So today was supposed to be the day I finally got to drive around Los Santos with actual other people in it, and instead I spent my evening staring at a spinning icon that said "Downloading Event Data" like it was mocking me personally.
Quick backstory for anyone who doesn't follow this stuff: GTA Online, the multiplayer mode for Grand Theft Auto V, went live today as a free update for everyone who already owns the game. I bought GTA V on day one back on the 17th, paid the full $59.99 like a chump because I couldn't wait for a price drop, and I've been putting maybe an hour a night into the story mode since then. Today was the day the online part unlocked, and Rockstar had been hyping it for weeks like it was going to be some kind of living, breathing second world layered on top of the first one.
It might be that, eventually. Tonight it was a loading wheel.
I got home around 6, made a sandwich, sat down by 6:40, and by 7:15 I still hadn't gotten a character past the creation screen. The servers were clearly buckling under everybody trying to log in at once, which, fine, I get it, that's what happens on launch day for basically anything with an online component. But there's a difference between "servers are slow" and what actually happened, which was character data just not saving, people getting kicked back to nothing, some folks online already reporting their created characters vanishing entirely after they'd sunk twenty minutes into customizing them. I didn't lose a character myself since I never got one to stick in the first place, so I guess that's a silver lining.
I ended up giving up around 8:30 and just went back to single player, which, honestly, is still a genuinely well-made game and I don't want this post to read like I'm trashing the whole thing over one bad launch night. The draw distance in that game still amazes me every time I'm driving up into the hills. It's just that the online piece is the part everyone's been talking about for a month, and the actual experience of trying to use it tonight was mostly frustration and a progress bar that didn't move.
Small tangent, because I can't help myself: my internet situation didn't help. I'm still running a Motorola SB6121 modem I've had since 2011 and I've been meaning to upgrade it forever, and every time something like this happens I convince myself the bottleneck is on my end before I remember, no, it's Rockstar's cloud infrastructure falling over, not my three-year-old modem. I looked this up mid-troubleshooting instead of just waiting it out like a normal person, which tells you something about how my brain works at 7pm on a weeknight.
The other thing hanging over today, obviously, is that the federal government shut down at midnight. I'm not going to turn this into a post about that because there are about four hundred other places doing that better than I could, and honestly I don't have anything sharp to say about it that you haven't already read somewhere else today. I'll just say that between checking a shutdown live-blog on one tab and refreshing my GTA Online loading screen on another, it was a weirdly appropriate night for two different systems to both be down at once.
I don't really have a neat opinion to land this on. I think GTA Online will probably be fine in a week once Rockstar sorts out whatever's choking on the back end, that's usually how these things go, Diablo III's launch was a mess too and people forget that now. But I wanted to write this down while it was fresh, because in a year nobody's going to remember exactly what launch night looked like, and "spent forty-five minutes on a loading wheel" is a more honest record of tonight than whatever the retrospective version ends up being.
Going to try logging in again before bed. Wish me luck.