So, how is the online play? I haven’t tried it yet because I want to finish the SP first.
Is it just people running around killing each other?
I’m not really sure but I was talking to a co-worker today and he said that at least some online gameplay is cooperative.
For instance you have to do a jail break where some go in over the wall, some crash the front gate and some fly in with a helicopter (and it is up to each to obtain the things needed).
hat said I really do not know. We have talked about doing a SDMB multiplayer bit for this but I think most of us (so far) are working through the single player game. I know I am.
I beat GTA5 on the PS3 and spent some time online before I moved onto other games. I’ve been meaning to pick it up again for the PC both for the improved graphics and to get back into online play now that they’ve finally instituted heists.
Online freeplay is, for the most part, random chaos. That can be amusing in small doses but what I really liked about online was all that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of races, last man standing type sieges and capture the flag style missions. The new online heists play out similar to the heists in the story mode. You gather a crew of 4 to cooperate on several setup missions before tackling a main heist.
There is a lot to online play. Really it’s sort of a puzzle figuring out everything there is to do, it’s not all obvious. First of all, you can put yourself in passive mode if you don’t enjoy random drive-bys, that will keep you from attacking or being attacked in free roam.
Then there is lots of stuff to do, including:
-Tennis
-Deathmatches (many varieties such as free-for-all, team deathmatch, vehicle deathmatch, etc.)
-Capture and hold missions, sort of like capture the flag
-Races; cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, planes, helicopters. A huge variety of courses from simple ovals to driving across the whole map with various offroad sections, ramps, and more.
-Last man standing, one team with lots of weapons has to withstand repeated attacks by more-lightly armed attackers.
-Parachuting
-Arm wrestling
-Rob all the convenience stores
-Do jobs for people on your contacts list
-Customize your car, or yourself
-Watch TV, including live footage of other players
-Heists - Big robbery jobs, just added last month.
-Lots more
Most jobs are accessed through the Online menu or your cell phone. Some unlock only at certain levels.
Another thing about online, if you want to play just with a group of friends, the best way seems to be starting in Single player and then go to the Online menu and pick Play with Friends (forget the exact wording.) That will bring you and your friends into a “private” server. You can also choose to play online by yourself.
Did some GTA Online stuff tonight with some people from the boards. A few missions, and then a few runs through the various game mode types. We didn’t have heists unlocked yet.
It’s pretty fun once everything is going. The menu system, and who gets into whose game, and who hosts, and all that stuff is kind of awkward and weird to navigate. The voice chat seems to work reasonably well, although if you get split up because one of you joined an event before the other that can get confusing since it stops the chat. And at least once when we left an event, we were split up and didn’t get back to my private friends only freeroam game and had to reconnect.
The netcode is pretty bad. Lots of warping. It’s really too bad because if the cars handled in a less arcadey way, and there was some good netcode, this could be among the best racing games ever. There’s just so much fun to be immersed with the realistic traffic, varied locales, detailed environments, etc. It’s still fun, but it’s so much less than what it could be.
It should have a more cohesive party system, so it’s easier for you to join and leave events together.
There is something I am not getting about online play. I start a solo mode or friends only or invite only session. Then, when I start races or jobs, sometimes it is only me, which I want and sometimes it is a bunch of random people, which I don’t want.
I thought I said solo! Why are there a bunch of strangers here?
I can’t predict which situation is going to happen when starting a race or job. Anyone know how to lock it, so it is truly solo or friends only?
The whole matchmaking system is awkward and weird. But when you create a solo session, you’re only creating it for the freeroam world. If you use the quickjob system, or just go to a job location in the world, you’ll get matched up with other people.
However, if you manually go to the menu and create a job there, it’ll create a new job with you as the host, and then you can set matchmaking to closed, which means invite-only. I think.
Alright guys, I created a Straight Dope crew. You can join from that link, or from searching for Straight Dope in game.
There was already a console-based straight dope crew, but they don’t appear to be active still, so I figured I’d create a new one for the PC players. But if you want, you can join both - you can join up to 5 crews, but only be representing/active in one at a time, so make sure you make the PC group your active one (in the online menu under crews)
This gives us bonuses if we play online together, makes it easier to find each other for grouping up and friends listing, let’s us wear custom emblems on our clothes in game, and allows access to other crew based cosmetics like tire smoke.
