GTA Online adds a quality-of-life feature players have wanted for years then upsets everyone by paywalling it: 'One of the slimiest things they've done in a while'
GTA Online adds a quality-of-life feature players have wanted for years then upsets everyone by paywalling it: 'One of the slimiest things they've done in a while'
Thoughts are inevitably turning to where the next GTA Online is going with this stuff.
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My favorite feature of GTA Online was when I’d get destroyed by someone with every weapon, only to respawn walking distance from them over and over and over. They’d kill me repeatedly before I even had a chance to do anything. The only way I could escape was to hope I found a car quick, or hope they got bored of spawn killing me.
This game is a fucking joke. Rockstar has been a shell of its former self for years.
I got hooked on shark cards for a while when I played GTA:O, I probably spend thousands of SEK on them for months, then one day I realized what a fucking shit game it is, and uninstalled it.
This was eight or so years ago now, and I have not played it since.
I don't consider the money wasted though, I consider them part of my education, I learned from this, and can now see the signs before I spend money.
Rockstar Education™: Predatory Live Services Edition
Yeah, I never consider it a waste if you got some personal enrichment from it as an outlet. My goal was to never spend any actual money on the online portion and eventually people just got way too overpowered. It was a glaring example of pay-to-play and how it can ruin a game. It shut out any chance of growth and fun.
One time I was just trying to do my money laundering restocking in GTA:O (iirc it was money laundering, it was whatever business you got when the game went free on epic games) and a guy on the flying motorbike killed me for no reason and it wasted a ton of time, eventually I killed him back and he spawned in the desert in front of me so I spawn killed him until he apologized.
I'm not saying what I did was right, I did it in the heat of the moment. But man, that game is really good at making you mad at people.
Greed will do that to any company.
My favorite feature of the game was when you went into a friend's only game, just so that you can get a handle on mp before subjecting yourself to actual mp, and halfway through driving through the city, you would merge into a public game and get shot to hell with no warning, and when you let out an exasperated "awww come on" the game triggers voice chat, which you never set up and didn't know the game had it, and only realized when the 10 year old kid that just fragged you comes on the mic with a "cry more noob" or some similar retort.
Oh yeah, super fun game.
Does this happen? I played GTAO on and off from 2013-2022, primarily in invite sessions with friends, and this has never once occurred to me.
To my understanding, invite only sessions remain invite only. If you’re in a public lobby but alone, it would ping occasionally with “you’re playing solo, find a new session to play with others”. Others could join, but it would say they joined. You couldn’t join a populated lobby without finding a new session, but people could start trickling in.
I’ve never once seen an invite session merge into a public lobby, would dozens of people just show up at once without notice? I haven’t played in a couple years so if they added that, I wouldn’t have seen it
I think it was a bug or some kind of resource saving technique. The original did all online servers, AFAIK they were hosted by Rockstar. So I would be in a new game I started as "friends only" and after a while (I imagine, alternatively, if their servers got busy, IDK), it would just transparently merge your current session into another session. Suddenly I would live join a populated public server.
IMO, it was an effort to limit their resource use. When someone was solo in a game, it would just merge your online session into another one that's populated to consolidate resources. Ignoring any game settings for friends/invite only or whatever.
I gave up on it quickly afterwards, because people insisted on being trolls and griefing anyone they could. Not everyone, I'm sure, but they're was plenty of it going around.
They may have changed away from a server/client model, to a more peer-to-peer model, I don't know. I lost interest in everything GTA after I finished the GTA5 campaign and tried to play online.
I don't know if I'll return to GTA when 6 comes out. At this point, I'm leaning towards not doing that. I might just wait for a sale and pick it up to play the campaign, but I'm done with their online gameplay.