Grad Theft Auto: Singleplayer VS Online

It's been months already since GTA V was released (time flies by) and we've all had the chance to try in both in singleplayer and it's troubled online counterpart. Now I won't got into the troubles that GTAO had at it's very start, or the ones it still has, as that's not my intention.

But there is something I'm trying to analyze: Should Rockstar Games focus on making GTA games more for the singleplayer crowd, or should they switch the focus to the online?

First of all, I'm a huge fan of singleplayer, never liked going online to play my game with 15 other people who only wait to randomly kill you because that's the only idea of online play they have. Not even trying to bash MP, but this is the reality of online games. There are of course groups of people who prefer some deeper roleplaying but it's often either too hard to find yourself among such a group of individuals, or they don't even want anyone knew in their social circle due to not knowing your true intentions.

On the other side is the singleplayer experience. The advantage being obviously that you as a player get to play the game with your own rules and at your own pace. You get to experience the story (a very important part of any game in my opinion) and the world revolves around you (we are all somewhat egocentric). But, there is a downside to singleplayer too. The number of missions is limited (unless they think of something like Radiant Story from Skyrim) so after you've completed them all you have two options:

1. Replay the whole game again.
2. Free roam.

For most people it's not as fun to immediately complete the whole game again, at least for a few months. So there is free roaming left. That part of the game is what made GTA, it's what turned a small studio into one of the biggest game developers in the world. But, free roam is limited. Yes we can go around and stalk random civilians, test drive all the cars etc.. but we've already done all of that in the previous GTAs. So that won't stay as interesting for too long.

That's where online has the advantage. Even though all you do online is soot others and hope to survive, just knowing they are ''real'' people and having them behave unexpectedly, that's what makes it fun for much longer. But does that mean Rockstar should focus more on Online?

My answer is NO. Yes, there should be online mode, but their experiment where they tried to make online more like singleplayer had somewhat failed. They tried adding a story to online, which is not bad, but they forced it upon the players, and that IS bad.

At the same time, adding a story to online meant much of that disc space was taken by online content and thus they had less space for SP content, specifically more missions. They even brag about how many hundreds of missions Online has, while SP is at 69 missions (some of which aren't even real missions to be honest).

My suggestion would be to simply make Singleplayer what it should be, a proper experience that will take you on and epic journey trough the story, while making Online a simple experience of playing with other player, but not forcing it to become a SP copy, as it can never be that.

Of course there are more reasons why they focused more on Online, but that's a whole different discussion.