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You know, I never cared about the heists. Mostly because I didn't really care for the heist structures in story mode, but also because GTA Online's canvas offered a lot more than robbing shops and banks. In fact, GTA Online was my reason to buy GTA5, though the grimly inevitable (and weirdly prescient) events surrounding the online side's early days put a dampener on my attempt to dive in as soon as it was enabled and not leave the couch for a week. Once the network issues were sorted, however, it blossomed into a whirlwind romance that delivered GTA's evergreen magic by the bucketload.There are a lot of things wrong with GTA Online. But this article isn't about that. It's about nearly being sick from laughing too much. It's about avoiding the city to head to the mountains for a nice bike ride with buddies. It's about four of you going on a shopping tour in a pal's car and it turning into warfare against the five-o. It's about the glory that happens when GTA becomes GTA plus your friends.
I had a pack of five or six friends that would play regularly. Early on it was every evening, and they were evenings full of laughs. Based purely on the quantity of those laughs, GTA Online is the funniest game I've ever played - it seems that slapstick never loses its base, primal edge (especially when it's the result of ineptitude or over-confidence). GTA Online offered a lot of opportunities for both to bear fruit, but the sparseness of stuff to do that wasn't racing or deathmatch threatened to end a beautiful honeymoon period. Then, there came the classic situation for online gaming - some people being a higher level than others. As with traditional MMOs, this isn't really a problem if lower-level peons can tag along on game content for higher-level pros and when a buddy reached level 15, the survival mode came into my life.
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