Even if you don’t want to play online, go ahead and join it - whenever you complete a mission or other leaderboards task, you can compare your score to other people from the same crew.
Does anyone more creative than me want to take a stab at creating a logo? I think I can promote you and allow that.
SenorBeef, thanks for the answer. It seems that bookmarking races through the website puts those bookmarks in the pause/online/jobs menu and from there you can solo them.
I had a go at an emblem. For some reason, one of the gradients would not publish though, so I had to redo it a couple of times. Also, on my first try, I wrote SMDB instead of SDMB, oops! :o
Any tips for flying helicopters?
I went to the flight school and for the life of me cannot get the hang of flying the helicopter. It is wavering all over the sky. Complete mess and I cannot seem to get the hang of it.
FWIW I am using an XBox controller (on PC) and I got gold in all flight school challenges up to that point with fixed wing craft so I am not completely clueless.
Any tips?
You steer it with the shoulder buttons instead of the right stick. I think it’s what they call yaw in flight terms, i.e. moving left or right on the vertical axis.
I’m baffled at how badly GTA Online is designed. So many inexplicably poor decisions.
It doesn’t seem like you can join sessions (missions, races, heists, whatever) as a group. I can create a friends-only freeroam session. But if I want to try to join a heist or something with my friend, well, you’re fucked. We didn’t have the level/resources to try to start our own, so we’d try to join a public one together. Except - you know how there’s a constant incoming text message feed of invites to heists? We didn’t even get the same ones.
So one of us would have to try to join a session and invite the other. But here’s where another inexplicably stupid design decision came in: It doesn’t seem to count players who are currently loading in as occupying a slot, or it doesn’t check to see if the slot you’re trying to join is open/exists until you’re done loading in. Because many times you’d accept an invite, wait for the load, then be told that the slot was full and (after another load screen) dumped back into freeroam. There’s no excuse for that. It should query the server before the load starts to see if there’s a spot, and then reserve that spot if there is. No one should ever say “oops there’s not enough space for you” after they go through a load screen.
And why didn’t we even get the same invitations? I assume those invitations come from when someone selects auto-invite from a lobby, but it apparently selects a random chunk of the available user base at that time to send the invitations to?
It seems so obvious that there should be a party system, and you should receive the same invitations as a party, and be able to join the same event as a party.
We’ve also been just two players in the same friends only freeroam lobby, tried to join an event by going to the blue marker on the freeroam map where that event is located within the game, and then ended up in separate lobbies for the same mission.
And in general, the matchmaking is wonky. We were trying to play a tennis match together and couldn’t figure out how to do it, so we decided to both do the activity quickjoin thing at the same time, figuring it would probably match us up, right? Well, we both enter the queue, and it says searching for other players (1/2) since it’s a 2 man event… and then we sat there for 2-3 minutes. We were both searching for a match, we’re both at the same skill level if that’s relevant (never played a match), and yet it wouldn’t pair us together after 2-3 minutes. WTF is it doing?
It makes me wonder if the matchmaking system works at all behind the scenes. It makes me wonder if there are 1000 different race lobbies out there with 3/8 or 3/16 players instead of having 300 full lobbies. Sometimes it seems like the auto-invitation system works, sometimes it doesn’t. There’s not a whole lot of rhyme or reason to the whole thing.
On a more positive note, the game’s performance has increased noticibly for me recently. I don’t get the audio skipping that I used to get in certain situations when the radio is on, and my FPS has gone from about 55-70 to 65-80 on 2560x1440 high/very high. The occasional stuttering I used to get also has pretty much vanished.
I have pretty good luck just entering an event (I generally pick it from the Online, Jobs menu) and then inviting my friend along. Still awkward though.
Performance seems better to me too, although playing custom radio stations still causes stutter. Curiously that stutter doesn’t show up in the frame rates though.
FWIW:
Rockstar will not issue bans for mods in single player.
Just do not use them in multiplayer.
Wow, and here I thought I would be holding people back lol! 
FYI:
Is there a way to text your friends and/or crew while in a separate session? Diablo 3 can do this.