Grand Theft Auto 5 review update: GTA Online

Rockstar Games should have called the current state of Grand Theft Auto Online a beta.

The word “beta” handicaps expectations, tacitly asking for leniency in exchange for immediate gratification, participation for perfection: Help us ensure that the final product, whenever it may come, is error-free. A beta connotes server issues, bugs, long load times and missing content. Rockstar preemptively warned of these issues the week before launch. All of this cripples Grand Theft Auto Online.

Grand Theft Auto Online is at least operable now, after an unplayable first few days. When the servers connect, it’s like peering through a telescope at a beautiful tropical island in the distance, slightly distorted; you can imagine how wonderful it will be upon arrival. There is, however, choppy water ahead.

Grand Theft Auto Online begins with a character menu screen void of polish. I created a young woman by selecting her grandparents, represented in four comically tiny, indecipherable photographs. In general, the menus of Grand Theft Auto Online are unappealing to the eye, and irritating to the touch. They are a noticeable step backward from Grand Theft Auto 5.

Anyway, engineering a being — male or female — that doesn’t resemble a half-formed hellspawn takes time, patience and a good spin of the genetic roulette wheel. After accepting I’d play as Frankenstein’s monster in a trucker cap, I was introduced to the world through an extended cutscene, a tutorial and a series of those small on-screen instructional black boxes that explain how to play the game. The intro is exhausting, and adds a number of technical to-dos. I now have to tag cars, buy insurance, avoid impounds, visit ATMs and so on, to the point where the experience felt, at first, like work.

Then I was shot and killed. Again. And again. And again. And again. Grand Theft Auto Online does have a safe mode, in which you can’t kill other players and they can’t kill you. In my earliest hours, I forgot to flip this switch, and was murdered en route to the first few missions by players with weapons and cars far beyond those available to low-ranked me.

I say without hesitation that the people I met in Grand Theft Auto Online were the worst I’ve ever encountered in an online game. Racism, sexism, homophobia and general hate were the nouns that bookended their increasingly threatening verbs. Rockstar didn’t design these humans, but they did design a game that awards antagonism directly (being murdered time and again in the street) and passively: Non-playable gas station owners will hurry if a player yells at them via the microphone, inspiring one player to unravel the most foul string of vulgarities I’ve heard since that “only the curse words” remix of Straight Outta Compton.

These players had no interest in playing (or completing) the missions, races and deathmatches scattered across the map. Everyone hated everyone else; no one seemed incentivized to get over some childish conflict long enough to have a positive, shared experience.

With friends, who are willing to maintain a semblance of a truce, and who want to actually play the game modes, Grand Theft Auto Online approaches the giant playground it was intended to be. But most modes are works-in-progress. During races, more often than not, a victor got far ahead of the pack and stayed there, though a rubber-banding option is available in the menu. Deathmatch takes adjustment, since it feels nothing like the snap-and-kill shooting of Grand Theft Auto 5’s campaign.

The world is impressively big and active. When I was skydiving with a bunch of friends, or pitting fighter jets versus motorcycles, I saw Grand Theft Auto Online’s potential. That vision would be followed by a long load screen, or I’d be booted from the game entirely, but the promise was there.

Editor’s note: While Grand Theft Auto Online remains in a state of only partial functionality and is difficult to recommend at this time, this does not affect the single-player content of Grand Theft Auto 5. As such, our overall recommendation of Grand Theft Auto 5 remains unchanged.

Rockstar has expanded and improved upon so much of what’s special about video games as mainstream spectacles, from the playful use of characters to the refined take on world design. The developer’s progress makes the aspects of the game left in cultural stasis — the poorly drawn women, the empty cynicism, the unnecessarily excessive cruelty — especially agitating.

It’s fitting that the game arrives at the cusp of the next generation of consoles. Grand Theft Auto 5 is the closure of this generation, and the benchmark for the next. Here is a game caught occasionally for the worst, but overwhelmingly for the better, between the present and the future.

Grand Theft Auto 5 was reviewed using a retail Xbox 360 copy provided by Rockstar Games. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.

Rockstar Games should have called the current state of Grand Theft Auto Online a beta.

The word “beta” handicaps expectations, tacitly asking for leniency in exchange for immediate gratification, participation for perfection: Help us ensure that the final product, whenever it may come, is error-free. A beta connotes server issues, bugs, long load times and missing content. Rockstar preemptively warned of these issues the week before launch. All of this cripples Grand Theft Auto Online.

Grand Theft Auto Online is at least operable now, after an unplayable first few days. When the servers connect, it’s like peering through a telescope at a beautiful tropical island in the distance, slightly distorted; you can imagine how wonderful it will be upon arrival. There is, however, choppy water ahead.

Grand Theft Auto Online begins with a character menu screen void of polish. I created a young woman by selecting her grandparents, represented in four comically tiny, indecipherable photographs. In general, the menus of Grand Theft Auto Online are unappealing to the eye, and irritating to the touch. They are a noticeable step backward from Grand Theft Auto 5.

Anyway, engineering a being — male or female — that doesn’t resemble a half-formed hellspawn takes time, patience and a good spin of the genetic roulette wheel. After accepting I’d play as Frankenstein’s monster in a trucker cap, I was introduced to the world through an extended cutscene, a tutorial and a series of those small on-screen instructional black boxes that explain how to play the game. The intro is exhausting, and adds a number of technical to-dos. I now have to tag cars, buy insurance, avoid impounds, visit ATMs and so on, to the point where the experience felt, at first, like work.

Then I was shot and killed. Again. And again. And again. And again. Grand Theft Auto Online does have a safe mode, in which you can’t kill other players and they can’t kill you. In my earliest hours, I forgot to flip this switch, and was murdered en route to the first few missions by players with weapons and cars far beyond those available to low-ranked me.

I say without hesitation that the people I met in Grand Theft Auto Online were the worst I’ve ever encountered in an online game. Racism, sexism, homophobia and general hate were the nouns that bookended their increasingly threatening verbs. Rockstar didn’t design these humans, but they did design a game that awards antagonism directly (being murdered time and again in the street) and passively: Non-playable gas station owners will hurry if a player yells at them via the microphone, inspiring one player to unravel the most foul string of vulgarities I’ve heard since that “only the curse words” remix of Straight Outta Compton.

These players had no interest in playing (or completing) the missions, races and deathmatches scattered across the map. Everyone hated everyone else; no one seemed incentivized to get over some childish conflict long enough to have a positive, shared experience.

With friends, who are willing to maintain a semblance of a truce, and who want to actually play the game modes, Grand Theft Auto Online approaches the giant playground it was intended to be. But most modes are works-in-progress. During races, more often than not, a victor got far ahead of the pack and stayed there, though a rubber-banding option is available in the menu. Deathmatch takes adjustment, since it feels nothing like the snap-and-kill shooting of Grand Theft Auto 5’s campaign.

The world is impressively big and active. When I was skydiving with a bunch of friends, or pitting fighter jets versus motorcycles, I saw Grand Theft Auto Online’s potential. That vision would be followed by a long load screen, or I’d be booted from the game entirely, but the promise was there.

Editor’s note: While Grand Theft Auto Online remains in a state of only partial functionality and is difficult to recommend at this time, this does not affect the single-player content of Grand Theft Auto 5. As such, our overall recommendation of Grand Theft Auto 5 remains unchanged.