The final days of 2016 are slowly trickling away and the gaming press is abuzz with all kinds of end-of-year awards and nominations. Rockstar is closing a strong year for GTA Online, which saw many sales, updates, and changes to the game. While many of these changes were positive — about which you can read here — some weren't as well received. 2016 being a horrible year has become something of a meme on the internet and some events in GTA Online fit this theme pretty well.
Luckily, the good aspects outweigh the bad, but Rockstar had a few fights on their hands this past year and they didn't get around to hammering out some of the issues that began to show on their three-year-old multiplayer title. Here's hoping the issues in this list will be addressed sometime next year.
April Lowriders
While the DLC model for GTA Online fell into place near the tail end of the year starting with Further Adventures in Finance and Felony, Rockstar had a few stumbles earlier in 2016. Even though the main Lowriders update was long released in 2015, the devs were still trying to ride that wave into 2016. In April, we got a version of the current "major update first, minor additions after" model with the whole major update part cut out. Custom Classics and the standalone lowrider vehicles were pretty much all we got by way of DLC for more than a month. Sure, it was free and we should be thankful for free DLC, but after Rockstar got the community hooked on major updates beforehand, it was hardly enough to keep people hooked. While the April Lowrider season was a concrete anchor of this, there was a longer DLC drought around that time too.
Why this sucked: The community had to go months without any kind of proper DLC.
Weapon Management Only Half Solved
While GTA Online has been pretty much universally praised by players and critics alike, if there's one design criticism that always came back, it's the weapon wheel. The method used to select weapons is a hot mess of inconvenience, as our character will always be carrying all the weapons we've ever bought. While the weapon wheel is neatly separated into categories, we need to scroll through each weapon within a given category each time we're looking for a specific model. When you have dozens of pistols and assault rifles, this just gets tedious, and there is no "favorite" system that defaults on a weapon of your choice. The issue was partially solved by the weapon locker introduced in Further Adventures in Finance and Felony, however, the locker only works while doing CEO missions or in Freemode. The moment you get into a different job or heist, all of your guns are dumped back into your pocket. Plus, this should be a basic feature in the game, not a bonus to be bought.
Why this sucked: We still can't customize loadouts in heists and jobs.
The Banshee 900R Bug
Sure, eventually the bug was fixed, briefly turning the fully upgraded Banshee 900R into the fastest car of the game. But while the error was around, this otherwise cool car was relegated to being nothing more than a showpiece. With the speed at which (no pun intended) the current fastest car in the game is changed, the time any vehicle spends in this prized position is short anyway. Thanks to the bug that caused the upgraded Banshee to be slower than the stock version, we had even less time to enjoy the Banshee while it was top dog than usual. It was overtaken after a very brief stint as fastest car, and knowing that this was caused by a bug added insult to injury. At least it still looks good, right?
Why this sucked: An otherwise neat car was deprived of its chance to shine.
