GTA Online's map too small? Madness! Well, yes, that's what we would have said too... three years ago. When GTA 5 launched way back in 2013, the size of its map was a wonder to behold. The city on its own was pretty sizeable, and truly felt like a bonafide metropolis, and a vast wilderness stretched northward with a handful of other settlements and all kinds of interesting locations and secret places scattered around.
Sure, GTA 5 didn't have the biggest map out there, but it did have the most vibrant and detailed map — and let's face it, it was among the biggest. Even today, players are still discovering all kinds of little details lovingly left behind by the developers who crafted this vast virtual world, all of whom no doubt wanted to leave a personal mark behind.
Fast forward three years, and GTA Online has been expanded content-wise with '''26 DLCs'''. That's right folks, Rockstar has supplied the players of their game with 26 individual pieces of free updates — feel free to remember that before you call them greedy. Some of those updates were minor, some were major and some were absolutely groundbreaking. However, all of them added something to GTA Online.
Joining a lobby today will look a lot different from three years ago. Yachts will line the shoreline, all-new kinds of events will spawn when roaming in Freemode, the decadent will be flying around in golden jets, biker gangs will ride about in formation and some Hydra griefer will probably be hounding an unlucky CEO trying to sell his or her crates in peace.
GTA Online has changed immensely since launch back in 2013, and while by virtue of the way game development works Rockstar probably had some kind of DLC roadmap planned out pre-launch, they couldn't have planned too far ahead in terms of updates. At one point, GTA Online started down a path the developers couldn't have envisioned before the title went live.
GTA Online's map was simply not designed with all this content in mind, and while there aren't any major problems, this shows. Things are increasingly busy and disjointed. While an exciting, vibrant and active game world is a good thing in many ways, you practically need to go looking for solitude to find it.
Here's the thing — fans have been asking for a map-expansion for a good long time now, and while it wasn't warranted before, it might be now. Even former Rockstar producer Leslie Benzies once said that the plan is to eventually expand Online to include all cities that formerly appeared in the franchise. Of course, his comments can't be taken as any kind of guarantee anymore...
In any case, GTA Online would really hit 2017 off to a good start by releasing a map expansion before Spring rolls in. Most fans want to see Liberty City, but maybe one of the other cities featured in San Andreas, like Las Venturas, would be a better choice. The mere announcement of this move would attract droves of players, new and old.
Would you like to see GTA Online's map expanded?
