So it's been just over two weeks since GTA Online went live and I think I've spent more time staring at loading screens than actually driving around Los Santos. Which, for a game that cost something like $265 million to make (that number gets thrown around a lot, I have no idea if it's accurate but it sounds about right for how ambitious this thing is), feels like a weird place to be.
Quick recap for anyone who's been avoiding the internet: GTA Online was supposed to launch alongside GTA V back on September 17th, then got pushed to October 1st, and even then it basically fell over for the first several days. Rockstar's been posting these little apologetic status updates every few days, the kind that say a lot of reassuring words without actually telling you when your stuff is coming back. I lost my character once in the first week - just gone, back to character creation like I'd never played - and then I lost him again this past Sunday night, around 11pm, right after I'd finally scraped together enough cash for a slightly less embarrassing apartment. Not the end of the world. Still annoying enough that I said something out loud in my apartment that I'm not going to type here.
Here's the thing though, and I want to be clear about this because I've seen a lot of "GTA Online is a disaster, 2/10" takes floating around forums this week that I think are lazy. The single-player campaign is genuinely one of the best things Rockstar has ever made. Three protagonists, that heist structure, Trevor being an absolute menace in the best way. If you just play GTA V as GTA V and ignore the online mode entirely for a month, you're getting your sixty bucks worth twice over. The online stuff is a different animal, bolted onto an engine that was clearly built for one player at a time, and it's showing every seam right now.
What actually bugs me isn't the bugs themselves, it's the always-online requirement for something that's mostly still solo activities half the time. I want to just go rob a store by myself sometimes without my connection to Rockstar's servers being the thing standing between me and playing at all. That's not a new complaint, people have been making it about other games for years, but it stings more here because the single-player mode proved they know how to make something that just works.
A few smaller things I've noticed messing around this week:
- Character creation is still oddly compelling even after doing it three times against my will. The family-tree ancestor sliders are a genuinely clever way to hide "adjust your character's face" behind something that feels less tedious.
- Money is basically worthless right now if you're not doing missions with a full crew, and finding a full crew that isn't actively trying to blow up your car is its own project.
- The radio stations carried over from single player are still the best part of driving anywhere, bugs or no bugs. I've had West Coast Classics on for probably four hours total this week just cruising around waiting for a mission to load.
I don't think this is a "everything is ruined forever" situation. Rockstar's clearly still actively fixing things, and games with server-based multiplayer components have shaky first months pretty often (I remember Diablo III's launch being rough in similar ways last year, though for different reasons). I do think it's a little bit of a preview of where a lot of big-budget games are headed, this expectation that a single-player-capable studio can just spin up a whole persistent online economy in a few weeks and have it be smooth from day one. That's a hard problem and I don't think money alone solves it.
Anyway. My character's back now, apartment's gone again, and I'm apparently starting over for a third time this weekend. If anyone wants to do heists whenever those actually show up, my crew is currently a grand total of two people and one of them is my brother who keeps quitting mid-mission to answer texts. Standards are low. Come join.