Today marks the launch of GTA Online. While you’d think that’d mean a return to the excitement levels of when you first started your story mode adventure, it isn’t as perfect as you might hope.
The first thing you can do before connecting to GTA Online is create a character. In many other games this is a fun process, but not in GTA Online. Instead of being able to select your skin color, face type, features, etc., you’re given choices on your heritage. These values include your Mom’s Mother, Mom’s Father, Dad’s Mother, Dad’s Father, and how much you resemble each. Your choice of what your grandparents and parents look like (supposedly) translates to what your appearance is. It might sound cool but it really isn’t. If these character looked anything in the realm of normal it’d be acceptable, but instead you choose between varying levels of meth addiction and disfigurement. You’re given no option but to battle with arbitrary sliders until you find the least idiotic looking character possible.
The character creation should have one focus, and that’s to let you create a character you’d like to be represented as in the virtual game world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t succeed. After losing my created character twice due to server issues, each time I found myself making the best bad-looking person possible. To think that others might believe I actually look like that is sort of insulting.
As if the character modeling wasn’t bad enough, choosing your starting stats is a similar mess. Selecting your stats directly is instead replaced with choices such as how many hours you sleep per day, how often you work out, and whether or not you sit on the couch a lot. It’s unnecessarily cumbersome, and since each option ties to stat changes, all it means is you spending time figuring out which options affect which stats and adjusting accordingly. Isn’t this sort of design methodology something that died several gaming generations ago?
The entire process of making a character in GTA Online goes against all the principles that make GTA V so great. What happened during development, and how it got through testing is beyond me. Thankfully, once you make your clown of a character you can enjoy the beautiful and outstanding world of Los Santos with others. Well, assuming you can connect, of course.
