GTA Online

[letsgobrian]

New DLC out where you form a private military contractor outfit with some new and old NPCs. You will need an Avenger and then another 1.5 million on top. And a Hanger to access the other new Avenger upgrades.

And about 100 cars have been pulled from the car websites. So if you've been holding off buying an Infernus for 10 years you'll have to wait for it to show up in a showroom (or go to the Car Meet and buy a copy of another player's).

But you can now hold to sprint, so it's not all bad news!

[Malcy]

Looking forward to having a go of it tonight. I've $65m to use up so going to just buy all the new planes. Might as well get a few things off Warstock as they never seem to be discounted anymore.

Hoping this update makes me use my Avenger a bit more as I only usually go in it for Mk2 ammo.

[QDRPHNC]

Just played through the Mercenaries DLC yesterday - possibly the limpest DLC I can remember. Extremely half-hearted story, the six missions are completely nothingy and I think I did the whole thing in about 2 hours. Say what you will about the jugaloo character in the last DLC, at least he was a character. This has two essentially faceless people directing you through the phone and (from what I can remember) no narrative cut-scenes at all. AND one of the six missions is essentially just an advert for the new $6,000,000 plane. And that's aside from all the other issues with this DLC (game-wrecking bugs).

I think after Cayo Perico dropped it's been really obvious that GTA5 is not Rockstar's focus any more. Part of me wishes they would just pull the trigger, say they're going full blast on GTA6 and leave GTA5 as it is. I mean, one of the updates this time around is being able to rename your garages, such a fundamental feature that it would be less embarrassing to never do it than doing it 10 years later in what is probably the last year of the game's life cycle.

You can tell it's near the end too, because they really do seem to be releasing the lowest-possible-effort DLC while becoming ever more shameless about wringing the last few dollars from the corpse. The Acid Lab DLC was pretty shitty with releasing (some of) the new drip feed cars for 2 weeks before removing them permanently, but this thing they just did, paywalling almost 200 cars to drive GTA+ subs, is just a massive finger to the users.

[QDRPHNC]

Still playing it like.

[Malcy]

I couldn't get past the 2nd mission. Hovering over Paleto bay looking for shit.

Fuck off. I just bought the new jet without the trade price. It's pretty good. These missions will no doubt sit there along with the ULP ones that I have one attempt at and decided life is too short.

All these quality of life improvements that they do based on "listening to player feedback and understanding" but they still don't fix the fact that if you use the expanded map then notifications end up on top of other stuff like menu's and make them unusable.

Also, there's a really serious bug where if you call your MOC then it reverts any upgrades you have and even deletes vehicles from your garages.

I rarely use mine anyway. Best part about the new jet is the stealth mode. Briefer causing shit all over the map? Fly up behind him, come out of stealth and annihilate the prick.

Love it.

[letsgobrian]

I couldn't get past the 2nd mission. Hovering over Paleto bay looking for shit.

You have to get out of the Avenger. I did it the old fashioned way (land and walk to the water), but if you put the Avenger in the Hanger, there's new upgrades one of which is adding a jet pack to the Avenger's hold. You can then park the Avenger in auto pilot, hop in the jet pack and fly down. And then back. Except re-entering the Avenger on the Thruster seems to be broken atm. So don't do that.

The third job with the new jet is the worst of the 6, to the point that I put it on easy. Your best bet is to outfly the enemies in that one rather than rely on firepower.

I quite like the new things added but fuck me they've broken a lot of things this time round. I see the latest is:

"We are aware of an issue with vehicles and the loss of vehicle insurance in GTA Online. We are currently working to resolve this and will share an update as soon as it is available."

[Flouncer]

Anybody playing on PC who would like to team up please give me a shout: I'd be happy to help out with businesses or whatever (also if someone is just starting out or grinding towards something, I can host heists and give you the highest possible take - I've got more money than I know what to do with so am happy to help others at this point). I've been playing a fair bit recently. Despite the lack of decent new content I've been having fun grinding the classics and pottering around the map flogging drugs to street dealers and raiding the stash houses every day. I've got a couple of friends I play with from time to time but I could do with some more compadres. I also play Red Dead Online so that's an option too.

