Ever since the success of GTA Online, Rockstar Games has gone downhill and constantly disappoints people. They never seem to fix problems with their games. What used to be one of the best video game creators has become a shell of what it once was.
Security
My biggest problem with Rockstar is how networking in their games work. Due to GTA Online and Red Dead Online being peer to peer and not using a server for sessions, it is very easy for people to pull IPs of other players. The biggest issue with people obtaining IPs is they usually intend to boot you offline. The other issue is IP pullers can get your general location, although it only reveals where the ISP is located and location accuracy can vary from a street away from your location to towns away. Booting, unlike everything else wrong with these games, affects you in real life due to your internet not working at all until the attack stops or you somehow change your IP or use a different connection. This issue could be fixed if Rockstar switched to servers for session hosting but despite owning probably the most profitable multiplayer game ever, player security is an extremely big issue when playing GTA Online or Red Dead Online. However, booters shouldn't scare you as most of them are children that looked up "how to pull ips" on YouTube then went and bought a $2 service and now call themselves hackers. To protect yourself against booters, VPNs from what I know, can provide protection against booting as long as the booter doesn't get your real IP. This problem must be fixed and if the PS5 and Xbox Series versions don't fix this, it will prove that Rockstar just does not give a single shit about the security of their players. PlayStation parties also had the problem of people being able to pull IPs; however, I have no idea if this is still possible or if the 'server only' connection setting does anything to stop this if it wasn't fixed already.
The Rockstar Games Social Club is an insecure system that has/had many exploits. One of the biggest security problems Social Club had was modders on PC being able to use mod menus in peoples' single player games and I believe this happened twice. Another problem Social Club had was one time (if not more), on an official Rockstar GTA Online stream with 2 celebrities, someone managed to use Social Club notifications to send whatever they wanted to say to the people playing so it would show on stream. This stream also showed bugs in the Casino Heist that weren't supposed to happen. I am also aware that on PC, modders are able to obtain your Social Club ID and probably do things that aren't good.
Cheaters
I'm not gonna even talk about modders on PC and PS3/360, if you don't already know, GTA Online on those platforms pretty much just lets modders do whatever they want, Rockstar doesn't care unless it's modded money. On PS4/Xbox One, despite having no modders, there are several in-game glitches that allow people to cheat in various ways such as using godmode, teleportation, and infinite orbital strikes. And these exploits have been in the game for years and still not fixed. Rockstar will fix any money exploit within days and remove fun glitches that have no actual impact on the game such as the fence that made cars fly and opening the back of a Titan to put cars inside but literal cheats that have been in the game for years are still here.
A while ago, there was an exploit that gave people a lot of money in GTA but Rockstar quickly removed it and wiped the characters of anyone that was caught using it. While I despise people cheating in multiplayer games to make money, Rockstar completely wiping characters was unjustified and should have just removed the illegitimate funds and placed people in the bad sport pool for some time.
Gameplay And Economy (GTA)
GTA Online has become a science-fiction over-militarized mess of a game. Ever since Gunrunners, almost every content update has introduced militarized and futuristic vehicles that completely change the freemode metas until we got the Oppressor MKII and the game hasn't been the same since. Almost all combat encounters involve weaponized or specialized vehicles now. It makes me miss the old days when children in Pogo masks with pink Carbine Rifles throwing sticky bombs was your biggest threat.
Most of the stuff you can do in GTA Online has become completely worthless as people mostly care about money and PVP combat making whatever doesn't make the most money not worth playing. People rarely play any of the pre-Cayo Perico heists anymore and contact missions have horrible rewards for the time spent doing them compared to other activities. Money is what motivates people to play missions, heists, and gamemodes but there has been no tweaking to the payouts of any of these. Vehicles, properties, and other assets also keep getting more expensive as older gamemodes keep their bad payouts and newer gamemodes get better payouts making it only worth playing new stuff. Shark Cards have also maintained the same prices for the same amount of money all these years and are a complete ripoff (all micro-transactions are a ripoff regardless but you get the point).
Ever since Import/Export, Rockstar has made enemies extremely more annoying by increasing their accuracy to where they can constantly get hits on you even when going over 100 miles per hour. Playing pre-Import/Export missions vs post-Import/Export, you can easily tell the difference in enemy accuracy. Enemies can also fire rounds much faster than the speed that weapons are supposed to fire, this is especially true with enemies that will spawn right in front of you. Rockstar designed certain missions so that an enemy spawn will surprise and kill you almost instantly and there is no way to escape death once this enemy has spawned unless you already prepared. While increasing enemy health and accuracy is annoying, spawning insta-kill enemies to try to force a mission failure, I find unreasonable. Dealing with these types of enemies is especially tedious when playing in free aim which I do. Rockstar also removed the quickest Motorcycle Club sell mission 'due to a bug' but years later, never fixed this so called bug nor made the mission available again. Rockstar designs many missions to make you fail so that it takes longer to make money and therefore consider buying Shark Cards to skip the work. They then encourage others to destroy supplies/product for virtually no reward. You could spend hours doing work for a business only for someone in a weaponized vehicle to come and easily destroy all your work and make hours of time wasted. While you can close the app when this happens, many people don't know this and it's an external fix to a problem that shouldn't exist or have much lower loss. This again, is all so you are pushed to buy Shark Cards. Instead of making a game that is fun to play, Rockstar designed the game to get you hooked on earning money while making it tedious to do so whether by player intervention or mission design especially when you aren't a long time player and able to obtain the wealth to buy stuff to defend yourself or make missions easier.
