2251: GTA Online: More Fun Than I Originally Gave it Credit For

Some friends and I have managed to spend most of today playing Grand Theft Auto Online, the sprawling multiplayer mode for Grand Theft Auto V on… well, everything, but we were playing on PC, because we all have excellent gaming rigs and like it looking lovely and running at 60+ frames per second.

Anyway. Regular readers will know that my reaction to Grand Theft Auto Online has been somewhat lukewarm in the past, but today we had a ton of genuine fun, both in the free-roaming mode and in the more structured activities. I think it’s finally won me over as something I want to play more of — I’m still unconvinced that I want to play it with strangers, as popular triple-A game multiplayer modes tend to attract the very worst kind of person, but I definitely want to do a lot more with friends.

It has problems, though; fairly significant ones for an online game. Mostly the issues relate to the overall clunkiness of setting up and managing online sessions. There’s no party system, for instance, which makes sticking together with the same group of players when moving from activity to activity a little troublesome at times, though the addition of the “Remain Host” option alleviates this somewhat by ensuring whoever initiates an activity remains in control of the session’s options after it’s over.

The problems with the party system are further compounded by Rockstar’s insistence on using its own proprietary login system for online IDs — the Rockstar Social Club. I can understand why they’ve done this — there’s some nice detailed stat-tracking and suchlike on the Social Club website — but it’s a shame it doesn’t integrate with something like Steam. On consoles it integrates perfectly with Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, making it straightforward to find and invite people, whereas the addition of an extra layer of user IDs and accounts on the PC version makes it a bit of a faff to get set up to play with friends. Social Club is also a bit of a temperamental beast; we spent nearly an hour at the start of our session earlier with one of our friends steadfastly appearing offline despite him being logged in to GTA Online; turned out the solution was just to open the Social Club interface in game, and then he magically appeared online. Dumb. Broken.

Fortunately, once it works, it seems to stay working for the most part, and while there are a few aspects of the experience you miss out on when playing in small, private sessions rather than in large public games, we certainly didn’t feel like we were being deprived of anything to do. Pleasingly, there are a lot of activities tuned for 4 players, which is typically the number of people we manage to have available at any one time, so there were plenty of options for us.

Over time, Grand Theft Auto Online has expanded with a veritable fuckton of new game modes and ways to play, too; open-world activities in Free Mode might challenge you to capture and control an area on the map; “adversary” modes give you unconventional and sometimes asymmetrical ways to compete against each other; missions provide relatively freeform objectives for you to complete as a group. And then, of course, there are the Heists, which we are yet to see one through to its conclusion, but which promise to be a ton of fun.

Particular highlights for us today included the “Hasta la Vista” adversary mode, in which the four participants are split into two teams: two on pedal bicycles, two in big rig truck cabs. The players on the bikes have to reach the finish line. The players in the trucks have to stop them by flattening them. The huge difference in weight, size and manoeuvreability between the two teams makes for a really fun, silly experience that is much more interesting than a straightforward race.

We also had great fun with the air races. In our first race, which gave us free reign to choose our aircraft, I ill-advisedly attempted to fly a small passenger jet and failed miserably to complete the course. In the second, we all flew small, nimble aerobatic planes, and — particularly when played in first-person — it was thrilling and terrifying.

Even just straight deathmatches are fun. The realistic city environments in which the game takes place make for great places to play cat-and-mouse (with shotguns), and it’s immensely satisfying to battle your friends for ultimate supremacy, or at least bragging rights.

Grand Theft Auto Online feels like what Grand Theft Auto has always wanted to be: a realistic-looking but chaotic, silly, cartoonishly violent and darkly humorous playground for people to let loose in using a variety of methods: driving, flying, boating, skydiving, cycling, shooting, bombing, robbing, running, climbing, jumping… while I don’t think anyone will ever make the argument that it’s great art, it’s not trying to be; it’s a stark contrast from the single-player mode, which does tell a good story and tell it well. Rather, it’s a game where the stories are, for the most part, emergent; the stories are the things you reminisce about with the friends you’ve been playing with, and most of them start with “do you remember that time when…?”

So yeah. Grand Theft Auto Online, your interface sucks and you need to hire people who understand how multiplayer games work. But despite all that, you’ve won me over. I’m greatly looking forward to the next time I can flatten my friends in a dump truck and blow them up with a rocket launcher.