Grand Theft Farrago?

In the interests of transparency, I should point out that I am a paid-up owner of Grand Theft Auto V. I should also add that I can’t really talk about controversial content, as so far all I’ve done in-game is get a “trendy” haircut, buy an Audi, listen to AOR and play the stock market; meaning that I’ve essentially turned the biggest game of the year into a middle age simulator. Even worse, someone nicked the Audi, rendering a large portion of my achievements worthless.

From a technology side, it’s been fascinating to see how much attention a number of bugs and distribution errors, common in most games to some extent or another, have been given: magnified it seems by the game’s notoriety.

First was the game “leaking” early: in this case by stores breaking the launch date and shipping early to customers or even simply putting the game out on the shelves at a near-100% mark-up. As a PR, I’m no stranger to embargoes and even less to them being broken. In this case, the obvious question is whether this has helped or hindered Rockstar Games (or had no effect) and whether it will continue to be an issue in the future. What it might change is Rockstar’s relationship with its channel, and how much it really needs the retailers and their distribution chains. Of course, with online distribution becoming a big thing for many forms of media, whether through a third party service or in-house, it may need those retailers less and less.

The second was the report that cars “bought” (ahem) in the game and customised could disappear: a bug that might be expected in a game keeping track of a massive number of in-game objects on hardware that’s the best part of a decade old. While others have been reported, from scenery issues to companion apps failing to work as expected, the disappearing cars was the big news: making it as far as the BBC. The same happened as GTA Online launched last week: login errors, bugs and software failures that seem to be becoming part of the course in online games were swiftly elevated to national news status.

Both of these issues are ones that may be served by an increasingly online society and “the cloud” (incidentally, it’s worth listening to GTA V’s radio stations for a more in-depth explanation of the tech). Online distribution and updates to software could mean that this is the last generation of games to face these particular issues. Then again, with the knowledge that problems can be patched away, it may well make several of them worse.