I’ve been a fan of grand theft auto for a long time. I played all the previous iterations until I had squeezed every bit of satisfaction from it. The only reason I ever owned any modern console was because GTA was released there first. Yes, I’ll drive a Vigero just for the way it looks, and drive a Comet smashed beyond recognition as long as it can still turn in at least one direction.
GTAV improved on IV in pretty much every way, except the story is half the length it should be. This was done so that people will grind out the second half of the story in GTA Online. I don’t know what the second half of the story is about, but I’m fairly certain it has something to do with waiting for other players to connect.
Which is fine, apparently. We all know that we live in the age where you could pay for a game what some people pay for rent, and then can reasonably expect it to not work after you install it.
So when I was cut off and shoved into rockstar’s alpha of San Andreas Multiplayer, I found myself cured of my GTA habit. My time playing since the end of the half story has been sporadic. I’d decide to go in to mod some cars and drive around a bit, be greeted instead by a 500MB update.
Being of this age then, you know that these updates are mandatory. No matter if you could give 0.00 fucks about their new half an MP map, which is the totality of the update. No matter whether you haven’t the faintest notion of entering Online again for the foreseeable future. No matter if 500MB of bandwidth at that time could cost you as much as a new game.
Well, after 1.14GB of halloween update, the DRM parasite that has to run attached to every game session has lost my password, and I don’t remember what it is. The reset site is broken. Helpfully, the only other option you’re offered is “quit game”. Because… I tried to come up with a sarcastic reason requiring you to always be connected to the internet to play a single player game, but the truth is there isn’t any reason, not even bad ones.
I can only speculate that rockstar, like microsoft and many others of their kind, have been able to utilise success as nothing else but a vehicle to self-destruction.
What you get when you take a modern game from the internet, via a torrent site, is all the game was designed to be, minus these imposed limitations that I have pointed out. The truth is that there you typically have a better chance of finding a working product than when you pay for it.