Grand Theft Auto V / Grand Theft Auto Online Tropes

General Tropes | Single Player Tropes 0 to D | Single Player Tropes E to M | Single Player Tropes N to Z | Grand Theft Auto Online Tropes

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• Absurdly High Level Cap: The rank cap is 8000. It used to be a whole order of magnitude lower on the 7th gen version of the game, but Rockstar ended up increasing the cap at the behest of players who hit the old one. The new rank cap was actually used as a honeypot for modders on consoles back then (especially Xbox 360) — particularly stupid modders would just max out their experience point counter and subsequently get banned for attaining an unattainable rank. It should be noted that the last item that ever gets unlocked for players is at rank 120 (135 if one were to count armor carrying capacity in the inventory), and even the most dedicated players who've been playing for practically every waking moment since launch day are very rarely past rank 1800.
• Adventure-Friendly World: Online Los Santos has tons of crap to do all the time, and you can find yourself caught up in someone else's adventure at any time. Walk down a particular block and you'll find a squad of cops chasing another player, a shoot out between players, an impromptu drag race, or a heist in progress. If you choose, you can even play favorites—for example, involving yourself in a police chase by ramming the cops off the escapee's trail or screwing the other player over just for the hell of it.
• Aesop:
  • Having your character smoke will damage your health a tiny bit, much like Metal Gear Solid.
  • On the flip side, green drinks in apartments fully restore health. Moral of the story: vegetable juice is healthy for you. Zigzagged in that a can of soda has the same effect.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Can be invoked by players simply by drinking any alcohol until they pass out. Most of the time, the Player Character will spawn somewhere either in the building where they passed out (possibly vomiting into the toilet they just woke up on), or end up somewhere completely different. The Macbeth Whisky Shot is expressly designed to knock the player out in one swig and has rare random events associated with it, such as passing out in a nightclub and waking up near the Epsilon Program building with a "Kifflom!" t-shirt, or finding out that the protagonist stole a van from the Diamond Casino and Ms. Baker demanding it back as a free roam mission.
• All Bikers are Hells Angels / Badass Biker: The Bikers DLC allows you to join or start your own outlaw motorcycle club with up to 8 members (A club President, Vice President, Road Captain, Sgt-at-Arms, Enforcer, and three others, complete with clubhouse, illicit businesses, rival player clubs, and additional motorcycles and weapons.
• Already Met Everyone: Familiar people show up for the "first" time in this story such as Lamar, Lester, Trevor, Simeon, etc.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different/Another Side, Another Story: The story of Online follows your silent custom character in events that initially happen a few months before the single-player storyline, but start to take place after it, apparently in real time, as Agent 14 states in a Gunrunning mission that it's 2017, the year the Gunrunning update was added.
  • The Contract DLC's "Short Trip" mission string has you and another player play as Franklin and Lamar instead of your characters. This switch is explained in-universe by getting them high off Lamar's organic weed so much, their perspective literally flips over to Franklin and Lamar's.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: When leveling up, cosmetic items, such as various outfits, hats, and haircuts will be unlocked.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • The Passive mode prevents other players from randomly gunning down the passive player whilst they're on foot. Doesn't work while in a car, and you can't return fire either. This was changed in the next-gen versions to be a complete ghost mode, making one completely untouchable by other players. However, damage from nearby exploding vehicles can still kill you, which players can use indirectly. You can also still come under attack from NPC characters and your only options are to run, or disable Passive Mode (which isn't instant and which has a cooldown before you can re-enable it)
  • Zig-zagged with the Simeon vehicles, as while it is possible to force the list you've been given to refresh in case you can't find any of the cars on the list, you cannot 'deny' the request and as such may end up with a two-star Wanted rating because you're stealing a car Simeon wants, even if you have no intention of delivering it.
  • The audio from the microphone chat can be completely muted, which is very useful if you don't want to hear 12-year-olds and living room background noise constantly.
  • Any vehicle that you're in becomes invincible if your controller disconnects, as the game doesn't pause.