[QDRPHNC]

Wish I could take you up on that offer, @Flouncer, but I'm on Xbox. Bored solo grinding these days, and trying to work with randos to to heists in a pain in the arse.

[Rev+]

Worst game I've ever played, this.  There's no way for a new player to start at all.

[Flouncer]

The problem is when you start, there's all these different things you can buy, all these different cunts phoning you up and saying do this, buy this... And nothing at all to tell you what the things are or what they do. It's fuckin baffling. However there are some great content creators on YouTube who will tell you exactly how things work and what to do to make them profitable. Without that knowledge you're just going to be floundering and wondering how the fuck anyone makes any money in this game.

If you're on PC I can give you a leg up and help you get started, otherwise you'll have to do some research (which really you shouldn't have to do just to play a fucking video game).

[QDRPHNC]

So in very unexpected news, Rockstar bought FiveM, the modders behind the RP/racing/custom cars servers on PC.

Likely: Rockstar bought FiveM to own the competition. PC GTAO (I've heard) is such a dumpster fire, it seems like a significant amount of people only play on the FiveM servers. Rockstar will probably monetize what they can and cut the rest over time, diluting the huge backlash they would have faced for DMCAing FiveM in one go, into a series of smaller backlashes over a much longer period. Almost certainly, FiveM will no longer be able to host the actual proper branded cars that have been created by the user base that feature on their servers.

My cautiously optimistic take that I don't think I've heard from anyone else: They've bought FiveM with an eye to having them keep the GTA5 lights on after GTA6 comes out. No more DLC, just ongoing improvements and changes to the experience for the remaining players (which I'm sure will still be quite a few for the next few years at least). I'm also hoping this means that some of the great stuff on FiveM may come to XBox or Playstation. I get jealous watching Broughy racing amazing custom cars against users who are actually there to race clean.

Speaking of which:

[Marner and Me]

New DLC out where you form a private military contractor outfit with some new and old NPCs. You will need an Avenger and then another 1.5 million on top. And a Hanger to access the other new Avenger upgrades.

And about 100 cars have been pulled from the car websites. So if you've been holding off buying an Infernus for 10 years you'll have to wait for it to show up in a showroom (or go to the Car Meet and buy a copy of another player's).

But you can now hold to sprint, so it's not all bad news!

Isn't the idea of a game called Grand Theft Auto, that you boost cars

[letsgobrian]

Isn't the idea of a game called Grand Theft Auto, that you boost cars

A surprising number of these private military contractor missions involve you boosting a car.

[QDRPHNC]

Since it's double money on acid sell missions this week, I've been doing a bunch and figured out a couple of ways to speed them up immensely (although I'm sure these are already well-known by youtubers or whoever, they're new to me):

For the mission where you have to deliver 5 packages and there might be cops at each one, one of the three drop off points at each location will be out of sight of any undercover car sitting nearby, and if you drop it off at that one, it won't trigger a wanted level.

The one where you have to drop off acid at the top of a parking lot. You can Cargobob the delivery bike over to the location, land it on one of the nearby rooves where a police chopper is waiting for the trigger. Blow up the chopper, blow up the second one that comes along, then just wait on the roof until you lose the wanted level then fly your bike to the new location. And you can land on your bike without dropping it from the cargobob, it won't explode.

Or, if you don't have a cargobob, just go to the parking lot and shoot the first undercover car you see on ground level. That'll trigger the whole thing and you can just take off without getting shot to bits on the top level where you're supposed to go.

Also discovered on the bunker sell mission with the Phantom Wedge, if you bribe authorities as soon as the mission starts, the cops never show up and it's plain sailing.

[letsgobrian]

Today's Chop Shop DLC is another "here's a bunch of low priority long standing Jira issues finally resolved" DLC with another single player activity belatedly added to the online game (the tow truck repo missions), some new small scale heists (this time the focus is on car theft) and drift racing.

