GTA Online impressions: Hit-and-miss mayhem, if you can even log in

When Grand Theft Auto V launched three weeks ago, its heavily touted online mode was hidden behind a giant “coming soon” sign, like a parent shooing kids away from the kitchen while the cookies are baking. “Go on, leave us alone for two weeks; we’re making something. When you come back, we’ll have a giant spread of online tomfoolery ready for you.” 

That didn’t work out. GTA Online promised to deliver the storied series’ first truly multiplayer experience, letting players form gangs and raise collective street-crime mayhem. Unfortunately, persistent connectivity woes throughout its first week—the very trouble you’d expect to be softened by a two-week delay—have gotten in the way of so much petty online crime.

These connectivity issues are still being worked out over a week later, and they have prevented us from being able to play enough to get a decent feel for the game up until now. When we have been lucky enough to log in, though, we’ve found that GTA Online is beginning to live up to its name and reveal itself for what it is: a giant crime playland that ignores some of its solo sibling’s advances. And it’s a terrible place for a lone wolf.

Persistent server headaches

After GTA Online was activated via a title update on October 1, GTA V‘s start-up screen added a simple button toggle to let you jump directly into the online portion before the single-player game even loaded. Convenient… in theory.

Every direct login attempt I made that first day led to a bevy of error messages, ranging from “Couldn’t log into the cloud” to “Matchmaking timeout.” None of these included a “retry” option; instead, I got dumped back into the single-player campaign, adding over 90 seconds of loading before I could attempt to get online again (and usually kicking up some weird visual bugs to boot).

On the beleaguered launch day, I finally managed to abuse an “invite-only” option to trick the game into launching an online session, however briefly. At that point, I reached the odd character-creation menus. Saint’s Row this ain’t. Instead of tweaking every detail, I used the limited “heritage” system to pick from preset grandparents, using sliders to decide whose genes (skin color, height, face structure, etc) make it down to my character. A few “personality” sliders rounded things out: “playing sports and working out” makes you run faster while “sitting on the couch” makes you a better pilot, apparently.

My character then landed at Los Santos International Airport to be picked up by GTA V gangbanger Lamar. He handed me a gun and babbled about all the hustling I was about to get into. In my case, my ride with Lamar ended with a GTA Online crash—one so bad, it broke my ability to log in to GTA V‘s single-player content (I eventually found a convoluted work-around to get single-player access again).

That’s nothing compared to reports of a bug that deletes GTA Online characters altogether. According to Rockstar Games’ latest notifications, the deletion can happen when you get disconnected and hit “retry,” a head-slapper of an error that jumps past “irony” and straight into Dante’s eighth circle of hell.

It was the third day of GTA Online‘s “launch” before I was finally able to get into a stable game. My character joined a “mission” that was nothing more than a simple series of “drive here, steal this, kill them, drive here” tasks that any GTA fan would feel at home pulling off.

I never actually played the mission, though. I’d been so annoyed waiting for the mission to launch, seemingly frozen in a matchmaking menu, that I’d switched my TV input to another channel, periodically flipping back to check on GTA Online. This went on for over an hour until, after a ten-minute TV break, I flipped back once more to see the mission’s final cut scene play out, followed by a “Success” splash screen.

Sure, why not.

Mixed missions

Impromptu races around Los Santos are some of the most satisfying missions, especially if you’re playing with friends.

I still dealt with countless matchmaking waits over the next few days, but at least I finally got to see what the hell was going on. GTA Online dumped my custom character into an alternate-universe Los Santos with the same map, the same buildings, and some of GTA V‘s lesser characters. Lamar’s intro is as close to a real sense of plot as there is; otherwise, I was expected to run around this urban playground raising hell, making money, and earning experience points with roughly a dozen other players at a time.

Using a combination of the map and my cell phone, I could launch instanced events, missions, races, and more. There’s no required order to tackle these objectives, so fans of GTA V‘s car or jet-ski physics can focus on their respective races as much as they please.

Most of the events are deathmatch-minded, splitting players into gangbanging teams with a simple “kill the other guys” objective, usually with “you only get two lives” rules to ensure players are careful. These events are easily the worst parts of GTA Online, mostly because of the wide-open maps. The fight may be triggered in a parking lot, peppered with weapon pick-ups to encourage players to stay put, but players can hop in a car and joyride away from the fracas, especially if they take the lead and want to milk the match clock afterward.

Even if players don’t abuse the game in this way, GTA Online retains GTA V‘s not-particularly-robust combat control suite. The cover mechanics and generous auto-aim are functional enough for single-player fights, but they’re not balanced at all for multiplayer matches. The best gun wins pretty much every time.

The mission-styled events are more engaging, and they provide the bread-and-butter experience you’d expect from an online Grand Theft Auto. You and a few friends can team up to steal cars, take out perps, lose the cops—all the standard GTA tropes. The only problem with this mode, really, is the shadow of the offline GTA V that looms next to it. In the single-player game, you can already juggle three criminals in a given heist—one ready to snipe from a rooftop, another piloting a helicopter, and a third breaking into a vault before jumping onto a jet-ski, for instance—and manage more hirelings to assist on driving and shooting.

This means that GTA V‘s single-player heist choreography actually plays out more like what you’d expect from an epic, freeform online crime simulator, only without the other players. GTA Online‘s missions, conversely, are straight-line affairs, never dividing objectives between crew members. We all go here, we all go there, we all go home.