Grand Theft Auto Onlineis a beast. The online mode that came withGTA 5evolved into its own thing, eclipsing the base game, and giving Rockstar a pipeline for unlimited money. New heists, missions, items, and of course, Shark Cards meant people will keep putting money into the game. In fact, part of the reason GTA 5 sold so much after launch was because of the shark card packs it would come with.
While GTA Online finally came with GTA 5, it seems that Rockstar was toying with the concept since development onGTA 3began. While we knew a bit about this thanks toa massive Rockstar leakon Christmas, Rockstar veteran Obbe Vermeij revealed a bit more about the process of how GTA Online came to be.
GTA Online Was Always The Plan
“GTA1 and 2 had LAN multiplayer,” tweeted Vermeij. “To save bandwidth, they only sent keypresses between machines — assuming the game state was 100% deterministic. That meant every game had to run in perfect sync, at the framerate of the slowest PC.” However, that didn’t really work out as eventually all the games would drift out of sync. However, they kept attempting it.
“For GTA3, I prototyped a simple deathmatch. Players could kill each other, drag each other from cars, and respawn around the city. It was promising… but we ran out of time. We needed lobbies, scripts working over network etc. We decided to cut the effort.” It seems the studio made progress with every title, but kept hitting a wall when it came to resources.
“We pushed for multiplayer again in Vice City,” he continued. “Even hired a couple of network coders. But with tight deadlines, it was abandoned once more. For San Andreas, we didn’t even try. It was the final PS2-era game — not worth the effort. We added local co-op instead. But yeah… not the same. GTA 4 is when we finally nailed it. 4 programmers and several level designers worked full-time.”
However, it wasn’t until GTA 5 that Rockstar was able to launch GTA Online as it was envisioned – the sheer chaos of the GTA universe in an MMO setting.
