As many of you know October 1st marked the launch of GTA Online, the multiplayer component to GTA V we’ve all been anxiously waiting to play. Unfortunately for many of us the online component was unplayable for most of the day Tuesday. I had intended on expanding my Power Hour Review to include an hour’s worth of play time on the multiplayer portion of the game, but instead I ended up chronicling my troubles for those of you who haven’t experienced it, yet.
When I first booted up the game it installed a 59mb update that took a chunk of time to download. As the game loaded I noticed in the bottom right hand corner that there was a message prompt telling me to press ‘A’ to enter Online Mode. Seeing as this was my purpose, I hit ‘A’ and held my breath. I was immediately thrown into the character creation screen and was surprised to see that it was not what I expected at all. To manipulate your character’s physical attributes you are given options to change the appearances of both your maternal and paternal grandparents, which also changes the appearance of your parents, and in effect changes your appearance. There are also a few slider bars that allow you to change whether your mother/father look more like their mother or father which also manipulates your character’s appearance.
From there there is a screen that allows you to assign how many hours of your day you dedicate to different items. These items include things like Sleep, Illegal Work Activity, Partying, and Family Time. You can increase or decrease each by a half an hour and depending on what you assign your time to changes your player’s stats as well as how your player is dressed. Partying, for instance, affects multiple stats in positive or negative ways and also clothes or unclothes your character depending on whether you are adding or removing time. The last customizable option is to change your hair color and style, add or remove glasses or a hat, and your age. Save your character and you are ready to enter the online world of GTA!
Wait, maybe not. This is where my game started to get screwy. The first time entering the online world I got through the whole introduction scene with Lamar, a character from the single player side of the game, until he dropped me off at the first “mission:” a supposed street race with the other players. This is where the game starts to load the other players onto the map and where my game falls completely apart. I was stuck at this screen for 15 minutes before giving up:
The worst part about being stuck on that screen is that it is constantly popping players in and out of the game around you so your player Is stuck motionless in one spot as you watch other people’s players walk away to play the game. I shut down the game and my Xbox, rebooted and tried again. I waited for another 15 minutes to no success. Another painful part of the waiting process is that your player still hears the radio station that the car you are supposed to be entering is tuned to. The first time I tried it was the country station and it was painful (sorry, I’m just not a fan). The second time around it was techno/electronic and made for some pretty decent background music to my sorrows.
As of writing this, Tuesday night, there is no solution and Rockstar has yet to put out an update since 5:30 pm ET. For thousands of gamers around the globe GTA Online was a total bust the first day of launch. While Rockstar knew that they were tackling an insane feat and that having a seamless launch was next to impossible, this is still pretty disappointing to fans of the franchise. It’s very reminiscent of the midnight release of Diablo III on PC, gamers spent hours downloading the game to their systems only to find the servers bogged down when they went live and the game mostly unplayable for the first day. An even larger mess was the launch of Sim City, which many people predicted as the demise of EA because of how terribly the launch was executed.
With the new era of console gaming among us, I wonder how long it will be before gamers will be rid of their “bogged down server” woes. Both PS4 and Xbox One boast large scale online capabilities, with Microsoft initially wanting to force consumers of the Xbox One to be connected to the internet 24/7. I wonder how it is that we haven’t been able to configure the servers to handle massive numbers on day one of a launch and yet the new consoles are supposed to be ahead of current technology (or what we’ve seen capable with current technology to date). And I’m not trying to be ignorant, I know that these issues come about because being able to handle large numbers of players is an extremely complex issue and that Rockstar is swimming into somewhat foreign waters with GTA Online, but to me it seems that it should be something we can figure out before the “next generation of gaming” comes out.