  • In the Prison Break heist, the pilot has to evade a Lazer fighter jet using a Velum, one of the slower and more awkward planes to fly. To prevent the pilot's job from being impossible, the Lazer can't fire homing missiles.
  • A small one, but any car you buy automatically comes insured. It's a small thing, but it can save a ton of frustration when you're taking your new vehicle for a spin and you happen to run into a player who's not hesitant about being a "bad sport".
  • A new feature added for griefing is ghost mode. If you hold back from attacking somebody who's chasing you around and harassing you by repeatedly killing you then you get the option to become a "ghost" to them and them alone for a limited time, letting you get away. A nice feature for those who want the randomness of other players but still don't want to be killed by the same person.
  • In the Gunrunning update, trailers that become detached from the Phantom Wedge during delivery missions will respawn right-side up after a short time instead of being marked destroyed. This is likely in response to criticisms of the Bikers update whereas any vehicle that got stuck would be considered destroyed after a short time.
  • In free mode any weaponized vehicle will have a unique car icon in the map/mini-map that will show you what type of weaponized vehicle it is instead of not showing up at all. This makes it easier to tell where the threats from other players are and how heavy the vehicle's offensive is, such as a tank compared to a missile firing flying car.
  • When doing any freemode job that requires taking a marked vehicle the game does not allow other players to lock onto it. Any other vehicle with a player in it can be targeted this way, but "cargo" vehicles with players in them are completely immune to it. It can't be understated how much this helps as it forces skillful aiming instead of just having the right toy to screw over another player, including a lot of aircraft that would otherwise easily catch up, preventing any random person in a Buzzard from making a vehicle warehouse impossible to stock in that session.
  • If one loses interest in their nightclub's upkeep and let its popularity drop to zero, Gay Tony and British Dave will eventually get the hint and stop bugging the player about it.
  • The Diamond Casino and Resort update added quite a few:
    • Passive mode was reworked to be more in line with Red Dead Online, having cooldowns that are minutes in length as opposed to a few seconds to prevent griefers from exploiting it to harm other players and then get away scot free with invincibility shortly after.
    • The relative uselessness of Nightclubs in comparison to other businesses was addressed by increasing how much popularity is earned per Nightclub management mission.
    • Daily Objectives were reworked by removing a number of Player Versus Player objectives so people who don't want to kill other players don't have to. Objectives like "Sell/restock a business" or "Set yourself as Looking for Work" were also added as something of a Hint System towards lucrative money-making methods. The first objective in the list is now also a global one, shared by the entire server so that there's no trouble finding other players for that particular objective. Lastly, monetary rewards for completing the objectives daily, weekly, and monthly were all increased.
  • The Diamond Casino Heist update added:
    • A five minute cooldown to calling in the Oppressor Mk.II after its destruction to curb the nigh-omnipresence of the vehicle in Free Mode sessions, especially at the hands of griefers (although the particularly rich ones realized the cooldown wasn't shared between Oppressors).
    • As for the titular heist, it does away with the traditional setup missions completely, having Free Mode setup missions instead. These setups can be done completely solo without fear of losing a lot of progress due to someone disconnecting or just plain old quitting. The heist finale is also easier than the original heists and the Doomsday Heist.
  • The Los Santos Summer Special update made sending your Personal Vehicle back to storage without registering as a Motorcycle Club a feature. Said patch also threw a bone for competitive racers: Griefers who like to drive the wrong way and collide with oncoming players are now automatically placed in non-contact mode if the game detects such behavior.
  • The Tuners update added an Auto Shop which contained two for existing types of content. Auto Shop Robberies are shortened Heists in all but name, requiring only two Free Roam setups that can be done in private sessions before getting to a Finale mission, a format that was eventually carried over into The Contract update. The legitimate business side of the Auto Shop has a less frustrating version of Import/Export, with customers automatically bringing in their vehicles for modding and vehicle deliveries not exposing the player to other players on the map. Should the delivery car get destroyed, it simply respawns in the player's Auto Shop instead of getting lost forever.
