Opinion: what's next for Grand Theft Auto online?

It’s easy to forget that Grand Theft Auto is a game ostensibly about cars. That the ‘auto’ in the title is short for ‘automobile’, rather than ‘automatic weaponry’. Or perhaps ‘autopsy backlog’. Or even ‘auto-erotic hand gesture’. I’ve seen that one a few times after losing a round of Team Deathmatch in GTA Online.

Back when the concept for the original Grand Theft Auto was percolating inside the massive brains of some 1990s video game developers, it had the extremely twee working title of Race’n’Chase, which suggested even greater emphasis on driving and less on unloading an entire magazine of ammunition on a group of mobsters.

Grand Theft Auto these days is basically unrecognisable when compared to its humble automotive origins, telling sprawling, complex crime stories in an utterly convincing simulation of a North American metropolis, where even the flip flops accurately flip and flop like they’re supposed to. That was some animator’s job for a week.

This mutation only accelerated with the introduction of GTA Online, the enormously popular and thus lucrative multiplayer version of GTA V. Sure, Rockstar provided the broad structure of this online mode, but once players were let loose in the sandbox, it didn’t take long before they were making their own fun.

I was reminded of this while watching a documentary film called Grand Theft Hamlet, in which bored, out of work actors stuck at home during the pandemic decide to stage a performance of Hamlet inside GTA Online. If you’ve ever played GTA Online you’ll have immediately identified the problem with that scheme: that you’re likely to be interrupted, at any time, by a surprise airstrike from someone with a username that can’t be repeated on a respectable website like this one. I don’t know much about Shakespeare, but I know Hamlet is supposed to die at the end, not halfway through from a hellfire missile attack. Still, the award winning film, shot entirely inside the game, is an uplifting way to spend an hour and a half.

Grand Theft Hamlet did get me thinking about what the GTA 6 incarnation of Online might look like. There are zero concrete details, beyond assumptions the new Miami-inspired Vice City map will become a playable location in multiplayer. In the past couple of years, though, Rockstar has quietly invested in modding teams who have been instrumental in facilitating weird and wonderful new ways to play the game, such as ‘roleplaying’ servers where everyone plays a character rather than the usual enigmatic murderous psychopath.

It suggests that while developers at Rockstar might have been as surprised as we were by how GTA Online has grown out of its petri dish, this time they’ll be ready. If you’re already struggling with fitting trivial things like work, family and exercise in around the important business of playing GTA Online, it’s about to get a whole lot tougher...