Six Urgent Requests To Rockstar For GTA 6 Online, From Gamers
Before we get into the six titular requests, let's talk about why I'm not addressing the elephant in the room, which is the game's notoriously grind-y nature. GTA Online is, simply put, a grindfest. Players repeat repetitive actions for weeks on end to earn in-game currency (GTA$), so that they can afford new clothes, new vehicles, new properties, and new businesses. This is tiresome, to be sure, so why aren't we going to address it?
Plainly speaking, it comes down to two things. First of all, let's make sure to keep everything in context: this is a highly detailed open-world multiplayer online game with no subscription fee. Once you purchase GTA V, you can play GTA Online all you want. The purpose of the game's gruesome grind is to make you buy "Shark Cards", which are microtransactions that dump a chunk of GTA$ on your character. I think it's unrealistic to expect Rockstar to soften the grind given that it would directly impact the game's bottom line.
But more than that, the grind is the game, in large part. By paying to skip the grind, you're partially skipping the game, and asking Rockstar to reduce the grind is essentially akin to asking the developer to reduce the amount of game. Make no mistake; we would prefer to be doing interesting, unique activities rather than repeating well-worn drug deliveries, but once you've completed a chunk of content, there definitely can be the feeling of "well, what do I do now?"
So, with that out of the way, let's talk about the six things I want to see in GTA VI Online, assuming that the new game has an online mode similar to the mode in GTA V Online.
Request #1: Streamline The Play Experience
GTA Online is a blast to play, even by yourself, but it's even better with friends. That comes along with a big caveat, though: "as long as you have enough time for it." It's not just the fact that it's grindy, as we just discussed, but also the fact that simply playing the game takes an unusually large block of time to actually play. This is due both to absurdly extended loading screens and also the number of loading screens.
A few years ago, a talented programmer reverse-engineered part of GTA Online and figured out that it was programmed in a ludicrously inefficient way, causing users multi-minute load screens even on the fastest hardware available. Anyone who played GTA Online in the early days will recall this. That specific issue has been fixed, but the game can still take minutes to load into sessions on modern machines, and there's no clear reason why. There's also an infinite loading screen bug that can commonly happen.
Many of these issues have become less problematic in recent years because Rockstar has started to implement more and more updates into the "Freemode" portion of the game. You see, when GTA Online came out, most multiplayer activities were implemented as instanced "Jobs", where players exited the normal free-roam gameplay to enter a walled-off instance of the game for their specific Job. This was probably done due to memory limitations on the Xbox 360 and PS3, but more recent updates have most of the content taking place in "Freemode", and this is great.
However, there are still many activities (like Heists) that take place as instanced "Jobs", and there are all kinds of technical problems with them, that the playerbase have to simply tolerate while Rockstar seems to completely ignore the issues. Connection problems, infinite loading screens, and the fact that players will likely be dumped into separate freemode sessions after the job are all constant annoyances. The frustration of these foibles is compounded by the extremely long black-screen loading sequences, with little to no feedback for the players as to what is happening.
It might not be so bad if playing with friends were a little easier. You see, the game makes no effort to keep players matched up with their friends. You can join a friend's game (sometimes, if it doesn't error), and you can make a friends-only game, but GTA Online does nothing at all to help you stay together if someone enters a Job, even if you go together.
Speaking of friends, the social functions of the game are largely tied to Rockstar's own service, and this might be forgivable if the games offered cross-play, but they don't. On PC, the Rockstar Launcher is a largely-useless application for the majority of users who purchased the game through Steam or Epic Games, and the Rockstar Social Club overlay is a laggy abomination that should really be nixed for the company's next release.
On the topic of technical issues, we'd also like to ask Rockstar to please put in at least a minimum of effort toward solving technical snags this time around. There are bugs in the PC client for GTA Online that have been present since 2015. This includes a particularly annoying bug related to the graphics options where certain settings will reset themselves to the minimum value on every single launch. You can find dozens upon dozens of threads asking about this problem if you search, yet Rockstar has never addressed it, probably because most people simply don't care.
Finally—at least for this category—I'd be remiss if I didn't bring up the chat filter in GTA Online. Let's be clear about this: GTA V and even moreso GTA Online are rated 18-and-up. They are violent and bloody adult games where you can mow down hundreds of police with machineguns, sell tons of drugs, illegally smuggle guns, interfere in government operations, hire prostitutes and strippers, and get a personal lap dance in your home or apartment. You can use drugs and alcohol yourself, and the voiced dialogue does not hold back from using coarse language and offensive terms, including racial slurs.
