GTA Online tips for fun & winning

Try different Jobs, mess with settings, play Tennis

The breadth of job types is kind of crazy, and if you’re hosting you’ll want to screw around with the options, or encourage your host to change things up. The racing alone features so much more than cars and tracks. Players can engage in GTA Races, which feature Mario Kart-esque power-ups (press in the right stick and then the left stick to shoot missiles behind you!), or you can elect to play a Rally, where one player drives and another player gives them directions. You can even race helicopters!

Then there’s deathmatch, where you can go to war on foot, or in vehicles like tanks. Survival mode lets you kill in co-op, providing a simple horde mode in a variety of locales. The variety of missions is truly impressive — one has a team of dirt bikes racing to a location while a team of jets tries to blow them up from above. It’s just crazy stuff.

It’s also worth noting that some jobs won’t be found in the standard playlists. You’ll have to track them down in the open world and invite someone to join you from there. Tennis, Golf, Arm Wrestling, Darts, and more can be played this way.

Use your phone for banking, buying property and high-end cars, and more

As in the single player, money is your gateway to better cars, guns, clothes, and property. There are some tricks to getting it and keeping it. While you can go to an in-world ATM to deposit your cash for safe-keeping (you lose a percentage of your un-banked cash when you die), it’s easier to just pull up your phone, go on the Internet, and make a deposit through the Money and Services tab. There you’ll also find the stock market and real estate websites. Buying real estate gives you access to multi-car garages for storing vehicles and a mechanic that can deliver your vehicle to you when you call them.

Learn some shortcuts

Beyond your phone, which provides quick access to any current Job invitations, your list of contacts (you can even call your friends for a one-on-one chat), banking, and more, you also have some handy controller shortcuts. Hold the Back or Select button to bring up a quick reference menu that allows you to quickly set waypoints, highlight your friends on the map, start an impromptu race in free roam, and give your friends money, just to name a few options. Double tap down on the d-pad to expand the map for a larger view without fully pausing the game. Also keep in mind that the pause menu has a ton of options for gathering friends, forming crews, and starting Jobs.

Gather some friends and enjoy the variety

My final tip for having fun in GTA Online is to simply take it all in, preferably with some friends. Don’t do any one thing for too long. There’s so much variety in GTA Online, but if you don’t take advantage of that you might get bored quick. Race golf carts with Mario Kart-style power-ups, steal a tanker truck with the help of your friends, see how far you can get in survival mode, grief your friends in free roam, rob an armored truck, steal a car, but don’t ever let yourself get bored, because there’s always something new to do. That’s the appeal of GTA Online, an endless pile of fun things to do, in a giant city, with fifteen other real, live humans.

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GTA Online has arrived!

But what is it? What do you do with GTA V’s massive open world and 15 other players? What is this about a persistent online world? Is it an MMO or is it just a natural progression of Rockstar’s multiplayer from GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption?

You won’t necessarily find the answers to these questions by the end of GTA Online’s tutorial, and you might even miss a lot during the first few hours. This guide won’t turn you into a high-level master of GTA Online, but it will hopefully alleviate some initial frustration. Why get mad when you can win and have fun doing it?

Let’s get started…

Understanding what GTA Online actually is

One way to think of GTA Online is that it’s an MMO with a 16-player server capacity. That isn’t “massive” by any stretch, but it helps to explain the game’s structure. Like an MMO, there is a free-roaming open world (we’ll refer to this as "free roam"), and instanced content like races, missions, survival, and deathmatch that you engage in with set numbers of players (the game’s blanket term for these are “Jobs,” so we’ll call them that).

Another way to look at it is that free roam is a gigantic lobby for gathering players into more focused gametypes. It’s so much more than a glorified lobby, though, and that’s one thing that can be hard to understand when other players are killing you repeatedly.

What to do in free roam

The initial tutorial will get you situated with a car, a gun, and take you through some missions, but if you’re like me, you’re probably going to want to play with your friends, get annoyed that you have to finish the tutorial, and not pay enough attention to all the tutorial info. It’s a lot to take in, and I honestly had an easier time absorbing it by learning from my friends and experimenting.

Beyond being a place to drive around and kill other players, free roam is full of dynamic activities and bite-sized missions to partake in without starting a new instance or Job. Robbery locations are indicated on the map, and sticking up a convenience store is a fun way to make some quick cash (you can even yell into your headset to intimidate the store clerk). Another way to make money is to steal a car, take it to a mod shop, and sell it.

Characters like Simeon will give you missions through your phone as well. Sometimes these are full-on instanced Job missions, but you’ll also receive free roam activities. One example lets everyone in the server know that there’s a hot car Simeon wants resprayed and delivered. From there it’s an impromptu race to grab the car or kill the driver and take it for yourself. In addition, your created character will have run-ins with characters from the single-player storyline, like Lester, Lamar, and even Trevor, with full cutscenes and missions given by them.

Starting a Job and getting lost in playlists

Jobs are where GTA Online’s more focused activities occur. You can start them by driving to a specific job on the map, or simply opening the pause menu. From there you get a pre-game lobby for adjusting settings and inviting other players. You can invite your friends, members of your crew, or simply invite everyone in your current free roam server. Once the Job starts, everyone who joined is pulled from free roam and tossed into a separate game with just those players.

One of the best ways to lose an evening to GTA Online is to gather your friends and just play different Jobs for hours. After a Job is over, a voting screen appears, allowing everyone to select the next Job type, replay the last Job, or elect to return the group to free roam together.

[Continue to page 2 for more tips…]