It’s been exactly three weeks since Grand Theft Auto V arrived on store shelves. The reception couldn’t have been more positive with dozens of perfect review scores, over $1 billion made in the first three days of sales, and breaking Guinness World Records like it’s nothing.
Rockstar Games chose to delay the multiplayer side of the experience two weeks in order to “give players time to finish the story without distraction”. As saintly as that sounds, it seems unlikely at this point. Players, including myself, have had to bear with one of the most unstable online experiences in video game history. Everything from stability, saved data, and structure has been delivered well below par. When it works it’s great, but it works so infrequently that the majority of the experience is overshadowed by frustration. At this point it’s a test of will to play GTA Online.
I’ve gone back and forth about reviewing GTA Online. I’ve spent so much time trying to play that it feels like a lost cause. Should I wait until 2014 to review it? By then most gamers will have likely moved on. I’m still undecided, and for now I’ll list some of the most agonizing parts of the game.
‘Bad Sport’ System is Bad
Grand Theft Auto has always been about being exploring your bad side. In the story you play as three crooks who exploit society in different ways. It’s baffling why Rockstar Games would create a system that punishes players for not following the ten commandments.
If the system worked it would be okay, but thousands of players are being reported as bad sports despite not interacting with others. For example, while playing with a friend of mine over the weekend, we entered two lobbies—which took 30+ minutes to join each, mind you—and one of us would be kicked from the lobby for being a bad sport before we could reach each other. We hadn’t even seen other players in the game world, let alone done something to deserve the title of ‘bad sport’.
It isn’t just the disconnection from the lobby that makes this a serious concern. Being labeled a bad sport puts players in a low-priority queue where they are forced to play with other delinquent players, as if being in a normal lobby wasn’t bad enough.
Griefing Awaits You At Every Corner
It was expected that players would want to shoot one another once given the opportunity, but GTA Online is a haven for griefers. A player’s first trip online is sure to be chock-full of moments where other gamers run them over with cars, call them racial slurs on the mic, and try to make their brief stay in Los Santos nothing short of living hell. Good luck doing something fun.
These issues stem from society more than anything, but the problem is Rockstar hasn’t made a genuine effort to give players options for when they don’t want to be harassed until they log out. The passive mode system costs money and only applies to being on foot. Muting other players is cumbersome, and can’t be done in missions or activities. If someone decides they just want to play in a private lobby with a friend or two, good luck to them. Getting into a lobby with friends isn’t easy, and usually ends up in tons of time wasted on loading screens.
Errors Galore
Many of the other points on this list are what players experience once they’re able to actually play GTA Online. Getting to that point is a seemingly impossible task, though. I would consider someone fortunate if they can make their character and finish the tutorial missions on the first try. They’d be even more lucky to connect to their first lobby without being kicked back to single-player. It’s difficult to keep track of just how many different errors there are.
Made worse, loading times are unacceptably long. It takes a full minute or longer to hop between online and offline, and even longer to change lobbies.
Sure, You Can Delete My Character Again
Players have reported thousands of cases where hours of work has been lost in space. In my case, I’ve had to remake my character six times and have lost thousands of earned experience points. I should be level 9, but everytime I log back in I’m level 5. What happened to my progress?
Rockstar Games say that they’ve implemented a warning that pops up when a player loses connection to the GTA Online cloud save server. If that happens, they’re guaranteed to lose progress. However, in every case my achievements have disappeared despite never seeing such an error. In other words, when someone plays GTA Online they should treat it as if at any moment all their work can be lost.
Laggy Gameplay… Laggy Everything
GTA Online‘s netcode isn’t very good. There, I said it.
It’s common to have perfectly aligned shots registered as a miss, and sitting as a passenger in another player’s vehicle can induce throbbing headaches. Players will frequently see traffic and other players teleporting around, especially police vehicles who they think they’ve outrun only to have appear out of nowhere with 100MPH of velocity ready to move them off the road.
This also applies the loading screens, which I’ve mentioned, and the menus. Fumbling through menu items, particularly the Friends tab, is so painful that people will do everything in their power to avoid it. Shame that’s the only way to join crews and other lobbies.
Due to these reasons, I have no interest in playing GTA Online in the short-term future. When everything is fixed, and I know I won’t be kicked randomly from lobbies for being a ‘bad player’ or lose my progress, I’ll give it another shot. For now, it’s a mess that needs serious cleaning.
