2451: GTA Online: Simultaneously Amazing and Shit

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There are few things in this world that are simultaneously quite as amazing and quite as shit as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto Online.

Every few months, I boot it up to see what’s been added, and there’s always been some pretty significant new content bolted on for free since I last tried. I get excited to try it, maybe even actually get to try it… and then before long I remember why I’m not playing Grand Theft Auto Online all day every day.

The most recent additions to the game — or new to me, anyway — are the Stunt races and the Motorcycle Clubs. The former provides a series of TrackMania-esque building blocks for track designers to construct physically improbable/impossible tracks using the game world as a backdrop, while the latter offers a new means of progression for small groups of up to eight players.

I haven’t yet raised enough money to purchase a hideout for a Motorcycle Club yet, which is why I was doing the Stunt Races — conveniently, there’s a trigger point for one right outside my in-game apartment. And I’ve been having an absolute blast participating in these races, which make the best of Grand Theft Auto’s exaggerated vehicle physics with lots of jumps, switchbacks, corkscrews and all manner of other funtimes — plus, of course, the inevitable playing dirty that tends to come with the territory.

This was all absolutely great until the “host” of the session either went away from their keyboard or crashed, leaving their game logged in but not responding. Not only did this mean that we had to wait a long time between every event because the host wasn’t there to manually press the “start event” button, but it also meant that at the end of one session in particular, everyone was left stuck as the results screen with no means of leaving the event or quitting back to the free-roaming mode short of completely quitting the game altogether then logging back in again. And with Grand Theft Auto V’s astronomical initial load time, this is not a particularly appealing prospect.

I’ve run into this problem before, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been fixed. Actually, no I’m not, because Grand Theft Auto Online is still missing a variety of features that a lot of other online games have had for a very long time.

Chief among the missing features is a “party” system whereby you and other players can form a group that sticks together, regardless of whether you’re doing events or free-roam stuff. The game does keep people from the same event together if they vote to continue on to a new map, but if anyone chooses to exit to free-roam mode, they’re immediately separated from all of the people they were just playing with.

Couple this with the fact that setting up a “friends only” game is a faff and a half, involving booting up Grand Theft Auto V’s single-player game, then entering Grand Theft Auto Online from there — there’s no means of starting a “friends only” session once you’re already in Grand Theft Auto Online — and you have an online experience that is a real mess, particularly if you want to play with friends. And for those who think what I just described isn’t a particular faff, you obviously haven’t endured GTAV’s load times.

It’s kind of baffling how these features simply haven’t been added to the game since it was launched, because I can’t be the only one keenly feeling their absence. And it’s frustrating, because the activities on offer in Grand Theft Auto Online are many, varied and a whole lot of fun. It’s just such a monumental pain to get it working properly that I often give up out of sheer exasperation rather than wanting to stick with it.

GTA Online should be an absolute masterpiece. And it has the potential to be just that. But short of a fundamental revamp of how the whole online functionality works, it’s doomed to remain an admirably fun and varied, yet ultimately frustrating and irritating experience that, for my money at least, often ends up feeling like more trouble than it’s worth.

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

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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.

1918: GTA Online’s Identity Crisis

I’ve been playing a bunch of Grand Theft Auto Online recently. My local friends and I all acquired copies so we’d have something we all enjoyed playing and that we could all get something out of: past attempts to do this have led to one or more members of the group being dissatisfied with our choices for whatever reason, and ultimately our multiplayer gaming sessions falling by the wayside. We’re hoping, however, that Grand Theft Auto Online will provide some fun shenanigans for a little while yet.

And I think it might just do that, at least in part due to the game’s curious identity crisis that it has going on. It doesn’t feel like it really knows what it wants to be. In places it’s downright messy, and the “session-based” nature of getting people together is cumbersome, clunky, unintuitive and simply broken at times. But even with all that, it’s simply fun.

I talked a little about the basic structure of the game a few days ago, but having spent a few sessions actually playing it “properly” with at least one other friend now, I can see what it’s doing.

The core of the game’s identity crisis comes from the disconnect between typical Grand Theft Auto freeform open-world gameplay — in which up to 30 players can log in to the same session, run around anywhere on the map completely independently of one another and have fun doing whatever they see fit — and the “Jobs” that form the more structured activities in the game. This disconnect is nothing unusual for Grand Theft Auto in general, of course; ever since Grand Theft Auto III brought the series kicking and screaming into 3D it’s been like two games in one, and this contrast has only become more pronounced as the stories have got better and more ambitious over the years.

Open-world freeform multiplayer is great fun. You can effectively make up your own silly little games and challenges and take them on with friends. You won’t get much in the way of rewards for them, but if all you’re in it for is some silliness, it provides that in spades. What doesn’t quite work about the open-world stuff is that the moment someone activates an activity of some description — be it a race, a mission or even a game of darts — they are snatched out of the open-world session, temporarily unable to communicate with the people they were playing with, and put into a more traditional multiplayer lobby, from which they can invite people via several means: everyone from the open-world session, selected people from the open-world session, friends who are online or simply “anyone who is available”.

Once you’re into that lobby and with friends, you’re effectively in a “party” like you’d be in something with more traditionally structured multiplayer like Call of Duty or Halo. You do an activity, you all vote on what’s next, you do the next thing, repeat until someone gets bored or everyone votes to go back to Free Mode.

The activities are pretty fun too, and I understand why they’re “instanced” separately from the main chaos of the open-world gameplay — trying to complete a mission while up to 29 other people are careening around the map causing mischief sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s the execution that is a little lacking: the absence of an MMO-style “party” system makes meeting up with specific people in public sessions tricky, and the way people are simply snatched out of the open world the moment they walk into a mission trigger is not explained at all well; if you don’t know that’s how it works, it’s entirely possible you’d be left thinking that your friends had simply left the game altogether.

As I say, these issues and the fundamental disconnect between the freeform gameplay of Free Mode and the structured activities of the Jobs don’t prevent Grand Theft Auto Online from being a good game. It’s a lot of fun, particularly when playing with friends you already know. (I don’t even want to contemplate how awful taking on the cooperative missions with random people might be.) There’s just an awful lot of things it could do a whole lot better, too.

Still, it’s enjoyable, and I’m confident it will provide some fun evenings of entertainment for my friends and I for a little while yet.

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.