Liam calls the pairing of single-player and multiplayer GTAs “an amazingly smart choice as to give the player base time to fall in love with the characters of story mode”. GTA V, the single-player mode, bought enough time for its ugly shambolic, initially pointless child, GTA Online, to eat the parent and take over as the main reason Los Santos exists. It now seems like it might have been a masterstroke to launch, fail and correct in the window when fans were still smitten with the single player mode. It’s like they’ve taken all the best bits of things they’ve been trying to work out from different games and then they’ve put them together in a way that just works.”
You see elements of it in games like Bully and obviously in all the previous GTA games.
“Trying to work out how to make the world seem as though it is alive – and the world is reacting to the player – is something that Rockstar has been doing over the course of basically all of their games leading up to that point. Wright says, by 2013, Rockstar had been doing this long enough that GTA V and Online already felt like a “greatest hits” album. There is something about it that feels more alive than most open world games since.” “Even I went through a period where I would do almost nothing more than load up the game and see how fast I could get to 5-star Wanted level, and then how long I could last. Crews and modders have set out to play the game in ways never foreseen – from shooting in-game Machinima films to roleplaying as cops. Have used the game as a way to unwind,” says Esther Wright, Lecturer in Digital History at Cardiff University. “There’s so much stuff to do even outside of story missions that I know so many people who New landmarks have arrived, too, including, nightclubs to own and operate, and casinos to frequent or rob. But GTA found its purpose with a handful of major updates from 2015, which forced players to cooperate to complete heists, let players form biker gangs, and allowed mob hierarchies to form through letting players hire one-another. “You’d be lucky to stay in a single server for more than an hour before it crashed, which prompted Rockstar to release the “We’re sorry” stimulus package of $500,000 in game dollars.” Certain overpowered vehicles like the LAZER Jet and Rhino Tank would lay waste to new players – setting the scene for years of over-the-top “ griefing” – “but the ultimate problem on GTA Online’s launch was the lack of any meaningful content.”įor years, gamers found it nearly pointless playing the game – grinding in GTA Online to accumulate cash, weapons and cars – with no real payoff in terms of story progression or gameplay, says Isaac. “The launch of GTA Online was an absolute mess,” says Isaac.
Early reviews praised the story mode, but slated Online as something that should’ve been framed as an open beta, but instead promoted itself as game ready and then, promptly, broke.Ī free add-on, it probably did not have any positive impact on initial sales, says David Cole, principal analyst at gaming industry researchers DFC intelligence. It can be easy to forget for fans who have spent years in the Online game since last touching the storyline, but GTA Online was initially a bust. Liam recently joined an in-game stunt flying crew with another redditor, Jordan, and says: “The game keeps me interested in the friends I’ve made.”. But numbers playing on Steam – just a fraction of the total across all platforms – hit 260,000 playing at one time in February (its highest total since the first month it debuted on PC.)ĭespite a reputation for random amoral violence, GTA has endured because of the rolling updates that have found new ways to provide freeform opportunities for people to connect, says Liam, one of the moderators of the subReddit r/GTAOnline, which has nearly 800,000 subscribers. Rockstar is typically tight-lipped about how many players that actually is, beyond labelling it a “record”.
Around the turn of the year, GTA broke its own record for most players in a month, according to the studio, with thousands joining during lockdown as the PC version of the game was given away free on Epic Games Store in May. In 2020, the number of players actually logging in each month has actually grown, even outstripping developer Rockstar’s more recent competitor Red Dead Online.