Six Urgent Requests To Rockstar For GTA 6 Online, From Gamers

Request #3: More Intelligent & Reactive NPCs, Please

Check out all these dudes standing outside of Bahama Mamas nightclub in the early morning. It's a pretty varied group, right? They look like you could walk up and talk to any of them. Perhaps you could offer to give them a ride home, or maybe one of them just wants to ask a local for directions. If you're a drug lord, maybe you could sell them some drugs to keep their party going.

Or maybe none of that happens at all, because the game has basically no interactions whatsoever with its "peds." The pedestrians that populate the game world basically exist to be abused by the player, as the only things you can really do with them are start a fist fight, stick them up with a gun, or run them over in a car. Other open-world games typically showcase at least a few interactions that you can have with randomly-generated NPCs, but not in GTA Online.


NPC drivers are no better. At a basic level, they follow simple paths and generally obey traffic rules, which was very impressive back on the PlayStation 2. In GTA Online, NPC drivers do have a few reactions; some will race off if you try to carjack them and many drivers will react to having a gun pointed at them by attempting to run you over. This is really about as far as it goes for realism, though.

I say that because NPC driving behavior outside of these circumstances is insane and arbitrary. If you're racing down the road at a hundred miles an hour trying to evade the police, you can be almost guaranteed that an NPC driver will jump out into an intersection to get in your way, even if they have a red light. NPC drivers will also blatantly swerve into your lane for no apparent reason, and every single one is incompetent when they start to speed away from a crime in progress.


Even more egregious than the NPCs who obviously spawn specifically to get in your way is the game's spawning behavior for police. It's anything but organic; GTA Online only simulates pedestrians and traffic within a very small bubble around players, so when you're speeding through the city at high velocity it naturally has to spawn fresh police. Only, when you're trying to evade the cops to lose your wanted level, the game will shamelessly spawn police directly ahead of you, even when there are no outlets for you to make a quick detour and avoid them.

It's very frustrating at times, as the game leans heavily on the police as antagonists in missions and heists. The number of missions and heists that end with you having to "lose the cops" is probably half or more, and while these chases can be fun, they can also drag on and on for ten or more minutes while you attempt to make sharp turns, take back roads, and hide in ditches or tunnels to attempt to evade the searching officers. I'm not really saying it should be easier, per se, but spawning cops directly in front of you when you're trying to time out a warrant is really obvious and tedious.

Request #4: No-Compromise Vice City Immersion

When GTA V launched on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox 360, it brought along a highly-immersive first-person mode. This wasn't some lazy hack, either. It's actually one of the best first-person modes in any open-world game. First-person combat feels like a full-effort FPS game, and first-person driving feels very close to an arcade racing title, complete with detailed car interiors and changes to the sound mix. For players that value immersion, it's a godsend, and it's extremely well-implemented.

GTA Online doesn't always do great otherwise for immersion, though. We're not talking about the ever-present HUD or the extreme reliance on the "Interactions Menu" for common gameplay functions. We're mainly talking about how the world, as detailed as it is, is pretty lacking in a few specific ways. There are no animals or wildlife at all in GTA Online, and there are surprisingly few enterable buildings, too.


Pictured above is a Burger Shot restaurant in GTA Online. It's there, it's fully-modeled just like the GTA V offline mode, but you can't go in it or order food, not even from the drive-thru. It's completely inert. That's basically the case for every building that doesn't serve a specific gameplay purpose, like barber shops, clothing shops, gun stores, and so on.

Even the shops you can enter are underwhelming in some ways. Most shops of the same type share interiors; there are only three separate types of clothing stores, two types of gun shops (that differ only on whether they have an attached firing range), and only a single type of tattoo shop. This is true for the purchaseable homes, too. There are only a handful of unique interiors for player homes, and while certain high-end apartments can be customized in terms of decor, the layout never changes.


Every player's Hangar is identical, every player's Auto Shop is identical, every player's Bunker is identical aside from which upgrades they've purchased, and so on. Moreover, nearly all building interiors are instanced zones; they're separate from the game world. This has gameplay implications too. Once someone enters their home, even if it's a tiny falling-down two-bedroom house in the countryside, they're completely home free; there's nothing you can do to get at them.

It's fine, in GTA V Online, as the game is built on the bones of a seventh-generation console release, but it would be really nice if GTA VI can alleviate this situation somewhat, perhaps through the use of procedural generation. Many players were disappointed that GTA IV and GTA V both lack the life-sim elements that were present in GTA: San Andreas. In that game, if you eat too often to restore your health, protagonist CJ becomes fat. If you work out a lot, CJ becomes visibly muscular. There's none of that in GTA Online, and that's a shame, because it would be more immersive and engaging.


Another frustrating part of GTA Online is the game's somewhat inconsistent world scale. There are limits to how big Rockstar could make the game map, and there are all kinds of implications both technical and design-wise when changing it. In general I think the developer did a great job balancing "big enough to feel realistic" and "small enough to be practical." However, there are still some knock-on effects of the highly-compressed nature of Los Santos and Blaine County, starting with the speed of vehicles.

The fastest car in the game at this time is the Bravado Banshee GTS, which has a phenomenal top speed of 138 miles per hour. If you've ever driven 138 MPH, you know that it's really quite fast. However, it doesn't feel like 138 MPH in the game; it feels more like 80 to 90 MPH, and that's because the cars don't actually travel as fast as they claim to. There's scaling going on, and that's why the "60 MPH" highway traffic feels like it's actually putting along at a leisurely 40 MPH, or less. This is all to say nothing of aircraft, which start at about "improbably pokey" and end up at "absurdly slow" in the case of what should be supersonic jet aircraft.


A further pain point for immersion has to do with the weapons. Combat in GTA Online is in some ways surprisingly realistic. It barely matters what gun you use in a lot of the game's encounters because, at short range, a single bullet to the head is generally going to ruin anyone's day no matter what firearm it comes out of. However, there are major differences in performance of some of the weapons, and all you're really given to judge them on are the four vague stats shown above.

To make matters worse, GTA V shipped with a nice range of weapons, but Online has seen continual updates adding more and more that slot into the weapon roster in improbable ways. Many of the newer weapons simply outclass previous guns, like the "Battle Rifle" which offers not only improved damage and accuracy over the other assault rifles, but also an overpenetration feature that allows shots to connect with multiple targets. You wouldn't know this without forking up the $497,500 to buy it and try it for yourself, though.


It's not surprising that a live service game has power creep, and it's also not surprising that the power-creep weapons are ludicrously expensive. However, it's not great for immersion, especially considering that there were already several weapons in the game that arguably qualify as "Battle Rifles" to begin with. Hopefully, in GTA VI, Rockstar can plan the progression of its content updates a little more sensibly so that we don't end up with this same situation again.

But there are still other things Rockstar should tweak as well...