I preordered Grand Theft Auto V for PC back in February, mostly out of spite, because I'd been burned by three separate delay announcements since November. First it was supposed to line up with some marketing push, then it slid to January, then to March 24th, and finally Rockstar landed on April 14th and actually stuck to it. So last night I did the thing I swore I'd stop doing in my thirties: I set an alarm for 11:45pm just to sit at my desk and watch a progress bar.
The Steam preload had been sitting on my drive since Friday. All 65GB of it. I checked that number twice because it seemed absurd for a game that first shipped on the Xbox 360 in 2013, but there it is, the PC version bundles in a ton of extra texture and asset work that the console builds never had. Preload finished clean, no errors, bar full. Great. Unlocking it at midnight did not go nearly as well.
The second the clock flipped, Rockstar's Social Club service, which you're required to log into on top of Steam because apparently one DRM layer isn't enough anymore, just fell over. I'm not exaggerating for effect here, my launcher sat on "Verifying" for twenty straight minutes before spitting out an activation error. Refreshed, tried again, same thing. Went and made tea, came back, same thing. Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else, X is a car company as far as I'm concerned) was full of people in the exact same spot, so at least I wasn't losing my mind alone at 12:30am.
It finally let me in around 1:20am. I played for maybe forty minutes before deciding sleep mattered more than driving Franklin around a version of Los Santos with slightly better shadows, and went to bed. Which, honestly, is a pretty funny way to spend a launch night you waited five months for.
Here's the thing that actually bugs me about it, more than the wasted hour and a half: this isn't a surprise. Big-name PC launches have been doing this exact dance for years now. You'd think after Diablo III's error 37 fiasco back in 2012, or SimCity's server disaster in 2013, publishers would have learned to either stagger unlock times by region or just, I dont know, provision for the load they're obviously going to get on day one. Instead we get the same "servers are experiencing high demand" tweet every single time, like it's a shock that a lot of people want to play the game they preordered. $59.99 is not a small amount of money to hand over for a product that makes you sit in a queue before you're allowed to use it.
Small tangent, because I can't help myself: I stopped by the Apple Store on Friday afternoon just to try the Watch on before preorders opened this morning. Twenty minutes with the Sport model on my wrist and I still couldn't tell you what problem it solves for me that my phone doesn't already handle sitting in my pocket. Everyone in that store seemed way more excited about it than I was, so maybe that's just me being a curmudgeon about it. I did not preorder one.
Anyway. GTA V on PC does look genuinely good once you're actually in it, first-person driving in particular is a much bigger deal than I expected going in, the car interiors are modeled in a way that makes we wonder how many hours some poor artist spent on dashboard textures nobody was supposed to look at closely until now. If you're planning to jump in tonight, my advice is don't set an alarm for launch, just install it, go to bed at a normal hour, and let the angry internet mob deal with the server meltdown for you while you sleep. I wish someone had told me that yesterday.
Once Social Club settles down over the next day or two this is probably going to be the version of the game everyone ends up playing anyway, mods alone will see to that eventually. Just maybe don't expect the first night to go smoothly.