Grand Theft Auto Online Makes A Superb Second Impression

I decided I’d play as a woman as that seemed novel and newsworthy enough. In fact, my game defaulted to presenting a female character model. It defaulted to a guy for one of my colleagues.

You don’t sculpt the character’s looks manually, but you can toggle their gender. What you primarily do to design their face and skin tone is select their grandparents and move some sliders to determine how much one side of the family’s looks affect your character’s. If you’re in the Rockstar Social Club or have special editions of the game, you can skip the parental grandparent part of the customizer and choose to have a “special dad.” I use the Rockstar Social Club, so I was able to do that and make Red Dead Redemption protagonist John Marston my father.

After figuring out your characters’ ancestry, you can shape their “lifestyle”, which is another odd, interesting change to how characters are customized in this game. Apologies for the blurry shot, but take a look:

What you’re seeing is the default way my character’s time would be spent each day. All the notches in the categories on the right are drawn from a pool of 24 hours of time. The game tells me I can’t make my character sleep fewer than four hours of the day. I don’t think I can make them sleep more than six. You, like me, might be wondering if this means my GTA Online character will go to sleep for a sixth of my playtime in the world. I do not know! We shall see…

I chose a hairdo, makeup, hat and shirt for my character and named her. I waited for the game to load more and catch up to what I was doing. And then GTA Online‘s proper intro began.

I backed out to the single-player and loaded GTAO again. Didn’t help.

I rebooted the game. Didn’t help.

I tried starting the game from GTA V‘s “online” menu, selecting a crew-only game or an invite-only game. Didn’t help.

I tried starting from the online menu and selecting a “solo” session in GTAO. That seemed to work. I loaded back into the parking lot and could run around. But Lamar wasn’t there. I jacked a car and was told to go back to the race trigger point. A yellow GPS line drew my path to it. I went there, but there was no trigger point to be found.

I left the game idle, resigned that I wouldn’t play Online today. After some time passed, I got a warning message saying I would be kicked from the game for being idle. I pressed a button to acknowledge this and then….

…my character re-spawned in the parking lot in a matchmaking screen. Other real, human players were also getting ready for a race. We were getting ready to go!

The Magical Second Impression

I sat back down, controller in hand and realized I was actually about to play GTA Online for real. OK. What’d I need to do? The game was showing that I would be racing seven other characters, one of whom I think may have been the computer-controlled Lamar. The others were people. Maybe all seven were and Lamar didn’t count? Not sure. I could also bet on myself. I bet $100.

The race began and I was immediately left in the dust. Yes, even on day one, hour… three… I’m already being left in the dust in a multiplayer game. So it goes.

The race was a pretty simple checkpoint course through downtown Los Santos. We raced at night, though I’m not sure if the time of day was forced by the game or random. As I drove, I could hear Lamar taunt me.

I passed a couple of competitors, didn’t come close to catching the lead one, saw some players drop out and ended up finishing fifth of… five.

After flashing the after-race match results, the game then loaded a cutscene of Lamar telling me to go get a drug package. I’m not sure if we were robbing people, reclaiming a robbed package or what.

I noticed that the two other guys Lamar was briefing looked familiar. Were they the other players from the parking lot? Yep.

I think the guy in the backseat wasn’t into this, so as we slowed to make a turn, he jumped out of the back and tumbled into the middle of an intersection. Our driver was having none of it. He backed up over the other player. Horrible. Wonderful. So very GTA.

As soon as Lamar was talking I was back in control of my character and standing next to a car, ready for this mission. I pressed a button to drive, but my character got in the front passenger seat. One of the other players in this group took the driver seat. The third player got in the back. This was a pretty cool moment. See, none of us had manually grouped together. The game had just decided to keep us together to keep the story going.

The driver player was a bit of a hellion. He tore down the streets of Los Santos, following the GPS waypoint, which we could all see. I think the guy in the backseat wasn’t into this, so as we slowed to make a turn, he jumped out of the back and tumbled into the middle of an intersection. Our driver was having none of it. He backed up over the other player. Horrible. Wonderful. So very GTA

Now it was just me and the driver.

He drove us to the spot where the drug package was. It was in some garage or something. It looked like a rival gang had it. All computer-controlled. We jumped out of the car and started shooting. The guy with the package ran. I chased him, shot him and took it. The other player and I then hopped in the car. I drove this time, a little carelessly, and we got back to Lamar.

For this next cutscene, Lamar talked directly to my character. The other player was in the background. I wonder if that was different for him/her. Not sure.

Lamar made fun of me not talking, introduced us to a new character and then we were set free to buy some better clothes.

At that point, the game world opened up.

And at the very next moment, my former partner in crime, my reckless driver buddy, ran up behind me, punched me to death, stole my hat, I think, and ran away.

Jerk.

I guess he didn’t care that the game’s tutorial messages had indicated that we’d level up faster by doing missions in a group and level up even faster by doing them in a Rockstar Social Club-connected “crew”. It wasn’t meant to be.

And there you have it. A couple of hours of server trouble. About 10 minutes of playtime. The latter was quite fun. I want back in. I hope those servers can handle it.