Everything That Happened In GTA Online 2021 & Where Is GTA 6?

Image: Rockstar / Kotaku Games

Rockstar’s hugely popular Grand Theft Auto franchise is in a strange place in 2021. It’s a series of games that remains huge, despite years without a big new release. Its online iteration is more popular than ever, yet if you look around Reddit and Twitter you’ll assume it doesn’t have fans.

And then on top of all that, Rockstar released a pretty nice but totally broken collection of remastered GTA classics and decided to fight modders throughout the year as well.

And still, no GTA 6, even though it evolves randomly online over and over again. So yeah, it was a weird year.

2021 has started off pretty well, with a fun video of Gerald “Slink” Johnson and Shawn Fonteno re-enacting their roles as Lamar and Franklin. in a real-life recreation of GTA V’s infamous roast scene. RGT play a role also exploded still on Twitch, also featuring non-GTA characters. And in February, clever and clever modders reverse-engineered the source code of Vice City and GTA III, opening up the possibility of porting these classics to more platforms.

Meanwhile, another tech-savvy fan even went to fix the horrible load times on the PC version of GTA Online and Rockstar paid them $ 10,000 to do it.

However, things quickly took a turn for the worse and a slew of bad news for GTA fans and gamers began.

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First, Rockstar and Take-Two released a DMCA takedown against the people behind the GTAIII and Vice City source code project. Some developers held firm against Take-Two and all that leads to a lawsuit still in progress.

Then Take-Two started to use legal threats and DMCA withdrawals to remove old GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas mods from the Internet. This angered modders, some of whom found mods almost ten years old removed due to legal deletions. Other creators have closed and removed old GTA mods for fear of legal reprisals from the publisher. (By the way, Take-Two still does. Last month, the publisher reportedly removed GTA IV mods, including a save file, from a popular GTA community site.)

All of this fueled new speculation that Rockstar was planning to release remastered versions of the classic GTA trilogy. In August, Kotaku confirmed to sources that all the rumors were true. and Rockstar planned to release remastered ports of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas on all major consoles, including Switch.

Image: Rockstar / Kotaku Games

Later in the year, as the hype built around these remasters, Rockstar and Take-Two once again angered the community. remove the original editions of the classic trilogy from digital storefronts.

Meanwhile, in the land of jetbikes and long charging times, it’s GTA Online, the game received its first of two major free updates. The first one arrived in July. This summer update was all about street racing and used fast cars to commit various crimes and street races.. If that sounds a lot like Fast and Furious, well… that’s because the update was basically Rockstar’s adaptation of those movies. (Well, the first ones at least.) It was a great update, widely appreciated by the community, and I felt like Rockstar was actually listening to its player base who had long wanted more culture content. automobile in GTA Online. Oh, the update also added a near-impossible-to-kill Terminator knockoff. Like I said before, weird year.

Around the same time, Take-Two was trying to convince investors that Rockstar Games had a very diverse range of games which included GTA V … uh … GTA Online, and … hmmm … GTA V, again … OH! and Red Dead Redemption II. The reality is that Rockstar Games has spent nearly the last decade ignoring most of its popular franchises and not making new games that don’t start with Grand or Red.

As September came, it seemed that GTA 6 was more and more random in 2021 than in the past. This was due to a few factors including false rumors reported by sites and a growing demand from GTA fans who wanted to hear something about the next entry in the series. Things got so bad in 2021 that someone crashed a live TV show just to shout about GTA 6. As I write this in mid-December, it seems extremely unlikely that 2021 will be the year that Rockstar Games finally confirms and announces Grand Theft Auto 6. There is always next year, right?

Adding to the growing frustration of GTA fans, the news that the release of GTA V and GTA Online PS5 and Xbox Series X / S ports have been delayedD. Originally, these ports were to be released in November. But at a big PlayStation event hosted by Sony, Rockstar released a new trailer that didn’t impress fans and announced a four month delay. It didn’t help that as the event approached, there were more and more rumors (and unfounded) that GTA 6 would be revealed or even a trailer for the ever-remastered Classic Trilogy. gossip.

None of that happened and instead an almost ten-year-old game was delayed in 2021.

In October, GTA Online received a small Halloween update who added deadly cars and NPC slashers to the online town of Los Santos. He also added deadly clowns. And if you’ve looked up at the sky during the spooky month of October, GTA Online was infested with UFOs. While not as cool as the Tuners update, it was a fun way to celebrate the best party, Halloween.

Finally, after a lot of leaks, Rockstar confirmed on October 22 that the GTA remasters are real and would be released on November 11. The new ports would feature newly created textures and models and would also use GTA V type controls. Everything sounded so good …

Of course, if you’ve been to Kotaku or any other video game website in the past few weeks, you know how the remastered collection went. Not great.

While it looked good every now and then, he suffered from many bugs, including the rain which was painful to watch and terrible mannequins, and other unwanted visual adjustments. It was a real shipwreck. Hell, people who datamined the remakes even found leftovers from the infamous Hot Coffee. contained in GTA San Andreas. Ouch!

The reaction to GTA The Trilogy: Definitive Edition has been so bad and so sustained that Rockstar finally issued a rare apology November 19. Not only that, the publisher has announced plans to bring classic versions of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andres back to PC gamers through its Rockstar Games store. And owners of the remastered collection would get the returning classics for free.

Read more: The year of the game’s apology

Since the release of the remastered collection, modders tried to fix and improve Games. However, many GTA modders and tinkerers decided to ditch this one., citing how Take-Two Interactive has treated them throughout 2021. * Insert the “It’s Ironic Palpatine” GIF here. *

Rockstar and Grove Street Games, the developers behind the remastered Ports, have also released a few collection updates since the disastrous launch. These updates actually fixed a lot of things and made the games more playable.. But the developers still have a lot of work ahead of them if they are serious about fixing these remasters. It seems clear now that these things needed more time in the oven.

But Rockstar was able to end the year on a positive note with the release of the latest GTA Online update. This new update, The Contract, stars Dr. Dre and takes place about a decade after the events of GTA V. Not only has this update added some awesome new tracks on GTA Online radio waves, but it also included some missions that looked like they’d been ripped from an unreleased single-player GTA game.

That’s a shame GTA Online is still, all these years later, some sort of broken mess that takes forever to load. But when you can play the new update, it’s one of the best Rockstar has made. He’s even provided lore nerds like me with new insight into Michael De Santa’s post-GTA V status.. Cared for! Additionally, this now means that Dr. Dre is an actual character in the GTA Online universe.

Sadly, on December 16, as GTA Online on PS4, Xbox One, and PC received a whole new update, the original versions of the game on Xbox 360 and PS3 were shut down by Rockstar Games. The company had announced plans to shut down the servers for these aging versions of the game earlier in the year, but it was still sad to watch the game’s final moments on Twitch that day. TEAR.

And with that, the year is almost over. Sure, Obsessed fans of GTA 6 didn’t get what they wanted and the remastered trilogy was a disaster that still hasn’t been fixed. But a few good updates from GTA Online have helped ensure that 2021 isn’t a totally terrible year for the GTA community.

Hopefully 2022 brings better news, better games, and fewer chases.