Hackers and hoverbikes. Ask any GTA Online player to name their biggest gripes roving Los Santos, and I guarantee this pairing gets a name-check. And while Rockstar has spent years attempting to cull cheaters from its chaotic multiplayer spaces (with limited success, it must be said), marshalling griefing sky-bound Pegassi Oppressor Mk II enthusiasts as they rain down mission-spoiling missiles upon hapless server-sharers is a different challenge entirely.
Sure, these guys are an-noy-ing, but being a dick in San Andreas isn’t illegal, at least not in the real world. What it is, however, is cause to seek GTA Online’s quieter servers, or, better still, its solo spaces that allow you to crack on with your business in relative peace. Which is to say: GTA Online is actually a better game when viewed as a singleplayer experience.
In 2020, at the heart of global quarantine measures, GTA Online launched the Cayo Perico heist—an island set-piece that transported players to a new location for the first time since the game’s launch seven years earlier. Heists are, of course, the tentpole of GTA Online’s accumulative criminal enterprise, but this one was different: this was the first rob ’em up that could be undertaken on your lonesome.
Fast forward another 12 months, and 2021’s The Contract, starring Dr Dre, offered another singleplayer endeavour which, after completing its missions, unlocked Shorts Trips—a series of co-op story missions starring GTA 5’s Franklin Clinton and Lamar Davies.
At surface level, Short Trips is fun as a low-impact buddy comedy that reunites two of story mode’s most endearing and entertaining characters. Scratch beneath its goofy veneer, though, and you’ll discover something more substantial, with Short Trips realising a long-sought after feature ultimately eclipsed by the sprawling success of GTA Online over time: narrative-led DLC that lets you re-assume control of one of Story Mode’s key stars. Sure, Short Trips is co-op only, but by putting us back in the shoes of Franklin—and not simply working alongside him while controlling our bespoke GTA Online avatar—we’re finally given a glimpse of singleplayer DLC.
You see, despite a slew of free (assuming you own the base game) updates, a vocal and oft-disgruntled section of GTA 5’s playerbase has continually bemoaned the absence of singleplayer story DLC; the same treatment received by its forerunner. Before GTA Online hit its stride, in its pre-2015 PC port state, Rockstar once promised something in the vein of GTA 4’s stellar The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony premium add-ons, yet nothing ever materialised.
Heists and increasingly more sophisticated business ventures filled the void, with a suite of world-renowned superstar DJs entering the fold in 2018’s After Hours update, and the aforementioned The Contract delivering Jimmy Iovine and Dr Dre to the shores of San An. Doing all of this with pals, and even strangers, can be fun, but you’re only ever one shit-stirring Oppressor-flying wanker away from disaster—again, a nightmare situation all too common on public servers.
I fully expect GTA 6 to follow suit on the chaos-o-metre, especially with internet rumblings of 64-person servers doing the rounds not long ago (compared to the current 30-player set up), but what I really want to see is the option to be let loose in GTA Online 2.0 on my lonesome as and when I desire. Nefarious business ownership is bound to return, but do we really need flying bikes and rip-off Deloreans tooled up to the max from the off? And, sure, heists with up to four, maybe five, six, seven, who knows how many accomplices will inevitably be as fun and unpredictable as the Fleece Job, the Diamond Casino, and Doomsday, but is it too much to ask for some solo ventures too, perhaps reuniting is with some of story mode’s most endearing characters a la Franklin and Lamar’s Short Trips outing? I don’t think so.
For me, as someone who dabbled on PS3 for just shy of two years before throwing myself into its PC iteration, I’ve always viewed GTA Online as a bit of an accidental experiment for Rockstar. The company may say otherwise publicly, but I’m convinced few behind the scenes would have, or even could have, predicted its eventual success in the first few years of its existence. The once promised standalone singleplayer DLC is proof of this, as is a handful of the game’s inner workings, such as being able to unlock its full gun library at level 120, and hit its highest Kingpin status level by reaching 100+.
Rockstar enters GTA 6 next year (In November now, thanks to another delay) on consoles (a PC release date is yet to be nailed down) with these learnings under its belt, with early sales projections suggesting it could rake in £7.5 billion in its first two months. Couple this with the impossibly long tail Grand Theft Auto 5 and its multiplayer offshoot have enjoyed—at the time of writing both GTA 5’s Legacy and Enhanced variations are inside the top 30 Steam Most Played chart—it feels like the entire world is preparing for GTA 6’s console release next year. Will that hype justify fully-realised singleplayer story DLC in the months that follow? Who really knows. But the option to play online alone is at the top of my own most wanted features. Hackers and hoverbikes, needless to say, didn’t make the list.
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