i still play GTAV online with a friend of mine. never spent a cent more than the original purchase price over 10 years ago. it never got old driving around in stolen shitboxes with my friend and blowing cops away in pseudo southern california.
kinda looking forward to more of this in the vice city / south florida setting, because my friend and i are both from there and lighting up FL cops is gonna be cathartic.
I still love how grounded and low key the original setup to GTA Online was. Get off a plane, get handed a shitty pistol and a couple hundred, get your first shitbox car by literally stealing one off the street.
I actually really like racing in Online (the rest is boring and not thought out very well), and what I do is I just grind out the Nightclub Sale, takes a few days to set up but once you have it running you will rake in money and wont ever have money problems again
it's dumb that you can't steal-to-own newer super cars like in every previous iteration, but you can just steal them and drive the shit out of them. i set my spawn to that shitty 2 car garage near the casino parking lot, because it always has really nice cars to steal. i drive stolen cars more like an asshole anyway, like sideswiping a bunch of parked cars in it, etc.
buying cars and garages and decorating them is rich people funko-collection b.s. anyways. the real meta of games anymore is to figure out the no-cost/low-effort method to having fun instead of being tricked into the money sink treadmill. every bozo with a $2 million fully loaded supercar deserves to have a $250 grenade chucked under it.
something i miss from the game engine in 4 is how deformed cars would get after accidents and the mechanism for seat belts / being thrown through the windshield. that was an incredible detail they never should have gotten rid of. they do something similar with helmets on motorcycles, but it's not the same.
the inflation thing is real stupid. like a tshirt costing $20k or an old 1970s van costing a million. they definitely fucked up the economy and seem to scramble to make monkey sinks for online. i'll log into the single player to dick around a little and its jarring to "only" have a few hundred K, but then i realize everything is far more normally priced so i'm actually loaded. but nothing in the online game requires the spending of real money. everything can be had with fake game money which can be earned doing cheesy AFK b.s. if you don't want to invest real time and effort. shark cards are a scam for whales only.
my chief complaint about the online game is the inclusion of all the extremely stupid futuristic/sci fi BS like the flying rocket that shoots missles and all that sort of b.s. it's all way too over the top. my second biggest complaint is how prevalent the god mode modding is. but really, the second problem just means its not worth it to buy big expensive weapons, because so many random idiots pretending to play are actually invincible.