Consumer
Member
As someone that spent WAY more time hyping the game on GTAF (1,000+ hours) than they spent actually playing it, GTAV (GTAO especially) is still a major letdown.
1. Easy money/XP is way too exploitable, whether it be grinding missions with unbalanced rewards, exploiting glitches to sell duplicates of your expensive cars, or entering a hacked lobby that makes you rich. These things ruined the economy and consequently, the game has no real sense of progression/accomplishment. You worked hard to afford a sports car? Sucker, all the other players in the lobby have a garage full of modded supercars & fighter jets while you're the odd one out. It essentially forces you to join the cheaters/glitchers, otherwise you might as well not play GTAO at all. After all, who wants to be the only one earning things legitimately when everyone else has millions of dollars from little to no effort? (This includes purchasing shark cards with IRL money).
2. Player hostility + imbalanced weapons: Being an asshole & killing everyone isn't a problem -- that's a staple of GTA games. The problem lies in the fact that, again, due to XP exploitation (and high levelled players in general), everyone and their mother uses the overpowered minigun & RPG (and stickies) to kill everyone else. In GTA IV it was always fun trying to kill other players since it was always an even playing field, but with GTAO's imbalanced upgrade system, newer players are punished for being new, while veterans are rewarded for sinking 100+ hours into the game (or again, simply glitching/exploiting). It creates a huge disparity in combat capability between players that have these OP weapons & players that don't. I stopped playing at level ~95 simply because getting repeatedly killed by these OP weapons wasn't fun.
3. Loading/Lobbies: Starting up GTAV/GTAO is such a commitment since it takes several minutes just to load into the world. And once you're in a GTAO game, chances are the lobby's empty (if you play with free aim like me), or you need to join friends, so you change lobbies which takes another several minutes. Then you're unable to connect to the lobby, so the game kicks you back to SP and you repeat the process until it works on a fluke. By the time I'm in a populated GTAO lobby with friends, ~30 minutes have already passed. After some time in free mode, you'll wanna do some missions/activities with friends. Well, joining these activity lobbies & loading them takes several minutes, and it really discourages me from leaving free mode knowing that I'll have to wait a total of 5 minutes if I want to arm wrestle my friend for 30 seconds. The feature I was anticipating the most on the PS4 remaster was (hopefully) quicker loading times -- boy was I wrong.
On top of all that, it's delayed the SP DLC indefinitely (stated by R* themselves), and heists themselves were delayed for 2 years. I could go on about how disappointing GTAO has been (and still is), but other posters have covered the topic quite well.
Honestly, the next GTA's online component should just revert back to GTA IV's system (barebones freemode) if they can't create a balanced economy & progression system, with little to no loading times whenever you wanna do something other than getting killed by miniguns & RPGs.
EDIT: @jWILL253 covers some other GTAO disappointments (post #50) if you'd like to read more about why GTAO sucks. Overambitious, pay to win system, etc.
1. Easy money/XP is way too exploitable, whether it be grinding missions with unbalanced rewards, exploiting glitches to sell duplicates of your expensive cars, or entering a hacked lobby that makes you rich. These things ruined the economy and consequently, the game has no real sense of progression/accomplishment. You worked hard to afford a sports car? Sucker, all the other players in the lobby have a garage full of modded supercars & fighter jets while you're the odd one out. It essentially forces you to join the cheaters/glitchers, otherwise you might as well not play GTAO at all. After all, who wants to be the only one earning things legitimately when everyone else has millions of dollars from little to no effort? (This includes purchasing shark cards with IRL money).
2. Player hostility + imbalanced weapons: Being an asshole & killing everyone isn't a problem -- that's a staple of GTA games. The problem lies in the fact that, again, due to XP exploitation (and high levelled players in general), everyone and their mother uses the overpowered minigun & RPG (and stickies) to kill everyone else. In GTA IV it was always fun trying to kill other players since it was always an even playing field, but with GTAO's imbalanced upgrade system, newer players are punished for being new, while veterans are rewarded for sinking 100+ hours into the game (or again, simply glitching/exploiting). It creates a huge disparity in combat capability between players that have these OP weapons & players that don't. I stopped playing at level ~95 simply because getting repeatedly killed by these OP weapons wasn't fun.
3. Loading/Lobbies: Starting up GTAV/GTAO is such a commitment since it takes several minutes just to load into the world. And once you're in a GTAO game, chances are the lobby's empty (if you play with free aim like me), or you need to join friends, so you change lobbies which takes another several minutes. Then you're unable to connect to the lobby, so the game kicks you back to SP and you repeat the process until it works on a fluke. By the time I'm in a populated GTAO lobby with friends, ~30 minutes have already passed. After some time in free mode, you'll wanna do some missions/activities with friends. Well, joining these activity lobbies & loading them takes several minutes, and it really discourages me from leaving free mode knowing that I'll have to wait a total of 5 minutes if I want to arm wrestle my friend for 30 seconds. The feature I was anticipating the most on the PS4 remaster was (hopefully) quicker loading times -- boy was I wrong.
On top of all that, it's delayed the SP DLC indefinitely (stated by R* themselves), and heists themselves were delayed for 2 years. I could go on about how disappointing GTAO has been (and still is), but other posters have covered the topic quite well.
Honestly, the next GTA's online component should just revert back to GTA IV's system (barebones freemode) if they can't create a balanced economy & progression system, with little to no loading times whenever you wanna do something other than getting killed by miniguns & RPGs.
EDIT: @jWILL253 covers some other GTAO disappointments (post #50) if you'd like to read more about why GTAO sucks. Overambitious, pay to win system, etc.
