Why GTA Online Is (and Isnt) Worth Starting in 2022

Actually, the sheer amount of content that GTA Online offers may be less significant than the diversity of content the online game offers. Vehicle races, deathmatches, heists, casino trips, running a criminal enterprise, buying homes, going to flight school, stealing exotic cars, running around the city in free-roam mode…all of that only scratches the surface of what you can do in GTA Online. It’s essentially several full-sized games in one, and each of them offers something slightly different. It dwarves every other GTA game in terms of things to do, and it even rivals some of the biggest MMORPGs in terms of keeping you engaged with new activities over a very long period of time.

On top of all that, GTA Online is practically built around a kind of Animal Crossing/Stardew Valley-like persistent content system that is designed to keep you coming back so that you can manage what you left behind. We’ll get to the notable drawbacks of that approach in a second, but it has to be said there’s something oddly peaceful about that style of game design. There comes a point when you’ll simply feel at home in the little slice of GTA Online you’ll eventually carve out for yourself. For all the guns, gore, and, let’s face it, immaturity we often associate with GTA, it’s strangely amusing that the real draw of GTA Online might be its almost Sims-style embrace of the seemingly mundane. However you look at it, this is a game you can easily lose yourself in. 

GTA Online Is the Closest We’ll Ever Get To a Story-Driven GTA 5 Expansion

To be very honest with you, I probably would have personally taken two big GTA 4-style story expansions over a lot of the story-focused GTA Online updates we got instead. That being said, I don’t know if GTA Online’s story-driven content gets enough credit for basically offering more than a traditional expansion’s worth of narrative-driven content and wrapping the whole thing up in the rest of the GTA Online experience.

GTA Online’s story missions and related narrative content sometimes lack the polish and flavor of single-player GTA campaigns, but they often scratch that itch many have felt since they put down GTA 5’s campaign and never looked back. That’s especially true of GTA Online’s heists, which (after a somewhat rocky start) have grown to offer more of what was arguably the GTA 5 campaign’s best feature. 

It would be disingenuous to simply refer to GTA Online as a kind of MMORPG version of GTA 5, but the game is honestly closer to that ambitious goal than it is further away from it. While I’d like to see the GTA 6’s online mode push a little further in that direction, it’s genuinely impressive that GTA Online features more story-driven content than we likely would have ever gotten from single-player GTA expansions.

GTA Online Is An Incredible Game to Play With Friends

Again, only you know how much this point means to you, but it has to be said that GTA Online really is one of the best online multiplayer games to play with a group of friends. 

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