Thanks to one talented player, GTA Online’s loading times will finally be fixed in an official PC update. Released as the online component to Grand Theft Auto 5, GTA Online remained popular among players, but its loading times have always been an all-too-literal drag. In the years since release, players have pleaded with developer Rockstar Games to update the game's sluggish loading screens on all platforms, and it appears some of them are finally getting their wish.
Recently, one GTA Online player took matters into their own hands and got to the bottom of exactly what was causing the PC version's long load times. Programmer T0st discovered a huge text file within GTA Online that comprised of a whopping 63,000 purchasable items and all of the in-game characters. Each time a game of GTA Online was being loaded, so were all of these items, taking up a huge amount of CPU time. T0st fixed this issue by overwriting the need for the game to make these checks, and as a result reduced the load times by an incredible 70%.
And, thanks to T0st’s initiative and know-how, other GTA Online players will soon be able to experience these same faster loading times. Rockstar Games confirmed to PC Gamer that this fan-made solution to reduce the loading times of GTA Online will be implemented in a “forthcoming update.” Rockstar Games also declared that T0st’s findings of why the game was so slow to load are accurate, and that a fix for all PC GTA Online players is on its way. According to an update on T0st's original blog post that started it all, Rockstar has also paid him $10,000 as a reward for assisting in the game's improvement, a financial reward normally reserved for crackers that discover security flaws in code.
It is currently unclear whether or not these improvements will also be implemented for the PS4 and Xbox One editions of GTA Online, but it's not likely since each port is not identical to the others. There is some indication, however, that Rockstar Games is working on a current-gen update for GTA 5 and GTA Online that will utilize the same engine as Red Dead Redemption 2.
Either way, this is a great win for the GTA Online community. As the industry and games in general are getting slicker, little things like loading times can become a real bug bear to even the most committed of fanbases. And, given how vocal the GTA Online community has been about the loading times issue, it really is a wonder that it has taken Rockstar Games so long to actually address it - especially as the solution actually turned out to be a relatively simple one.
GTA Online is available on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.