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GTA Online Is Full Of Abandoned Modes (kotaku.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: GTA Online just had its most active month ever. It is consistently one of the top-selling games on Steam, Xbox and Playstation. It is always in the top 10 of the best selling games each year. The community is huge. Yet players looking to play a wide variety of modes modes will have trouble finding anybody to play with or against.
The problem, paradoxically enough, is an overabundance of content. GTA Online has a huge variety of things to do, including missions, races, heists, and deathmatches. When the game first launched, this variety was great. But the game has only gotten bigger. Now, after four years and dozens of updates, GTA Online almost feels too big and empty. The player base has spread out across too many jobs and events, making it hard to play anything but the latest new thing.
The problem, paradoxically enough, is an overabundance of content. GTA Online has a huge variety of things to do, including missions, races, heists, and deathmatches. When the game first launched, this variety was great. But the game has only gotten bigger. Now, after four years and dozens of updates, GTA Online almost feels too big and empty. The player base has spread out across too many jobs and events, making it hard to play anything but the latest new thing.
What do you mean you can't find 40 people to raid Molten Core at level 60?
Or is this part of the ongoing series "First World Problems: Maslow nailed it better than we ever could have imagined"?
They need to select a few featured daily modes and offer some reward for doing those. Rotate all the modes through this, changing the list on a regular basis. That will concentrate the player base while still allowing people to experience variety.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
They don't care too much about abandoned modes as much as they do their in-game currency.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
When the game first launched, this variety was great.
I stopped played GTAO before heists came out (nearly 3 years ago at this point). Even then, it was hard to find people to do certain races with. For example, everyone wanted to do the Supercar races. Nobody wanted to race sedans.
I am sure that it has just gotten worse since then.
I had thought about picking the game back up again, but I missed the opportunity to port my PS3 character to the PC version. I almost bought it anyway, but I was concerned about exactly what the article is talking about. Not being able to do anything except the latest content, and then getting kicked out of groups for being under geared / having no clue what I was doing.
Welcome to MMOs...
Yeah, pretty much this. Everyone always flocks to the new in these kinds of games. No one wants yesterday's fancy loot, everyone has it already.
Too many of the characters are wearing neat, made-to-order suits and driving around scooters to please the gaming company which name is related to rockers. Maybe they could organize those battle-royals, 1960s style, in the GTA type of games. Strictly for the cultural studies, of course.
I don't play GTAO so I may be blowing smoke. But why can't a player select multiple games they want to play, then when the server can fill a game it puts the player game-match on hold and starts the game.
GTA Online's matchmaking system was just plain broken about when I stopped playing, and that was before there were that many modes. I have no reason to believe it ever got fixed, considering they let it linger that way for so long. Even the sandbox events were horribly broken... some servers... armored car or airdrop every hour at least... others, you could stay on all day and nothing at all happened.
That, and the way they made it mandatory to use the associated social website in order to participate in a lot of the activities (dammit I play games to get away from web UIs and cell phones. STOP INTEGRATING THEM.) soured me on the whole experience.
Someone had to do it.
Was there a difference between GTAV and GTA5?
I seem to remember everyone talking about a new "first person" mode back when it was released on the Xbone, but it felt like I'd already finished it years before on the Xbox 360, so I didn't bother purchasing it (or an Xbone).
I played quite a lot at the start of the release (PS3) and then played some more on the higher def re-release on PS4, but ultimately dropped it for over a year.
I've returned to the game and while I still have a fairly reasonable leveled character and I've actually accomplished most 'normal' missions in the game, I am having real difficulty finding anyone for one of the earlier heists, which is actually a shame.
There actually *IS* a lot of 'single player feeling' (or at least co-op feeling) content in the game, for those who don't want to just shoot each other (think, Left 4 Dead)
Many of the missions still have proper voice acting, good comical writing, utilising some of the B tier single player characters (Lester, Lamar).
If you're a fan of the single player game and of the gameplay in-itself, there *IS* enough there to at least push out another ...10 to 30 hours of gameplay which feels, /mostly/ like the single player. It's quite fun.
Alas, can't partner up for a heist, at least not without coordinating friends and that is a little difficult as an older, time constrained gamer.
The PS3 / 360 "last-gen" versions were essentially a beta test.
Not even close. They invested a great deal of resources in platform-specific optimisations, producing one of the best looking games ever to run on those machines, and went on to patch the game on both platforms for years.
And thus Fear Of Missing Out has been replaced with Regret For Playing Along
I clearly remember "heists" not being available unless you signed up and joined a gang.
Someone had to do it.