I tried GTA Online and I hated every minute of it.
I had high hopes for it, because Red Dead Redemption's online was so good, from what I'd heard, this was a much larger scale of that. Sadly and ironically enough, it's inferior in almost every way.
The game starts you off by dumping you in the free play mode, which is just a free for all, where everyone just kills one another on sight. This might sound obvious to some people but Red Dead had a freeplay mode with no friendly fire, for those of us who don't find the prospect of being repeatedly gunned down by people in fast cars, with UZIs very appealing. Sadly, GTA doesn't have this and instead just insists on putting everyone in one sandbox and telling them to get along.
If a person guns me down, I don't feel any desire to take revenge or beat them, because I know that I'm under equipped. Being a lower level, I can't get an Uzi of my own, all that I have access to is a semi-automatic pistol and a pump action shotgun and if I'm remotely visible to these players, even for a second, I'm dead. Yeah Rockstar, that's really fare.
I just felt so apathetic, it should annoy me or inspire me to be a better player but it feels more like a practical joke than anything. I decided to try and do something with a damn purpose and connect to the heists and quickly learned that the shittiness didn't end at the freeplay mode.
The game can take ages to connect and a lot of the times I was kicked for being too low a level, because apparently everyone who's a level 2 is a drooling moron, who can't do anything. And that's even if you can achieve a connection, more often than not I was told that the game was full and that I could join a queue or watch someone else have fun instead.
What is this, an amusement park? Remember when owning games at home meant that you didn't have to sit back and miss out and watch your friends play all of the games? I'm glad that we got over that obsolete school of thought.
Anyway, I attempted several heists, the majority of which are full of team members who are eleven years old or speak Spanish and have very loud domestic disputes, again another thing that you don't get whilst playing singleplayer.
I did manage to join a semi decent group of people and quickly realised a fatal flaw of the heists, if one person dies the whole mission fails. Yeah, because that worked so well in Battletoads and this is an online game, relying on four people around the world to not screw it up.
Every heist that I've been a part of has failed and only twice was I the one that died and one of those times was, because my team took their sweet time completing their objective, whilst I was chased around by fighter jets in a tiny propeller plane.
In Red Dead the consequence of someone dying on your team was that that person died on your team and that therefore you'd be a man down, I think that's a damning consequence on its own but apparently it didn't make it frustrating enough so they went with this instead.
The most annoying heist was the aforementioned plane one, this was the closest that I got to finishing a job. After someone, other than me, realised that we should use our headsets to communicate instead of sharing samples of Spanish soap operas with one another, we got really far in the heist but these missions go on and on and on, for friggin' ever. Bare in mind that there is nothing resembling a pause function, so including lobbies, cutscenes, dicking about, contingency plans for inevitable failures, you're going to have to give up an hour of your life to these missions if you want to complete one.
Now, how many people can honestly say that they can go an hour without phone calls interrupting them, without someone asking them to do a job, without friends messaging them or something even more important like needing to go to work or even going to take a piss? Nope, sorry, no time for that, you're playing GTA Online now, better record an answering machine message on your phone that says 'sorry yo but my video game doesn't want me to come to the phone right now, I'll call you back when I find a moment in its schedule.'
Since when did video games start dictating how I lived my life, this is such horse shit.
So anyway, my dad cooked my family a meal and I held off for as long as I could, a good five minutes but this shit just goes on and on and on and on, to the point that it's absurd. I'd rescued the hostage, got him on a plane and he was half way to Jamaica but that wasn't enough, I had to jump out of the plane, whip out a parachute and land a parachute jump to complete the heist.
Because I was not expecting this and had all but forgotten the parachuting controls since I played the game, last Christmas, I just didn't know what to do. There was so much pressure on this one moment, that I failed, pulled the cord too soon and crashed into a cliff face and died. Heist failed.
Are you kidding me!? The hostage was on the plane! He was half way to Zimbabwe! What the hell happened!? Are we all connected with some sort of device, that makes it so that if I die the hostage goes into cardiac arrest, like Escape to New York. Why does it matter if I fail to land a parachute jump after completing a heist?
This game completely crosses my bullshit threshold, it made me incredibly bitter and angry and it only exists to try and get you addicted to it, so that you'll be forced into positions where you'll have to disappoint people, defecate your pants and lose your job and relationships in order to make any significant progress in it. All of these problems are problems that were in NES games, one dies we all die was a problem with Battletoads, no pause was a problem with Ghostbusters 2 but the difference is that GTA Online was not made in 1993.
If you have no job, no friends, no family, you live alone and you haven't got anything to 'distract' you from the game for hours on end, then GTA Online is the game for you, otherwise I wouldn't recommend it.
