that supposedly alleviates this, though I’ve never managed to make it actually work as it’s supposed to.

The bigger issue comes when playing with friends. There’s no “party” system so it’s extremely difficult to keep together with the group of people you actually want to play with, particularly if each person has their online matchmaking settings set a little differently. It’s also extremely difficult to simply pick up your friends and plonk you all into a single, private session where you won’t be bothered by random other public players — in order to do this, you actually have to quit out of Grand Theft Auto Online altogether and go back to Grand Theft Auto V, then rejoin Grand Theft Auto Online using the appropriate setting (Invite Only, Friends Only and so forth). This forces you to sit through one of the game’s many, many long and tedious loading breaks. And even then, this setting only seems to apply when you first join; on more than one occasion my friends and I have finished an event only to be dropped into a session with 25 other randos.

The whole system feels exceedingly undercooked, and given how long Grand Theft Auto Online has been, well, online now — not to mention how many other big-budget triple-A games have done multiplayer really well to date — there really isn’t much of an excuse for it. And I wouldn’t blame some people for giving up on it rather quickly — which is a shame, because as I mentioned above, it’s really rather fun when it works “properly”.