I have noticed that with each update, the game's performance decreases. The framerate will go below 20fps at around 16 players in a session or in the low 10s if it's full and The Diamond Casino and LS Car Meet interiors have always had bad framerates. The game freezes more commonly with each update too. When the Diamond Casino update came out, I noticed the game would freeze for about a second when near the Diamond Casino. As of The Contract update, the game will freeze for about 10 seconds around the Diamond Casino, many seconds in other places, and pop-in is much more noticeable than it used to be. Game freezes occur just as long even when in a job with one other person. As of The Criminal Enterprises, pop-in has become a major occurrence on 8th generation consoles.
Gameplay And Economy (RDO)
Back when Red Dead Online came out on RDR2, there was so little to actually do and earning money was painful. How I heard one person describe it was something like "Stuff costs what it would today but you earn money like it's 1899.". The best way to earn money was to launch a mission, wait 15 minutes, hunting while you do, then do the mission because Red Dead Online uses the same bullshit GTA Online uses for its jobs where the longer it takes, the more you earn instead of having a flat rate to incentivise efficiency. I only played Red Dead Online in the first couple months of RDR2's existence but people that play keep saying Rockstar half-asses the game and complain about all the updates and how bad they are.
Bugs
Rockstar just won't fix bugs in their games. The same bugs have been in GTAV for years and still not fixed. The earliest example I noticed was gun magazines being nonexistent during cutscenes, while I believe this was finally fixed in 2019 or 2020, for years, during cutscenes in online and Story Mode, even when guns were being fired, there was no magazine in the gun. Currently, one of the most infamous bugs is the 'yellow circle' bug where certain objective markers won't trigger a completion state when you touch them making a mission impossible to finish. This has been around for a long time and has never been fixed. The Casino Heist is extremely buggy and has so many bugs from having a full arsenal during the mission to spawning inside the Diamond Casino itself or other places when starting the mission. One bug that completely baffled me is somehow, a corner of the Casino Heist planning board being your phone's background. Sometimes when playing someone else's Casino or Cayo Perico Heist, the game will think you're the host and wipe the progress of your currently active heist and you will have to do setups over again. None of these or the many other bugs have been fixed and probably never will be at least until the PS5/Xbox Series versions if even then which I doubt. Almost every other developer of a multiplayer game constantly fixes their bugs except for Rockstar who just does not care and refuses to fix almost anything unless it can make people money faster.
"Expanded And Enhanced"
The PS5 and Xbox Series versions of GTAV are coming and the announcement and trailer for the game just seemed like a giant "Fuck you" to everybody. The announcement used PS3 footage and the trailer was a mess. In the trailer, we see Rockstar didn't bother adding reflections to car mirrors in first person, Lester's chair is duplicated clipping into the other chair, bad glare effects that look like they come from one of those bad 'GTAVI Hyperrealistic Graphics Mod' videos, and yellow license plates. And to top it all off at the very end, we see GTA Online as jets and Deluxos fly by with an explosion as a finale of disappointment going against a lot if not most players' wishes to end the current futuristic/over-militarized state of GTA Online. The encore of disappointment will be finding out the game costs $70, runs at 30fps, and still uses P2P posing a security risk every time I play.
Encore
The game has now been released on PS5/Xbox Series. For Story Mode from what I've seen, it's fine, just minor graphical improvements and the game can actually run at 60fps. Although the game is being milked, rereleases, remasters, and remakes do help with preserving games. The game is $40 instead of $70 also. It's still a horrible base price but at least it's not full price. However, GTA Online is a mess. For whatever reason, Rockstar decided that transferring your character to current gen would delete the character on last gen. Why? Who the hell knows? I don't see why they wouldn't be able to just fork the character's progress like they did from PS3/360 to PS4/Xbox One. The game is still P2P so the game is still a security risk. Something absolutely baffling that no one expected was GTA+. Rockstar has decided to launch a subscription service where you waste $6/£5 for 500k GTA$ per month, an old vehicle, a bad property location, 50k GTA$, some clothes, some vehicle cosmetics, and 2 job bonuses. You get a top tier yacht which is the only thing of any value here though. Everything else is next to useless and 500k per month is a ripoff since you can easily make 1-1.5mil GTA$ in an hour. You also get Shark Card bonuses. Now instead of Shark Cards being a complete ripoff to the point where the value of the $100/£65 Shark Card can be earned in well less than 8 hours, you get about a 10% bonus to all Shark Cards, still being a complete ripoff.
Sources
Security, paragraph 2: https://youtu.be/GL11jHKhOLo 0:00-3:33 (Shows clips of modders affecting others' Story Mode, source links in description are dead.)
Security, paragraph 2: https://youtu.be/2JVKXzXmT9c 25:10-31:37 (Official Rockstar stream showing custom Social Club notifications and Diamond Casino Heist bugs.)
"Expanded And Enhanced": https://youtu.be/VNbONMSObfs 0:08, 0:19, 0:35, 0:37, 1:00 (E&E trailer, time codes in order of appearance: Duplicated chair, no mirror reflection, overdone bloom, yellow license plates, explosion of disappointment.)
Encore: Rockstar Newswire Post Archive (Rockstar Newswire post about GTA+.)
Post-Publication Notes
- As of 2022-7-26 update, you can sell/source for all businesses in private sessions.
- GTA Online character progress is no longer wiped on previous generation consoles and is now forked.
Written 2021-11-4/8/12 Published 2021-12-1 Updated 2023-9-1