GTA Online, Diary #1: The connection is there, but I’m a little lost

The way to Rock stars nihilistic online paradise has been full of potholes so far. But with a lot of prayer and luck, it is actually possible to gain access to the online version of Los Santos. When you get there, you’ll want to find your friends to do things and go on adventures with. Figuring out how to do this is a hell of a lot harder than it should be, but it’s worth all the effort and hassle.

I’ve been playing since Tuesday GTA Online on Xbox 360, but until yesterday it was a strangely lonely affair. The incredible amount of tutorial/tip text that appears on the screen at the start is anything but helpful. It’s only been since the weekend that I’ve really had fun.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, my first interactions with real human players involved knocking out a male character in a brawl – hey, he started it! – and shortly afterwards being shot in ambush by another guy. As fun as the strange Epsilon resurrection was, I wasn’t willing to be a practice target for other players. Okay, so Passive Mode.

Passive mode is a great option for people who just want to be voyeurs, but the mode is a little too inactive. It would be nice if Passive Mode let me do everything you can do in the game – robberies, car chases, gunfights – without having to worry about the other players, but unfortunately that’s not the case. It basically turns you into another pedestrian, only one controlled by a human and not the AI. So if I wanted to see the best, this GTA Online has to offer, I have had to subject myself to the occasional random assassination attempt.

Shooting from moving cars and robberies didn’t happen too often. But the problem is that not much else happened. The Quick Job Option reliably connected me to mission instances initiated by other players, but then a bug would kick me out of them or I would lose the connection altogether. When I was able to play through the missions, they seemed kind of clumsy. In one instance of the Welcoming Party Team escort mission, it wasn’t clear who would be driving, so there were several seat changes before we could finally set off. When we arrived at the designated location after a few minutes without any major problems, the text “Loser” suddenly appeared on my screen. I had no idea why my team was losing, even though the businessman we were driving home was safely in our limo. You probably know what it’s like to play with strangers. There’s this internal battle about how greedy/altruistic you should be, even if you’re on the same team. You get tired of giving people you don’t know the benefit of the doubt. It was clear: I needed my friends.

My first GTA Online I had an epiphany on the night from Friday to Saturday when I finally played with people I knew. But getting to the point where I could reliably hop into their game worlds wasn’t easy. I had to play around with all sorts of options and invitations for about 30 minutes, both in the Xbox menus and in the GTA phone contacts until I realized that these friends wouldn’t just show up in my world, even if they accepted Xbox invites. The best way I’ve found to connect with a friend in-game is to send them a job offer. However, it is currently difficult to determine whether this is a result of the network problems in the launch week or a peculiarity of the system that is supposed to work this way.

You will never have more than 16 people in one at the same time GTA Online To see the world. That’s roughly how “populated” the world was when I hopped into my best friend’s session, except the players’ names were completely different. This is a common number of players for multiplayer match games, but for a GTA It seemed very little game. 32 players would be a lot more interesting. I think the great promise of GTA Online — the opportunity to wreak havoc in an online rock star universe filled to the brim with other people — has not yet been realized. It would be nice, would Rock star increase this limit in the near future.

However, doing all sorts of messy and nasty and entertaining things with friends has been worth every bit of hassle and effort so far. A repo mission that I did with another player was really fun. After retrieving an expensive sports car from a fancier part of town, we went our separate ways to shake off the cops. He delivered his vehicle to the dealer more quickly, while I had to play cat and mouse with the law enforcement for longer. The police were on my tail for what seemed like an eternity, so my former partner returned after dropping off the vehicle to help me get rid of the annoying pursuers. The cop AI seems in On-line to be a lot more aggressive than in the single player campaign, but I was able to shake them off very close to the dealer.

I’m currently a Level 6 Thug (I think) and I’ve seen quite a bit of reps in the job openings available. Lots and lots of races as well as deathmatch and team deathmatch events. Yes, the sports and activities can be good, distracting ways to pass the time, but the most interesting missions seem to be the ones you get from the main game characters. Still, you keep trying to get some entertainment out of the game while you wait for one of these missions to show up.

Works in the first few days GTA Online like a jumble of systems that don’t seem to be communicating with each other at the moment. You and your friends must be in the same session, but it’s not initially obvious why you can’t see the friends on the map and when you can make job offers to players. It’s a large open world, but one that’s underpopulated compared to its offline counterpart.

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