2026-09-08 GTA Online Butthole Edition

Usually I find it dreadful the video game industry, and how incorrect the mean position is of gamers. I have, however, found it somewhat amusing seeing a number of stories about GTA6. Watching them flit by me without a care because of how not interested in that shitpile I am. With that being said, it has made me reminisce on GTA Online and I was considering what the butthole edition of that (game?) might look like. Given how far away from the butthole we are.

All of the rancid bullshit would be drained, obviously. We're lancing it like a boil. Its default state would be the private lobby. The psychopaths can have their public servers if they want. Far away from us. Shark cards are gone. There is no concept of real money becoming fake digital monopoly bucks. We are making a game here. Our goal is for fun to be had. You purchase the thing and then you have it. It is yours. We will be doing either private servers that one can run or just peer to peer where one person acts as the host.

On the topic of the stupid digital money, I have this distinct memory from the old days. Alex and I found there was one mission that was super simple and could be repeated ad infinitum. It gave you the most amount of money that we could get for where we were in the "story" of GTA Online. But the mission rewards scaled with how long the mission took. (Not how quickly you can do the mission, as you might reasonably assume. The opposite.) So there was this weird incentive to do this mission and then sit a block away from the target to let the clock tick up to some predetermined max amount before finishing. I think something on the order of 10-15 minutes. Might be confabulation though. Could've been slightly shorter. In either case we'd like, do the mission and it would take us two minutes. We would then sit in a car jerking each other off for fully 8+ minutes just talking. Because the incentives for the game were so perverse. No, it wasn't fun. We were going for pure efficiency. Theoretically you'd be more efficient to do the mission as quickly as possible (so you could fit more missions in total in the same amount of time). But doing so invited disaster and and so we went with safe efficiency over actual fun because the pricing of all the items was so fucking insane that you just could not get anything in any reasonable period of time without resorting to degenerate tactics.

There's a centrality to your bank account in GTA Online that used to make me mad but at this point just makes me roll my eyes. It interfaces with everything. Every single activity, the point is make number go up at the end. Every tangible reward you can get requires you have a bank account with a compounding interest in order to afford. It's depressingly empty. Fucking about with friends can be such fun. Which I think really is borne out if you look at the state of friendslop on steam in this day and age. People want toys where they can just fuck about with their friends. Who knew! So I think one of the overriding decisions that needs to be made is pushing back on how central money is to this experience. We want to prioritize the part of the experience where the actual dopamine is hitting. My thought is that what we need to do is make GTA Online more of a campaign. Something that can be started and eventually finished, rather than the ever-changing live service money pit that it is. (Because removing that financial flywheel means we no longer have any reason to string you along forever. You can keep playing in the sandbox if you want, but I want to provide an off-ramp. We played GTAO. We had fun while doing so. We are now done playing GTAO.)

There's sort of almost a campaign already in place. When you start a character in GTAO, you get off the plane, are briefly introduced to Los Santos and then start to be assigned your little missions. And as you rank up and do the missions for people, there is a mechanic where you get introduced to more characters who give out more missions to meet more people, etc. etc. GTAO takes place canonically before the events of the main game. There's not an enormous sense of progression. You do start doing missions for more important people that have a little more complexity to them. But it's a pretty gentle slope. Literally none of the psychopath public lobby people care about this. But if we're taking a step back and reevaluating everything, my first thought is "What is the story we are actually wanting to tell?" GTAO serving as a soft prequel to the main game sets us up for a nice little rise and fall story.

So I would begin much as we already do. You get off the plane, you're introduced to some of the starting ne'er-do-well's of this foul land. But I would then make the core focus of the experience creating and building up a crew. The crew structure was the standard multiplayer clan system that most of these sorts of games have. It rarely served much of a purpose for us, given we were always playing in private lobbies. I think there was some slight reward boosting? Extra money and leveling maybe? But that's really all it was. And I've already talked about how we're gonna bring that damn inflation down. So I would approach this from a different perspective. What could crews be? I would have one of the starting quest givers suggest forming a posse. Los Santos is a dangerous place. Lot less dangerous if you have people who got your back. And with more pooled resources you'd be able to take on bigger jobs. I would plant the idea early that we are leading toward the vaunted heists. This is a sore spot for me. A good 95% of our GTA playtime was from the pre-heist era. They did not exist yet, but were a thing constantly alluded to. Always on the horizon. We salivated waiting for Godot to arrive. And then when he did, we didn't have enough dipshits to even play the thing because only 3 of us were regularly having fun together. And a fourth we had at the time had their xbox explode in the middle of one of the first heists. Sucks. Our playtime also started dropping around that time and we largely moved on.

I would have the story of the GTAO be you forming and growing a crew. Crafting your little fiefdom. Perhaps give you the option to start in different neighborhoods? You can start in a richer neighborhood where the pickings are nicer but the police have a better response and things are riskier. Or go off in Franklin/San Andreas land where there's a lot more crime and you'll run into other groups going for the slim pickings. But less police, so more freedom to just violence your way to success. Just throwing ideas out. As you get larger and start pulling off bigger jobs, you butt up against the NPC mission givers. Rather than all being mutually inclusive, (where they all just function as a quest receptacle with slightly different flavored cutscenes) I think I would have it where they do conflict. Some can be friends, others enemies. Doing business with one should put a target on your back from others. I want there to be a sense of maintaining a delicate balance that gets more delicate the farther you push. Piss off one enough and maybe they'll start putting hits out on your crew. Eventually though, you get big enough and start doing large enough jobs that you come to Lester's attention. We start doing the proper heists.

