ranzware
It’s been over a decade since Grand Theft Auto 5 first launched, and a good few years since I last cruised around the streets of Los Santos. In fact, I only realised after loading my five-year-old save (after a bit of faffing where I had to install both the new Enhanced and the old Legacy editions of the game then upload my Legacy save to Rockstar before redownloading it for the Enhanced edition) that this is the only GTA game that I never completed.
Returning to this spit-and-polished iteration of GTA 5, I was reminded about the good and bad of Rockstar’s money-spinning machine. I’m impressed by just how content-rich GTA Online has become yet saddened by how the single-player has been left behind; I’m impressed by how great the open world of San Andreas still looks and feels to zoom around in, but also terminally bored by the prescriptive mission design and archaic controls that are something of a Rockstar hallmark.
In short: it’s been bittersweet.
We’ve already detailed the differences between GTA 5 Enhanced and GTA 5 Legacy, which the original version is now called, but the gist of it is that the game now benefits from full ray tracing, DLSS, and FSR support, and adds in a bunch of stuff to make the online aspect more inviting and enticing.
Some games definitely benefit from ray tracing more than others. In the relatively shine-free world of The Witcher 3, for instance, I had to really look for the differences far and wide before eventually falling in love with a wood-panelled wall in Novigrad that looked particularly delicious when the sun would shine through its window.
In GTA 5, the ray tracing really jumps out at you. The patchwork paving of the streets soaks up those polluted pink sunsets, the neon signage for every spoofily named shop you can imagine beckons you in off the street, and the soft glow of every orange streetlight bounces cleanly off the chrome of your car. For me, GTA 5 was always right up there with movies like Nightcrawler and Drive at capturing the alluring alienation of nighttime LA through the driving and street lighting, and ray tracing amplifies that effect beautifully.
Ray tracing also lends itself well to emphasising the seediness of late-stage capitalism, from the way nocturnal advertising shimmers with uncanny realism in every remotely reflective surface to assault you from all sides, to the increased contrast between light and dark, which means that the illuminated things that businesses want you to see pushes the actual architecture of the city into the background.
GTA 5 Enhanced is right up there with Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City when it comes to extending ray tracing from a graphical luxury into a thematic tool.
GTA 5 Enhanced is right up there with Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City when it comes to extending ray tracing from a graphical luxury into a thematic tool (which is apt given that Los Santos is pretty much a modern-day precursor to Night City, with everything that GTA 5 pokes fun at becoming starkly manifest in CDPR’s vision).
But I digress. What else is new here? Well, there are now animals in GTA Online, which I only learned about when mounting the kerb to avoid hitting a kitten (and wiping out a yoga instructor instead). The newly online fauna comes with a daily challenge that sends you to take wildlife photos out in the wilderness: a nice, relaxing way to spend some downtime between the cross-city cocaine runs and random shootings.
I hadn’t engaged much with GTA Online before, but dipping into it now it’s amazing just how much of it there is: cutscenes, challenges, business management, mini story arcs involving old favourites like Tony Prince, or even continuations of the Story Mode’s campaign, such as one series of missions which lets you join Franklin and Lamar in their business ventures years after you left them.
I’ve always bemoaned how GTA 5 didn’t give us singleplayer story expansions like we saw with GTA 4, but seeing the sprawl of content in GTA Online in 2025, I can at least see where all those resources went. GTA Online is an absolute behemoth, and after just several hours of setting up my Rollo’s Rejects Motorcycle Club and stumbling through my first cocaine operation, I can at least say that I get it, even if I wish some of this was a little more accessible without other players around to bother me.
In other ways, no matter how much botox and facelifting it gets via ray tracing and enhancements to its online mode, GTA 5 is inevitably showing its age. First up: there’s the matter of movement. It kind of feels like you’re grabbing your avatar’s head in a claw grip, then tilting their upper body in the direction you want to go before the legs follow.
On-foot movement in this game is sludgy, top-heavy, and feels like driving a tank under the influence of ketamine. It’s an issue that’s pervaded every Rockstar game since GTA 4 right up Red Dead Redemption 2, but at least in the latter you have don’t have to navigate the sharp angles and alleys of urban sprawls, and can somewhat justify it by the fact that Arthur Morgan is literally trudging through mud most of the time.
