// PC GAMER — GAMING
Before Grand Theft Auto Online, GTA 4's multiplayer added 'glorious chaos' to the open world sandbox
Liberty City, Liberty City: so big they reviewed it twice. This time: multiplayer.
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There's so much we still don't know about the next Grand Theft Auto. Like when GTA 6 releases on PC or what GTA 6's online mode will even look like. We do know that the console release won't include an online mode out of the gate, perhaps because Take Two was scared that GTA Online would stop printing money if a combined singleplayer & multiplayer launch didn't work out. After the juggernaut that mode has become as a GTA 5 add-on, it's fun to look back on the seeds Rockstar planted with GTA 4's far humbler online mode.
As you'll read below, GTA 4's online mode didn't have anything like the elaborate multi-stage heists, criminal empires or endless odd jobs that have made GTA Online a lifestyle for millions of players over the last decade. It was just a bit of silly fun, and that's no way to generate billions of dollars!
While GTA 4's official multiplayer shut down in 2020, you can still play it today via GTA Connected. It's alive to this day on console, too.
What am I supposed to do? The only response I manage is blinking, laughing loudly and then trying to work out how to activate the firehose. Some bright spark decided that the next game should be a race with trucks. 32 trucks. Of which about 25 or so turn out to be fire engines.
As you may expect, the result is chaos. Glorious chaos. Glorious never-had-anything- like-that-before chaos.
It’s one of those dark secrets of videogaming: if you want to play a GTA game and you’re willing to wait a few months, the PC version is always the best way to go. Always. Back in the day of GTA3, the PC’s generally more potent hardware led to a game that dealt with the cities better, included custom soundtracks and even worked as a shooter. And now, as the next-gen consoles start to get long in the tooth, the PC is building towards something else. Two relevant points here. First, that there’s a degree of future-proofing in GTA’s hardware settings, with options that will only become practical to turn on when PCs catch up. Secondly, the upping of the multiplayer limit from 16 players on the consoles to a 32 on the PC.
While it’s easy to dwell on increased scale of the multiplayer and how that impacts the experience, it shouldn’t overshadow how the addition of multiplayer to the GTA series is—in and of itself—a major step forward. Previously, to experience such a thing you had to turn to mod projects such as Multitheft Auto. Now, it’s just in there, and accessible.