I would like for the heists to be more friendly to variable number of participants. Old scars...Besides I think it's a fun concept giving you a bit more leeway to customize to your liking. Maybe you think you don't really need two people guarding. One will do, right?...I'll say that I don't really respect Rockstar's game design ethos for missions. My understanding is that they have been this way forever. And you're either sensitive to it or not. When you're in the open world, it is your oyster. The moment you get into a mission, it's paint by numbers. Go here, do this. Go here, kill this. Go off the beaten path in even the slightest way? Wasted. I'll repeat again what I said at the end of my RDR2 review that I don't really respect Rockstar's underlying game design ethos. Rockstar says the player is a little baby that can't possibly handle any amount of freedom. But...they make games that are essentially sandboxes? I really don't understand the dichotomy between the two game modes. Why they aren't married to some degree. When was the last time Rockstar made a game where in one of the missions they give you a general goal and leave it to you to figure out how to do it? No, I'm really asking because every game of theirs that I've played the missions could just as easily have been played for me with how little control I really had. If you want to make movies, Rockstar, that is an industry that is available.

As you move up in the GTAO Butthole Edition, I want you to be given more freedom. I fucking love the idea of being given a vague goal of "rob this bank". And having to work out with your fellow dipshits how to accomplish that. At least being given various options to pick and choose from. Give you something to come together and argue over and advocate for. The deliciousness of saying "I dunno, I think we should really do X because Y", being ignored, and being proven exactly right when things go sideways and so having to pivot in the middle of bullets flying is not a taste GTAO ever chooses to indulge in. But it's there and available. And oh so appropriate given the crime story genre we are experiencing.

What are we working towards? I think you know. The one that went wrong. You build up a crew, establish an empire. You've got fancy cars, properties, a private jet. Then you bite off more than you can chew. I would end the story of GTAO with a huge heist that stands to make you millions. But I would have it have it all fall apart. Maybe you're betrayed. Maybe we have a standoff with the Bolivian Army where our protags know all is lost and so choose to go out in ab laze of glory into the gunfire. In some sense we make it clear that you flew too close to the sun and the crew will inevitably fall to ruin and make the way for the GTA5 story to happen. In my mind's eye, I see this really dreadful instance where your character goes to their bank account and sees a big fat zero as the government has moved in. The delightful gut punch of that. Probably not actually permanent but my sicko desire would be to make it so. To push the boulder up the hill and to know in your heart of hearts where it will inevitably end up.

That would be my big restructuring to the experience. I do have couple more nitpicks. One thing I dislike about Rockstar's games is they're just so cynical. Well beyond what I feel is acceptable. Everyone is shit, everything is shit. It's so teenager-coded that it feels nauseating to me. I felt this when I was a teenager, mind. So I can only imagine how that would be a stronger conviction at this point if I ever were to play these games again. I know that by and large the point of a GTA is to be a toy that you fuck about with. There has to be some level of removal for us to all be fine with driving at 9,000 miles an hour, running over dozens of people, getting 5 wanted stars, getting blasted to cinders. Only to wake up in a hospital, out only a few thousand dollars. Ready to begin the day again. So I have no intention of like...rehabilitating the series' image. Rather, I just want us to take a step back from the ledge. Saint's Row is literally right next to us. Having a gay old time. Doing much of the same thing as a GTA but in a way that doesn't make my skin crawl. We understand that it feels different launching a car 500 feet into the air to have it perfectly land on top of an orphanage, leaving it a blasted hole in the ground. Than to like just straight-up torturing a guy. The difference is taste. GTA to me often lacks taste. It can be quite fun, but it contains nuggets of shit that I'd rather not have to eat around. I want the parodying to be more...funny? Less mean-spirited. GTA sometimes feels very similar to like a South Park or other such ilk. Languishing in its enlightened centrism. Where to have a position or to hold an opinion is a moral failure. You have to be above it. Above what? It. Everything. Everything is stupid and shit and you are the one who sees that. You are cool. Gross and ick and I do not like. Gives me a skeezy feeling whenever I run into it.

I would redo armor. Annoying-ass system. A thing you have to go to the store every time to re-up. But the shit's made of paper-mache and disappears after taking 3 bullets. Most of the time we ignored it completely because it was simply too annoying. Do something like you have X free armor refreshes stored in your car's trunk. But you have to get into a place where you can actually pop the trunk and put it on.

I would add more random interactions. I recall one of our ventures in the old days was beach day. We decided randomly that we were not feeling the missions. And so we went out and bought appropriate attire and hung out at the beach/boardwalk. Riding the fair rides. Stealing some boats. Ending with a friendly beach brawl with the fellas that eventually brought in the boys in blue. No Rockstar approval needed. I would provide more avenues for this sort of emergent storytelling by adding in more places with interactions. More buildings with actual interiors that one could explore. More.

That's all that comes to me at the moment, but if I think of any more I will add. Also the characters do have visible buttholes.