I’ve spent a few thousand hours of my life living in GTA Online. Well, actually, that’s how long Steam tells me I’ve spent tearing up the streets of Los Santos and Blaine County. This lurching figure does not include my time living myriad Truman Show parallel existences within the bounds of FiveM’s roleplaying scene.
In any event, at this stage I’m pretty au fait with both the official Grand Theft Auto 5 multiplayer offshoot playground and its unofficial player-made one. I enjoy both spaces for very different reasons, and as GTA 6 comes into increasingly sharper focus, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want from its next online variation—whatever shape it may take.
Given the enduring and seemingly interminable success of GTA Online, it’s hard to imagine Rockstar ditching its golden goose entirely when it moves house to Vice City later this year on console. One would presume GTA Online in its current state will continue, business as usual for a period of time, with GTA 6’s slant on a multiplayer offering running alongside it, at least in the beginning.
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Rockstar’s acquisition of Cfx.re in 2023—the team behind FiveM—suggests the next crime sim entry will push deeper into the RP space in an official capacity, and it’s exactly this distinction that I want in the coming months and years in the Florida-aping state of Leonida.
Believe it or not, it was while watching some punk named YEPYEP2006 smash up my truck Rusty, beaten down and teary-eyed, that led me to this dawning realisation.
Cog in the machine
GTA Online is a machine. With a half-century of complimentary updates spanning more than a decade, it boasts an exhaustive array of customisable weapons and vehicles, standing as one of the most alluring shop window experiences in the history of videogames—its most appetising material goods literally zip past you, on the street or in the skies, and whether you grind or vouch for real-money Shark Cards, everything you see can be yours.
Moreover, 2019’s Diamond Casino update let us live out our best Ocean’s Eleven-inspired fantasies. In 2020, the Cayo Perico update gave us a desert island to explore at a time when freely roaming beyond our doorsteps in the height of strict quarantine measures was impossible. And in 2021, The Contract brought Dr Dre out of retirement to not only star in a string of dedicated missions, but also drop new and exclusive music on the Los Santos airwaves. GTA Online, now almost 13 years-deep (11 on PC), is a dynasty.
The roleplay scene is a less obnoxious beast. It’s a breeding ground for imagination, for storytelling, for daft capers and spending loads of valuable real-world time in-game collecting garbage in order to buy a banged up truck that winds up getting wrecked in a bout of high-stakes hide-and-seek. And, while the latter example is a very specific one, it’s also exactly what I want when I need a break from the balls-out the bathwater fare of vanilla GTA Online.
In 2026, the GTA Online economy exists to fuel an endless streak of hedonism, nefarious activity and chaos, whereas the majority of life sim-styled RP spaces reflect reality—where saving up for one single banged up truck can take literal months of investment, and reckless behaviour has genuine in-game ramifications. Having failed to pay for car insurance, you see, my truck has remained in bits in the yard of a building site in downtown LS for weeks.
When GTA Online 2.0 comes around, then, I’m hoping for two variations—one akin to GTA Online right now, where money is plentiful and excess rules all; and another more in-line with the roleplay scene, where money is tight and earned through toil and toll. Even from the outside looking in at this moment in time, it seems Rockstar has the unhinged side of the next Grand Theft Auto nailed down, something best referenced in that first Tom Petty-soundtracked trailer at the tail end of 2023. Its deference to the social media world that encompasses pretty much everything we do in the modern age was uncanny, yet I’d love to see this super-realistic slant on new-gen Vice City given the same super-realistic rules the current GTA RP spectrum has down to a T.
All of which could probably be chalked off as wishful thinking were it not for Rockstar’s aforementioned Cfx.re acquisition. To my mind, this is one of the most elusive and intriguing facets of where GTA Online goes next, and it’s something that could stand number six’s PC iteration apart. Give me both, please, and I’ll almost certainly hang around for another several thousand hours.
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