Grand Theft Auto Online is a persistent multiplayer open world game, full of excitement and adventure at every turn. It’s not just gun heists and carjacking these days… jump out of planes over beautiful vistas or arm wrestle a gangster in the back alley, it’s all up to you. What path will you take?
GTA Online is its own beast: building your criminal empire in this part of the game requires navigating through a very different dynamic, with earnings and progression separate from those found in the story campaign. In fact, Rockstar’s aim is to spin this off into its own separate entity altogether. That’s why GTA Online is being built on a separate development schedule, and why it will release shortly after GTAV on October 1 via a patch to the main game. But don’t worry; you’ll be able to get yourself suitably hyped up thanks to a countdown timer Rockstar plans to include in the game prior to the patch.
The whole thing takes place within a world that aims to feel far more alive than any of Rockstar’s previous multiplayer offerings. Switching over to GTA Online, you’re immediately dropped into a world shared by 16 players. No need to match up with other people using some free-roaming lobby–merely jumping into GTA Online is enough to tell the game you’re ready to free-roam alongside other players.
As a free-roaming experience, Grand Theft Auto Online is full of all these little opportunities for running into other players and mucking about in the sandbox. (Pro Tip: Deposit your money into your bank account as often as you can. When another player kills you, they can snatch the wallet right from your dead body.) But there’s more to it than unorganized chaos. Like GTAV’s story campaign, GTA Online features a mission progression where a series of larger and more elaborate heists offer you the chance to pad your bank account and cement your status as a master criminal.
These are missions unique to multiplayer and as such they’ve been designed for a cooperative style of play. One of the missions Rockstar showed was a large-scale operation requiring a crew of players to sneak into an airport, take out a crew of armed guards, and fly away in a military cargo plane. If that weren’t challenging enough, the players also had to fly it clear across the map and successfully land the thing in a ramshackle airstrip out in the middle of nowhere.
