Before you’ve even loaded into the map you’re asked to pick a career, and will have spent almost all of your money doubling down on it. This overhaul of GTA Online’s first few hours was undoubtedly long overdue, but it does immediately highlight one of the main issues with the game in its current state. Gunrunner, biker, executive, and nightclub owner are your main options, with the game also nudging you through your first real estate and vehicle purchases. You can then use the career builder to pick a lane. For starters, you’ll get an instant cash injection of $4 million dollars. Whereas a couple of years ago you would load in, pockets filled with little more than pennies and moths, and stand still while you received 200 emails and texts from characters you hadn’t met yet, in 2022 you have a much easier landing. There’s good news on this front, in that Rockstar recently streamlined the onboarding process, with a set of flashy new menus serving as a gentle guiding hand, shepherding the player through the opening hours. Perhaps the most pressing question surrounding GTA Online is how friendly it is to new players. Whether you want to run drugs around the city, roleplay as a business executive, or simply tune-up your cars and take them along to meets, there really is always something to keep you busy. The sheer breadth of things to do is where it thrives, however. Its foundations are old, ancient even, but with the sheer barrage of constant updates from Rockstar, it manages to straddle new and dated ideas simultaneously, to predictably mixed results. GTA Online in 2022 is a particularly strange thing then, and it’s also much unlike anything else in gaming. With microtransactions and optional £4.99 monthly sub. Monetisation: £17.99, or included with GTA5.The shooting is clunky, the characters still control like small shipping frigates, and there’s a general toxicity to its online community that harkens back to the dark days of Modern Warfare 2 lobbies (my mother is a saint, I’ll have you know). Fundamentally, though, GTA Online is still the same game you will have played all those years ago. As such, it’s a very different experience to when it launched, back when the term ‘games as a service’ was still a relatively new idea and Skrillex reigned supreme.

In that time, it’s jumped across three console generations and been bolstered by nearly 40 updates. It’s pretty staggering to think that GTA Online will be celebrating its ninth anniversary later this year.

Is gta 5 online a different game?