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.

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.

1917: Creative Spark

The concept of machinima — video clips, short films and even full-length movies made using a video game’s engine and assets as the basis — is something that’s fascinated me for a while, but I’ve never really gotten big into it.

In fact, as I alluded to in yesterday’s post, the last time I really did much with anything even remotely resembling machinima was back in the PS1 days, when the then-spectacular open-world driving game Driver came out and shipped with a cumbersome and clunky but hilarious video editor mode, allowing you to create custom replays from your last play session.

My friend Woody and I used to play nothing but “Survival” mode in Driver, which starts you in the midst of a challenging police chase in San Francisco, and tasks you with simply lasting as long as possible before the cops destroy you. More often than not, our attempts to survive were fairly short, but since the game pretty much went balls-to-the-wall crazy in this mode, even a ten-second clip could make for some hilarious footage. Particularly when, as often happened, the somewhat rudimentary physics engine that powered the game went a little awry, sending the player vehicle shooting inexplicably up into the sky and flying for miles before crashing to the ground and, if you were lucky, driving off relatively unscathed.

Some people over the years have done some amazing things with machinima. Shows like Red vs Blue showed that there was life in games like Halo well beyond simply playing them. Tools like Source Filmmaker have enabled people to create movies (and, uh, a frighteningly comprehensive amount of pornography) using beloved characters from games like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and BioShock.

But, for me, the most consistently entertaining thing about machinima — both making and watching it — is seeing things going horribly wrong in a variety of unexpected ways. It’s what Woody and I used to do with Driver, and it’s a proud tradition that numerous others have continued over the years. Here’s a great example from the Skate series of skateboarding games on console. I can’t take credit for this; it’s a popular (and, judging by the view count on YouTube, somewhat legendary) video by “HelixSnake”.

I mentioned yesterday that Grand Theft Auto V features a video editor mode, much like Driver did, and even shared my first attempt at a video. Since then, I’ve spent a little more time with the facility, and it looks set to provide a lot of fun times in the future.

The best thing about it is that it includes a feature called “Director Mode”, where you’re not tied to the normal rules of the game. You don’t have to play as one of the single-player protagonists or your Online characters. If you want to cause chaos without attracting the attention of the in-game police, for example, you can simply turn them off. You can adjust the time of day. You can make your bullets and even your melee attacks explosive. And you can turn down gravity.

Naturally, the first thing I did upon discovering all of these options was make full use of all of them to produce some sort of horrific monstrosity. And I proudly present the results of said attempts for you today: here is Unprovoked, a short film by me.

Part of the joy of doing something like this is simply trying things out and seeing what happens — a form of “improvisatory theatre”, in a way. In the case of this video, all I did was set the gravity to low and equip myself with explosive melee attacks, then walk up to the poor unsuspecting almost-naked gentleman in the video, kick him and take it from there. The addition of various “emotes” — which can be used in the online mode as a means of expression or simply messing around — makes for a surprising amount of flexibility, too.

Once the footage is recorded, it’s a case of editing it together using something that bears a strong resemblance to “proper” video-editing software, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. You can edit individual clips together into a longer movie with different scenes, and within a single clip you can set keyframes to change camera angles, apply effects and all manner of other things. It’s remarkably simple to use but very powerful, and I’m looking forward to getting to know it a bit better in the coming days and weeks.

Of course, we all know that the majority of the movies I — and, I’m sure, most of the other people who are fiddling with it — will make will involve people flying around in physics-defying, ridiculous situations. But I’m also quite interested to try some things like recording a race in the online mode, or a shootout, or something else “structured”; the level of detail in the graphics and animation in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V in particular makes for really good-looking movies, and I strongly believe, as I said yesterday, that the Rockstar Editor is going to be big for machinima — if only from a perspective of getting more people experimenting with it.

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.

1354: GTA is More Fun with Friends

I’m not talking about Grand Theft Auto Online, either, which is, so far as I can make out, still a predictably shambolic mess after throwing its doors open to the public earlier this week. No, I’m talking about that peculiar joy you get from playing a game made for… well, play… with someone else.

To put this in some sort of context, allow me to explain. I played through Grand Theft Auto V and enjoyed it. I liked the characters, I found the story enjoyable and the gameplay entertaining enough to keep going after the credits rolled. Can’t ask for more, really.

Except this evening my good friend Sam came over and we played together. Sam and I used to play Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City together when we were at university, usually drunk. (We’d play Grand Theft Auto drunk, not we were usually drunk at university. Though we were drunk quite a lot at university.) Since going our separate ways and entering what careers advisors insist on calling “the world of work”, though, the only games we’ve really played together have been things specifically designed for group play with structured rules — things like board games and the like. I thought it would be interesting to see if GTAV would recapture the magic of the previous games, so I invited Sam over this evening primarily to play it, and if it didn’t, well, there’s a shelf full of board games to play instead.

Fortunately, GTAV very much has the old magic. In several hours of play, we didn’t do a single structured piece of content in the game — no missions, no races, no Flight School, nothing. Instead, we’d set largely improvised challenges and then attempt to complete them. First up, we wanted to get to the Los Santos airport and successfully steal a plane — something we’d regularly try to do in GTAIII — without getting shot to pieces by the police who were summoned the moment you step on the runway. Eventually we managed that, so we turned our attention to the enormous Mount Chiliad, the peak that dominates the north end of the map. First we tried to fly a plane over the top of it and parachute onto the summit. Having successfully accomplished that (once — never again after that) we discovered a pair of dirt bikes near the top, and a conveniently-placed jump ramp nearby.

After an unsuccessful attempt to make the jump that ended in the unfortunate demise of poor Trevor, we tried to get back on top of the mountain — firstly by parachuting again, then by driving and finally by walking. All of these attempts ended in failure — my parachuting concluded prematurely when I failed to realise that leaping out of a plane at a couple of hundred knots would cause you to go flying at a couple of hundred knots, too, and ended up plastering myself all over the site of the mountain; driving up the mountain was stymied by the fact that most vehicles can’t drive up near-vertical rock walls (though driving the front of a big rig past some very surprised hikers was enormously entertaining while it lasted); walking up the mountain concluded after several “trip-and-fall” incidents that saw Trevor rolling part of the way down the mountain, with the last fall being a big one that brought his life once again to a premature end.

I haven’t laughed so much at a game for ages. GTAV still has the magic.