Grand Theft Auto Online Diary - Day 1

Instead of adding an addendum to my review of Grand Theft Auto V going over Grand Theft Auto Online, I thought I would write diary entries for my experience with the online game. I had a good reason for doing this, but I do not remember what it was.



I did not get very far on my first day. I tried playing it twice, the first time I got signed off of Xbox Live in the intro movie and the second time I got stuck waiting in an infinite loop for other players.

The only thing I got to experience at length is the character creation. Normally I do not like messing with the facial features in a character creation, I'm too lazy, so I usually stick to hair style and color and eye color. If I am feeling really lazy I give my character brown eyes like mine and messy black hair like mine.

For this character creation I did not get that much control. I was supposed to to pick my characters grandparents which would influence how my character's parents and eventually how I would look, and I could influence how much my character looked like my ancestors with a vaguely defined resemblance bar. I did not feel like cycling through the grandparents and fiddling with the bars. I tried it a couple of times but the lack of control frustrated me, as did the graphics. Any character I sort of made looked like an ugly bastard from an original Xbox game.

I quickly gave up and moved to the second part where you could change the hair, facial hair, hat, and glasses. To my annoyance the glasses were only sunglasses, so my character had no glasses, and no hat or facial hair because I did not like any of the options. I went with the messiest hair model I could find, and ended up looking like an emo douche.

The last part had me assigning how many hours my characters spends doing normal stuff like sleeping and hanging out with friends. I tried to put in something close to what I do in real life and ended up in really baggy looking clothes like a white guy who thought he could wrap. I wish I was allowed to at least dress myself. I hope Rockstar has a problem with everyone looking the same, though I bet a lot of people will assign hours at random, or make their character look as badass as possible.

From what the introductory movie said, it looks like the idea is that I am put in Los Santos and I can do the things I could in single-player mode that were not missions but had goals, like the races, the rampages, and the golf and tennis which I did not mention in my review. But you do them with other people and the more you do them the more stuff you unlock. A common problem with video game developers is the idea that if you add an online multiplayer feature it automatically makes the game better and Rockstar looks like they have fallen into that same mindset. I did not like most of those features in single-player and the idea of playing them with other people makes the prospect of playing them again only mildly more exciting, and only for dealing with other people, not the minigames themselves.

I will have to try again at some alter date when hopefully their servers have calmed down, and see fi there is anything more to the game.