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3) Shark Cards
GTA Online is a fantastic online multiplayer experience, perhaps even one of the best currently in the gaming landscape. This game has been able to evolve way past its initial promise, and into something far more successful than players initially imagined.
It comes at no extra cost along with each copy of GTA 5, which is an excellent move by Rockstar and scores it a lot of brownie points in the community. But the publisher isn't the only one guilty of microtransactions, which has long been established as a scourge of modern-day gaming.
Mobile games and their free-to-play model justifies the need for microtransactions to support the game. Still, the case becomes a little muddled up when AAA games incorporate the same microtransactions.
With GTA Online becoming a standalone title on the PS5, perhaps it is time to get rid of microtransactions altogether. As GTA Online is dangerously close to devolving into a "pay-to-win" situation, which is what Rockstar must avoid at all costs.
4) Massive Load Times/ Matchmaking
This is one element that is perhaps the most easily solvable, as it isn't deeply-rooted in game design or the writing of GTA games. This issue has more to do with the technical efficiency of the titles.
Both GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are massive games, whose scale and scope is nigh unmatched by other offerings in the genre. The trade-off comes in the form of the absolutely staggering load times.
Even on recent tests, Red Dead Redemption 2 was taking up to 30 seconds of load time on next-gen hardware (Xbox Series X). While it is a significant improvement from the current-gen hardware, it still leaves a lot to be desired.
Finding a match and jumping right in should be as quick as possible, but GTA Online will test a player's patience to an insane degree. Switching between games can be extremely frustrating, and the constant disconnection is one of the biggest detractors to the Online experience.
Rockstar must take a long, hard look at its Online component as well as the load times for the Story Mode and figure out how to do it more efficiently.
5) Filler Missions
The GTA franchise can be accused of a lot of things, not all of them completely fair. However, none can lob complaints at Rockstar for padding out the game with filler missions all that much.
But GTA 5 is the biggest culprit when it comes to the presence of filler missions that add little to nothing to the game. A lot of these tasks boil down to merely driving from one place to the other while characters talk, and the conversation adds nothing to the story.
Missions such as the one where players, as Trevor, must complete a set of tasks on the Docks are egregious and no amount of "narrative through gameplay" arguments will ever justify their presence.
While earlier, advertising the number of "missions" was a massive part of the marketing campaign, the industry has moved past that. Rockstar likes to show off its writing chops every once in a while with these "talking" sections and filler missions, but it will have to come up with a less annoying way to do so.
Essentially, a game should be paced exceptionally well, with each story moment or mission adding something to the narrative, and not just serving as a way to pad out the game.
