GTA Online Questions - Son Wants It, I'm Undecided

Mark#1

Hi.

My 14 year old son wants GTA5 so he can play GTA Online with a friend.

Before I decide on it, there are a couple of things I need to know:

1. Do you have to complete the GTA5 campaign/missions in order to play GTA Online?

2. How much of the "bad" stuff is essential/unavoidable to play in the GTA5 campaign/missions?

3. In GTA Online, can you play with just one friend, or are there always other strangers online to interfere with your gaming?

4. In GTA Online, how much "bad" stuff is essential/unavoidable to get what you want - cars, vehicles, apartments, etc?

I'm not a prude, and I enjoy gaming myself, but the whole GTA series always seemed irrelevant to me, given my own taste (Mass Effect series has no equal, IMO). My son has preferred shooters so far - notably the Ghost Recons, Battlefields and Halos - though he's recently gotten into Forza too.

I realise many GTA5 players are well under the age 18 rating, and it can't be the case that all of those guys have parents who don't know or care what their kids are doing, so can anyone offer me any insightful or objective advice or comments?


Thanks,

Mark

TacoMan

1. Nope, you can jump right in.

2. You can play races and missions to rank up and make cash. None of the missions are any more graphic than what is in the single player campaign.

3. Yep, you can launch an invite only session and just invite a friend in.

4. You can make money and rank up by playing races only if you fancy.

I'd advise to join the Boards crew. Always a few of us on, and great craic. A nice bunch of lads. Also good to play with a group, Los Santos is not a safe place to walk around alone, especially if you are a low level player.

There can be some idiots online, so best to stick your chat to Crew and Friends only to avoid listening to them.

Max Mafioso

Mark#1 wrote: »

Hi.

My 14 year old son wants GTA5 so he can play GTA Online with a friend.

Before I decide on it, there are a couple of things I need to know:

1. Do you have to complete the GTA5 campaign/missions in order to play GTA Online?

2. How much of the "bad" stuff is essential/unavoidable to play in the GTA5 campaign/missions?

3. In GTA Online, can you play with just one friend, or are there always other strangers online to interfere with your gaming?

4. In GTA Online, how much "bad" stuff is essential/unavoidable to get what you want - cars, vehicles, apartments, etc?

I'm not a prude, and I enjoy gaming myself, but the whole GTA series always seemed irrelevant to me, given my own taste (Mass Effect series has no equal, IMO). My son has preferred shooters so far - notably the Ghost Recons, Battlefields and Halos - though he's recently gotten into Forza too.

I realise many GTA5 players are well under the age 18 rating, and it can't be the case that all of those guys have parents who don't know or care what their kids are doing, so can anyone offer me any insightful or objective advice or comments?


Thanks,

Mark

This is my own personal opinion, its up to the parents to decide whether they want their child to play a game such as GTA, there's a reason why it is rated 18. Stores can and will get in trouble for selling an 18 game to someone younger, we had an issue with this in Gamestop about 7 years ago. Its like the cinema, you wouldnt let your kid go see an over 18 movie. If I had a kid, I wouldnt let them play the game. I do have a nephew who is only 3 and I try to make sure he isnt around me when I am playing, if he is, I go get a chopper because he loves them and gets me to fly around.
Anywho, to your points

1 - Nope, it has nothing to do with the the online game, you just meet some of the characters who give you missions

2 - Well a lot of the missions involve stealing and killing but otherwise you can just do races though you might get bored of always racing.

3 - If you start an invite only session, only people you invite will be in freemode. If you start a mission, you might either get into one that has someone already in it or strangers might join yours. You can set the lobby to closed beforehand so that no random player joins in.

4 - Same as point 2.

I would also just like to say that I was with a friend in a session and there was some kid who he was friends with, around 14, he was actually a very nice kid, not like some of the feckers you get with all the cursing and trolling.

NiamhGodfrey

Well if you're alright with it you should let him play it. Just tell him to stick with his friends/crew because you get some little ****s in there

doubledown

For sure most of the adult content (language, sex, violence) is in single player mode, mostly in the scripted scenes, but there is a fair bit of risqué material in online too.

You can still visit the strip club and get a lap-dance (although the girls keep their tops on in the online version). And you can kill or be killed with a vast array of weapons including broken bottles and a hatchet. Although, to be fair the animation is not overly bloody or graphic.

And you can also pick up hookers after dark in certain parts of town and they will "service" you in you car for a small fee once you drive to a secluded spot. The animation doesn't pull any punches and if you buy it for the Xbox One or PS4 you can see the aforementioned action in first person (see the video below).

And as always with any online game there is the chance of hearing people saying pretty extreme stuff over the headset, which you can't really protect yourself against.

If your son stays in private games or games with crew members only then he should be fine but it's pretty easy to hop back into single player mode and have a snoop around.

It's up to you, but as you can see from the video, these games are rated 18 for good reason.

Mark#1

Max Mafioso wrote: »

Its like the cinema, you wouldnt let your kid go see an over 18 movie.

doubledown wrote: »

It's up to you, but as you can see from the video, these games are rated 18 for good reason.

Alien is an 18 rating, but I'd let my son watch it. The reasons for the 18 rating are the sense of terror and suspense and peril, the bad language, and the (limited) violence. Porn movies are rated 18 for completely different reasons. I certainly wouldn't let my son watch them. Different movies are rated 18 for different reasons, and the same goes for different games.

The context of Alien is fantasy/fiction - it's not realistic; as far as we know, there are no aliens like the xenomorph in real life, and we don't yet mine planets in the far reaches of space. The context of GTA is - on some level - realistic; there actually are people in the real world who do behave like the characters in GTA, and events like those in GTA do happen in real life. IMO, the 18-rated fantasy context is not the same as the 18-rated realistic context.

My personal decision on whether or not to let my kids watch a movie or play a game is based primarily on my own assessment/appraisal, which I typically base on a) actually watching the movie/playing the game myself, and/or b) researching online. I'll rarely blindly trust a third party: I know parents who let their kids play GTA (and hit me with "sure it's grand, my young lad plays it") , but they're shocked when I describe some of the content - they simply didn't know. They presumed the 18 rating was due to just the violence, which to them (often non-gamers) seems cartoon-ish and unrealistic, but as any gamer will attest, the act of actually playing the game is a very different experience to watching a movie.

In the case of the GTA series, they simply don't appeal to my own personal taste, so I'd struggle to play them for a length of time sufficient to consider myself "informed". This is why I highly value forums and the people (like you guys) who help others on them.

Thankfully, I'm certain my own son isn't interested in GTA Online for any of the "bad" stuff. He simply wants to feck around in helicopters and planes with his mate. He brought this video to my attention to illustrate the type of thing he wants from his GTA Online experience:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCtr4OH8Sz0

He's suggested that he only plays it when mam or dad are around, and that if he's home alone, mam or dad take the disc with them.

Given this, I'm leaning toward letting him go for it.

For some context, I'll reveal that I've watched him play Future Soldier, and he always feels bad when he kills a civilian by accident, so I'm pretty sure the "killing civilians for fun" aspect of GTA isn't for him.


Thanks for your replies folks.

Mark