All of that is to say nothing about what other players will say to you using the in-game voice chat, and yet, for some reason, the game is saddled with a hypersensitive chat filter that you simply can't disable. It truly interferes with basic communication in the game and it makes no sense in the context of what game we're talking about. I'm fine with the game having a chat filter for those who are truly hypersensitive to bad language, but it should really have a toggle to disable it.
Ideally, in GTA VI, none of these problems will return. Many of them are likely due to the game's awkward lifecycle, starting development on even-then-aging console hardware and never getting a full re-base or refactor. A brand new start, as with GTA VI, could help alleviate a lot of these problems, but Rockstar remaining conscious of them to avoid the same foibles would be key.
Request #2: Tone Down The Endless NPC Dialogue
The cutscene where you meet Vincent is interminable and pointless.
While we're talking about irritations with the game, let's discuss GTA Online's obsession with NPC dialogue. In most other online games, when you have voiced NPC dialogue, it's to add emotional weight or relatability to the storyline, helping you get immersed in an interesting narrative. In GTA Online, a humongous portion of the dialogue is either intended to be funny (and usually failing) or simply unexplainable.
Case in point—the police officer in the picture above is a man named Vincent who is a pseudo-corrupt cop that sends you to raid a drug production factory that he can't deal with legitimately, because the other cops are all on the take. The cutscene that introduces you to Vincent and his storyline is several minutes long, and yet nothing of particular interest or value is said in the cutscene. You are forced to watch your mute character—something frequently acknowledged by NPCs as a running gag—stand around and listen while Vincent gets bullied by his coworkers before he finally tells you about the job.
Some people might find the dialogue amusing, or the world-building interesting, but the problem is that Rockstar is apparently very proud of its cutscene direction and if you're not a fan, you cannot skip any of these interactions. If you're repeating a mission that you've already played as the host, only then can you skip—but there's not a lot of other reason to repeat many of the most cutscene-heavy missions as a host, and you can't skip them as a multiplayer guest no matter how many times you've seen them.
Worse, some NPCs don't just waste your time in cutscenes, but in fact chatter on for literal minutes during missions when you're trying to focus. The community has gone through several iterations of complaining about this—first, it was whiny hacker Lester, then it was smug idiot Agent 14, and then it was mousy office girl Bryony, and most recently, players have been introduced to KDJ Moodymann and his assistant Sessanta, who operate out of an auto shop. The player has to put up the money for the auto shop—to the tune of a few million dollars—and yet these two have the audacity to constantly talk down to the player.
KDJ Moodymann and Sessanta are completely obnoxious even at the best of times, speaking in a slang-heavy dialect with dialogue that is full of sexual innuendos pointed at each other (making the player feel like a third wheel), but the worst part is that they chatter on and on in the middle of missions while you're being shot at and chased by police and criminals alike. You're trying to escape from a bank with gold bars in your bag and SWAT officers unloading at you, and they're going on about a bunch of nonsense that only serves to distract you. It's tedious and almost totally ruins the missions that they're involved with.
This doesn't get better when one of the game's signature characters or celebrity guest stars is on screen. A major update back in 2021, called The Contract, added hip-hop star Dr. Dre as a contact for the players. Dre gives them a specific quest line involving the recovery of stolen pre-release music material, but the artist himself doesn't actually have that much to say. His friends sure do, though, and there are even missions where you give up control of your own character to play some of said associates.
This is doubly frustrating because if you're a fan of the artist, you really don't get to see that much of him in the story, and if you're not a fan of the artist, the way the game spends minutes of the player's time building the cameo up as a big deal, a major hype moment, is just obnoxious—and again, you can't skip these cutscenes, so have fun listening to the awkward dialogue as the legendary gangsta rapper is obviously out of his element voicing himself for a video game.
In the end, GTA Online players really want to control their own custom character in an immersive world. Playing other characters, and listening to NPCs yammer on for minutes at a time, are not satisfying, and they're not what we signed up for. With any luck, GTA VI will learn from the GTA Online community's pitched negative response to the more obnoxious NPCs.
Let's talk more about immersion next...
