Brought to you on the Friday of each week, GTA 5 News Roundup collects the top stories of the past seven days and bundles them into one neat package right before (or after) the scheduled City of the Week article. If you didn't have a chance to follow all that has happened, this post is for you.
This week saw the release of yet another mini-expansion to the Bikers DLC, adding yet another bike to GTA Online. The release of the all new Pegassi Esskey made the biggest waves this week, as new DLC releases usually do.
We kicked things off after last week's post with the scheduled City of the Week post, wherein we visited the ever peaceful Salt Lake City. While the location would have provided the writers at Rockstar with more than enough joke material, and the area's geography was neat as well, some of the other factors — mainly crime — just didn't add up to the GTA formula.
Soon after, we brought attention to the most apparent solution to the Shotaro's biggest problem: the fact that its colours don't match the shades of the Deadline outfit. While the solution itself makes use of systems presently found in GTA Online, thus requiring no glitch nor any kind of special know-how, it isn't widely known.
Last week's Top Videos included some pretty high-class GTA 5 fan-entertainment. Packing a stylish — and long — noir short film, a neat Shotaro showcase, a driving cinematic, a straight-faced homage to The Shining and a not-so-straight-faced parody of Baywatch, the list was a pretty damn strong one.
We topped off the weekend by reporting on Rockstar Games' all-new website, which has now been optimised with mobile platforms in mind. While certain iconic design elements remained, the layout got a modern hip makeover. The new site is nice and all, however, Rockstar might have wanted to complete their transition without wiping all comments from the site in the process...
Looking outside of GTA 5, gaming news has been recently abuzz with stories about the new PS4 Pro, and all the games that are getting a makeover to take advantage of the new hardware. We speculated in a post whether or not Rockstar's flagship title may get a similar enhancement.
In another opinion piece, we fleshed out just how much control the community has over the future of GTA Online. While Bikers already proved that the company cares about the opinions of its fans, it's important to remember that Online will only be supported as long as people play it — essentially giving the players the choice of when it ends.
Around this time, many players started taking to forums and Reddit to voice their frustration over Rockstar "correcting" that free 250K that was handed out to celebrate the third anniversary of GTA Online. Thing is, it turns out that these players simply didn't check their in-game accounts, and the gifted cash was still there. The culprit was the missing minus-sign, as well as the confusing wording of the prompt.
After this came the story which could have been the top story of the week — if it wasn't so disappointing. One particularly dedicated mystery hunter has seemingly solved the Mt. Chiliad mural, and the end result is pretty anticlimactic. It's literally just a plot-summary of GTA 5's story mode. That's it.
It was after this letdown of a revelation that Rockstar added the all new Pegassi Esskey to GTA Online. The new bike is a blend of vintage and modern elements, resulting in a stylish scrambler with a new-retro feel going for it. The ride is much cheaper than the Shotaro, and it isn't breaking any records in terms of performance, but it has found its audience among Online's bike enthusiasts nonetheless.
After this we took a look at how recent trends in GTA Online's DLC could show us what to expect for the future. Between Cunning Stunts and Bikers, a pattern of releasing a major update and following it up with minor expansions for about a month could be the norm from now on. Based on generally positive attitudes towards updates recently, this would seem like a good model to follow.
Which of the past week's GTA related stories interested you the most?
