I for one applaud Rockstar for going open source. So progressive and insightful of them.
You can already get doxxed and perma griefed by any 12 y/o with a $20 mod menu I don’t see how it could get any worse
Yeah I played years ago and within 5 minutes someone dropped a harrier on me and millions of dollars
I just got fucked over repeatedly when I was trying to make money by people flying around with those rocket bikes. I spent like 12 hours total trying to play online and got nowhere. That was starting with a free business I had gotten somehow. Fuck GTAO.
Several years ago I got an email about my rockstar account - someone had guessed the password and logged in, they were trying to change the email address. Luckily I’d managed to stop it in time and recovered the account.
Several years later, I decided to give GTA Online a go, I logged in and found I had billions in cash and loads of property and cars. I guess that they must have been nodding while using my account.
But I didn’t get banned so free stuff I guess?
Modding used to be extremely easy and detection systems weren’t implemented yet back in the day. I have an account with billions in cash just for being in the same lobby as one.
These days you’re still free to ruin everyone’s day with all sorts of griefing mods, but once you try and spawn in cash daddy rockstar gets angry at you.
Did GTA online ever actually become a good game?
Honestly it can be fun? For a few weeks at a time before I get bored and go do something else.
I will admit though GTAO is the only online game I’ve ever downloaded a mod menu for. I never touched the god mode or teleportation or any other parts of it. Just the money generation because fuck every single thing about the grind in that game that is designed to push you towards shark cards.
When you can buy whatever you want and the missions are purely for fun? Honestly yeah. I enjoy it. Last time I played, even though it wasn’t current, I mostly played with the nightclub.
Agreed, I dumped a lot of hours in that game’s grind and it’s marginally worth it at best. They seem to have loosened up the payouts lately (been playing on and off for the past year), but the real fun (VTOL jets, railgun tanks, subs, orbital lasers, etc.) is locked behind millions of funbucks, which are immensely difficult to accrue. Plus it’s infested with modders and cheaters at this point, so not using mod menus is relatively synonymous to shooting yourself in the foot before running a marathon…
I used to screw around with friends as The Panto Gang where we decked out pantos in the most ridiculous visual mods, and drove circles around people until they started trying to blow us up.
In 8 months, I put more time into gta online doing that than in the 9 years afterward.
Duping the Arena Issi was the only reason I could ever enjoy the game. The grind was absolutely ridiculous. Once my character got wiped during the glitch where you could sell the cheapest property for the price of the most expensive one, I quit permanently. I’m not spending hours and hours and hours of grinding just to afford a single car.
It was when it first came out on ps3 for me. It was fun to run around as a nobody, get into gangland shoot outs and feuds with other players, have death matches in the hood, etc. But very quickly, within six months, the game had become full of cheaters and modders with tanks, so I stopped playing. I went back to it years later and it was not GTA, it was Saints row essentially, with flying bikes and laser guns and shit, it just became stupid and silly.
I played the story on PS3 back in 2013 then picked up the PAC version and only played online that time around. I did put about 200 hours in to it which is a lot for me, j probably have 4 or so games with that many hours or more.
If you’re looking for story it never got good, particularly because your protagonist is a silent insert with no supporting NPCs to carry it, but if you’re favourite part of story mode was the general exploration and open world stuff, it’s pretty good. I sometimes played with friends but I think 90% of the time I put in was mindless time wasting which it was good at, although I was a teenager and I’m not looking to waste time like that anymore. I also got into modding it in about 2017 and had a really good time with infinite money and cheating benevolently which probably got me an extra 100 hours of enjoyment out of it.
I think it had a golden age which you’ve missed. The first 6 weeks it was out, it was totally broken and then for maybe the first year and a half it was really low on content compared to story mode. Eventually the first wave of heists and tools and resources to support race / minigame makers came out too and that was a great era. Eventually though as players left more and more over time it was becoming more and more targeted at those few “whales” who were probably spending thousands on the game, with all content becoming inflated in cost to sell shark cards. By the time I dropped the game, it was practically impossible to progress without buying the digital currency, and any money exploits or cheater’s were gone, leaving only the destructive cheaters. I have no idea if this has got better I haven’t touched the game since maybe 2019.
At first, maybe? When I first started last year, I was pretty hooked since it was something new to me, minus the constant hackers spamming the message and grievers, it was so bad that I had to play private lobby only. The only thing to do is doing the same thing over and over again to earn money just to spend it to do the same thing again. There’s no new mechanics, no story, nothing, just a constant grind and your reward is more grind.
Now I feel a dumbass for wasting two months of my life on it. Even Genshin is way better than GTAO, it actually has interesting story, fun mechanics and great characters. I’ve been playing GI since 2020, got a bit burned out and currently addicted to Witcher 3 but I still play it daily. But GTAO, fuck that shit, I left it more than 6 months ago and the thought of considering looking back never once crossed my mind.
Now I feel a dumbass for wasting two months of my life on it
Did you have fun? Because if you did (without actively damaging your life) then it wasn’t time wasted even if you wouldn’t ever go back!
Some of those 2 months was fun but most of it were like voluntary chore. I basically grinded to buy a business, just to grind that business to buy another one. Sometimes when I was earning money to buy a vehicle I want, it was somewhat fun because there was something to look forward to, and once I’d got what I wanted for a few days, I started asking “Now what?” every time. The most fun I got was from VIP Contracts, but they get repetitive real quick too.
GTA online on PC is a hell hole of mod menu using douches. But on Xbox it can be a lot of fun, I’ve been enjoying the new Salvage Yard content and my buddy and I just did the first part of a doomsday heist and made him a million bucks in about an hour of time. It’s not hard to make lots of money these days in the game which is pretty great. I still play regularly on Xbox. But yeah, the moment I log in on Steam I’m instantly being killed by some fuckwad with a mod menu.
On the one hand, this is why security-through-obscurity is no good. Hell, even without a source leak, people figure out how to hack games.
On the other, much as I would vastly prefer if every online game was server authenticated so the client didn’t need anticheat, I understand that basically every game is a barely held together yarn ball and checking logic server-side would slow things down to an unmanageable level.
It sucks.
Yes and no. Games (all software, really) can be made slick and efficient, it just takes more time than most companies are willing to spend because they get their return even if its buggy and slow.
“Boss! Boss! The devil possessed me last night and I got some wonderful ideas for you! Want to ship way too fucking soon but still make money? Pre-orders! We get the people hyped and offer the product to buy now before they get to find out it’s shit! But wait, the devil had an even better idea than that… Early access if you pre-order!! We get their money now and they beta test for us! The people want everything yesterday so we can just monetize impatience!”