Then there’s the mission design that forces you to follow Rockstar’s vision for the mission to the letter. There’s almost always a specific path to follow, a specific yellow dot on the mini-map that you have to stand on, a specific angle from which to approach an encounter, and on-the-fly character-switching—a cool idea in principle—isn’t nearly as creatively implemented as it could’ve been.
You feel like a child being directed for a school play: “Stand here–no, not here, here, good, now switch to him, then kill him, but don’t be spotted otherwise you’ll have to restart, and we don’t want that now, do we?” At one point, I happened to drive past a mission marker where I was supposed to buy masks for a heist, and was hit with a Mission Failed simply for driving past the shop. In the space of seconds I’d somehow activated then failed the mission!
There’s nothing wrong with a good scripted action movie sequence where you’re chasing a crashing jet on your motorcycle across half the state, or need to parachute out of a falling cargo plane. GTA 5 nails those moments, but they’re highlights in a sea of humdrum missions filled with fail-states, stringent rules, and wave-defence shootouts.
For such an accomplished open-world game, it’s amazing how little of that freedom gets expressed in the missions themselves.
For such an accomplished open-world game, it’s amazing how little of that freedom gets expressed in the missions themselves, which feel like they’re just giving the player something to do between the sassy cutscenes and story progression. Again, this is very much a Rockstar problem, going all the way back to the first 3D GTAs, but man does it need to sort it out for GTA 6.
If GTA 5’s getting a little stale in the way of mission design, it still shines in detailing its world. The endless advertising, the soundscape of radio presenters, the fact that you can walk into a gas station and spend five minutes reading the ridiculous labels on all the foodstuffs and magazines (RIP) still amount to one of the strongest visions for a videogame world.
Sure, some of the spoof branding doesn’t quite land (Life Invader as the Facebook equivalent, Krapea as IKEA), but the sheer silliness of Jizzy Jims as a stand-in for Jimmy Jazz speaks to my inner adolescent, while the sheep-themed Bleeter as the in-world answer to Twitter feels even more on the mark in today’s online world of echochambers and groupthink than it did back in 2013. GTA 5’s mad, mad world covers the spectrum from puerile pastiche to sharp satire, and there’s still nothing quite like it.
If we were to use GTA 5 Enhanced as a barometer for what GTA 6 will be, then the future is, for better or worse, online. This isn’t to say that this edition isn’t the best way to play GTA 5 (it is, if your PC has the specs to handle it), but beyond the gleaming graphical improvements, everything else in this version is tailored to make GTA Online that bit more appealing.
Even I, as a Story Mode loyalist, was quickly pulled in by the new Career Builder in GTA Online, which lets you pick one of four career paths to give your online journey a bit more of a direction and narrative bent. The other big highlights of the Enhanced edition are the vehicle customisation shop Hao’s Special Works and Oscar Guzman Flies Again storyline, both of which are for GTA Online.
And of course that makes sense, because in a sizable update like this why would Rockstar direct us to the side of the game that’s sequestered away from the grind and microtransactions and other service-game money-making trappings? I can’t exactly begrudge it, because the online product is a good one, but I do hope that GTA 6 is a bit more accommodating for solo players to partake in the endless wealth of activities enjoyed by the online bunch, such as the far more detailed businesses management side of the game, or by offering more solo-friendly ways to take on some of the storylines in GTA Online.
This Enhanced edition leaves me both hyped and wary for GTA 6—hyped because it showcases Rockstar’s industry-leading talents for building engaging open worlds (and if it could do this 12 years ago, just imagine what it’ll do today), but wary because it highlights how much the studio’s focus with the series has shifted towards the service model, which may demote the singleplayer element to a kind of elaborate lead-in to the ‘main event’ of GTA 6 Online. But hey, we’ve some time to wait yet—especially us PC folks who’ll arbitrarily get it later than console players—so I may as well get my cocaine business off the ground and catch-up on all the content I missed in GTA Online over these past several years.
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Kurt Indovina
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