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1. Grand Theft Auto Online: Los Santos Drug Wars (PC, 2022) - 1:18 + 14:41 in 2023 - January 1
A few Era threads late last year hinted that GTA Online was actually a fun place to be for a solo player who was mostly uninterested in multiplayer. This is a surprise, but not necessarily a huge one; I've played live-service games in the past that seem like they want you to play with others but are entirely viable playing solo without ever having to interact with another human being, like The Division 1 and 2. It's been almost a decade since I last played GTA V, and I'd never taken the PC version for a spin. Plus there was all the recent talk about GTA VI. So hey, let's visit Los Santos again and see what's what.
GTA Online for a completely new player trying to play solo in 2023 is not for the faint of heart. There's a lot to figure out, and the game doesn't make a lot of it easy; new player onboarding is kind of a huge mess. But the worst part is having years' worth of content suddenly open to you, with no guide as to what you might want to play first, and what's going to be locked behind businesses you can't afford, systems you can't access due to player level, or forced multiplayer. Welcome to GTA Online.
After a bunch of Reddit guides and some experimenting I finally got the hint that Drug Wars was a pretty decent place to start. What I found was a bite-sized GTA solo experience, complete with the usual cutscenes where your player character is introduced to some criminal element who slowly inducts you into the empire. In this case, it's Dax and the Fooligans, an upstart group of drug dealers who are in it more for the mind-bending highs than the money. Compared to the main campaign of GTA V, Dax and his crew are downright lovable; they're a fun group to hang out with. The missions are your standard GTA fare for the most part, and there's a set of repeatable missions you'll need to grind to unlock some upgrades for a drug lab you get halfway through the missions (there's that Online aspect rearing its ugly head again).
Overall, Drug Wars was pretty fun, and while I still would rather everything just be a single-player campaign where I can do things like pause the game without worrying about the server timing me out, this is an acceptable compromise for now.
![ZivYXvo.png](https://i.imgur.com/ZivYXvo.png)
1. Grand Theft Auto Online: Los Santos Drug Wars (PC, 2022) - 1:18 + 14:41 in 2023 - January 1
A few Era threads late last year hinted that GTA Online was actually a fun place to be for a solo player who was mostly uninterested in multiplayer. This is a surprise, but not necessarily a huge one; I've played live-service games in the past that seem like they want you to play with others but are entirely viable playing solo without ever having to interact with another human being, like The Division 1 and 2. It's been almost a decade since I last played GTA V, and I'd never taken the PC version for a spin. Plus there was all the recent talk about GTA VI. So hey, let's visit Los Santos again and see what's what.
GTA Online for a completely new player trying to play solo in 2023 is not for the faint of heart. There's a lot to figure out, and the game doesn't make a lot of it easy; new player onboarding is kind of a huge mess. But the worst part is having years' worth of content suddenly open to you, with no guide as to what you might want to play first, and what's going to be locked behind businesses you can't afford, systems you can't access due to player level, or forced multiplayer. Welcome to GTA Online.
After a bunch of Reddit guides and some experimenting I finally got the hint that Drug Wars was a pretty decent place to start. What I found was a bite-sized GTA solo experience, complete with the usual cutscenes where your player character is introduced to some criminal element who slowly inducts you into the empire. In this case, it's Dax and the Fooligans, an upstart group of drug dealers who are in it more for the mind-bending highs than the money. Compared to the main campaign of GTA V, Dax and his crew are downright lovable; they're a fun group to hang out with. The missions are your standard GTA fare for the most part, and there's a set of repeatable missions you'll need to grind to unlock some upgrades for a drug lab you get halfway through the missions (there's that Online aspect rearing its ugly head again).
Overall, Drug Wars was pretty fun, and while I still would rather everything just be a single-player campaign where I can do things like pause the game without worrying about the server timing me out, this is an acceptable compromise for now.
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