[QDRPHNC]

Yeah, I just watched Digital Car Addict's video on it, and it looks really limp. My first thought was "Only $300k for doing a mini heist? I can make that in one bunker sell mission." Then my second thought was "You're being boring, it's about enjoying new stuff in the game, you can't reduce it all down to how much money it makes." Then my third thought was "But it's not new stuff, it's just go here, get this, kill the people coming after you."

So yeah, don't know if I'll even bother buying the scrapyard. Nothing particularly interesting amongst the new cars either. Although apparently what they've been doing for the last year or two is releasing the car models they've been making for GTA6 as new content for GTAO, which is fair enough.

It's been clear for a while their heart hasn't been in GTAO. Which is why I'm still so curious about what the plan was for buying FiveM. I'm sure part of it was squashing copyright infringement, but I wonder if Rockstar is going to hand over the reins on GTAO to FiveM at some point.

[letsgobrian]

The FiveM racing types seem to be loving this update. It has a lot of QoL features for custom races, and it finally lets you move vehicles between garages via the menu rather than having to drive them.

And you can get killed by cougars in free roam now. If I had to guess, I'd say they'll be bringing Cletus Ewing back in a future DLC and implement the single player hunting challenges in free roam.

[Famous Mortimer]

The FiveM racing types seem to be loving this update. It has a lot of QoL features for custom races, and it finally lets you move vehicles between garages via the menu rather than having to drive them.

Ooh, that would be nice. The issue for me in Online is it's almost impossible to find a group of people that wants to do anything other than the standard Rockstar tracks, and it's beyond impossible to find a group that doesn't have at least two or three people in it who just do all the cheesy boring tactics and make every race not really about being good at racing. I dabbled with FiveM before but maybe it's time to give it a go (although I got Forza Horizon 5 in a sale the other day).

[QDRPHNC]

Moving cars between garages does sound brilliant, actually.

I get jealous watching Broughy's videos, watching actual proper racing. It happens sometimes on console, but more often than not it's a combination of massive clusterfuck crashes at each corner and cunts doing a pit manoeuvre on anyone trying to overtake them.

[QDRPHNC]

Moving cars is current gen only :(

[QDRPHNC]

This most recent DLC is bit of a curate's egg, I reckon. It's certainly the first update where it seems clear we are getting a peek at how GTA6 is going to do things — there's the insanely customizable police cruiser, the upcoming Hellfire police cruiser that was seen in the GTA6 trailer, drift modes that can be activated on selected cars, an upcoming drag mode that will have an on-screen tachometer and manual gear shifting.

On the other hand, some of the drip feed vehicles are mystifying, such as a new version of the already useless Boxville, and a Cluckin' Bell truck — most likely everyday vehicles for GTA6, used here to pad out the DLC.

Then there's the weird sloppiness. DLCs rarely release without any bugs, but this is something else. On one of the new convertibles, one of the side windows doesn't fold away with the roof. On another new car, the headlights on the right side of the model are missing their covers. And on another, some of the visual mods only get applied to the left side of the car, not the right.

The scrapyard missions seem alright. I like the fact that they create tasks that appear on your freemode map, meaning you can do them at your leisure as you're driving around. Bit weird though, that they've timeboxed them so that you can only steal 3 cars a week, especially since you're already jumping through a lot of hoops for a relatively small payout.

[letsgobrian]

The other thing with the final step of the chop shop missions is they launch without going into the standard job starting window, which I'm guessing is also testing for GTA 6.

[QDRPHNC]

Found this video last night and it made me laugh a surprising amount. Bay Area Buggs and his friend Ryan impersonate cops on a private RP server. The part starting at 9:30 where they pull over an ambulance is great. Ryan in particular has a great line in police patter.

Spoiler alert

Looks like no people gettin' saved tonight!

[close]

[QDRPHNC]

Also, the latest update includes random races now! Called Unknown Unknowns and Known Unknowns. It'll be interesting to see what else they bring over from FiveM.