  • The Contract added "Imani Tech" vehicle mods for a select few vehicles introduced in the update. The most notable ones include a lock-on jammer and vehicle armor that can withstand more than one explosion to prevent prospective Griefers from destroying the Imani Tech vehicle with very little effort. Both of these features were formerly only present on mission-related delivery vehicles.
  • The 9th gen "Expanded & Enhanced" edition has a few:
    • The game uses a title screen menu similar to the one used in Red Dead Redemption II, Rockstar's previous game, allowing players to decide on what they want to do without having to wait for the game to load and connect to a lobby first.
    • The revamped tutorial, Career Builder, gives newly created characters $4,000,000 scot-free to buy things with, to alleviate the painfully slow early-game grind — the only caveats are that only one "main" property (office, bunker, nightclub, or motorcycle club) can be bought, and that they have to spend at least $3,000,000 of it before being allowed to start the game. The in-universe justification is that the online protagonist robbed the money sometime before the events of the game but got jailed for it, and the properties were needed to launder the money in the meantime.
  • The Criminal Enterprises update brought a few notable quality of life changes:
    • A lot of older business properties' income (office, motorcycle club, bunker, and nightclub) up to snuff to things added after it, generally adding at least one more avenue to gain income from each business. Nightclubs in particular got the heftiest buffs as they brought in absolute abyssmal money before this update — their passive income was increased, the safe limit was increased to $250,000 (up from $50,000), and new nightclub popularity missions were added to help maintain the club's income, with some of these missions being as simple as tossing a troublemaker outside.
    • After months of on-and-off events doubling the payouts of CEO and Motorcycle Club associates, Rockstar decided to just make it a permanent feature. The money associates earn for helping out others with their sale missions was also increased.
    • The payouts of the original heist series and the Doomsday Heist had their finale payouts increased. All the originals were increased by 75% aside from the Pacific Standard Job, which saw a 50% increase alongside all three acts of the Doomsday Heist.
    • The Oppressor Mk. II saw another nerf, with the turning radius on its homing missiles drastically increased. Its flare countermeasures also got slapped with a long cooldown and decreased ammo count. On a related note, players no longer get charged with insurance costs when destroying other players' weaponized vehicles (including the Oppressor), averting PVP crimes of self defense.
    • Last, but not least, players are able to launch sale and heist prep missions in invite-only sessions, a feature Rockstar themselves lampshades was repeatedly requested over the years in the Criminal Enterprises patch notes. For the risk-takers, the High Demand bonus for selling cargo was increased from 1% per player to 2.5%. The bonus caps out at 50% (or 20 rival players) so players don't need to be in a full 30 player session to make the most of the bonus.
• Anti-Grinding: The game is littered with these to keep players from making too much money and stop buying shark cards.
  • In general, a lot of the money making activities are tailored towards having multiple players, even when it doesn't make sense. You can often do these missions solo, but doing so is so tedious that many players would rather spend time working in the real world to buy shark cards than playing them.
  • Robbing stores too often causes the wanted level for each robbery to gradually rise. Likewise, after selling a stolen car to a mod shop, they won't accept any more for a period of time. You can also only export a Simeon vehicle once every 24 hours from the list he gives you.
  • They quickly patched being able to immediately replay the same job request over and over after some players grinded their way to earning the most expensive apartment. To wit, executing the same job over and over automatically makes the same job harder each time you pull it off (for example, the Where Credit's Due mission- for each subsequent times you do the job, the game throws in gangsters to protect the car and subsequently increase their numbers, and then increase the aggressiveness of the police by having them come in larger numbers, move in on you faster, etc. Not playing the mission for a certain amount of time on the other gives a cooldown timer that resets the difficulty of the job.
  • Client missions, especially Diamond Shopping, can grant the player 30,000$ for literal five minutes of work. To counteract this, Rockstar sets the cooldown timer of the missions to half an hour.
  • All sale missions can only be started in public sessions where the player is vulnerable to griefers with oftentime vastly superior firepower. This is a particularly noteworthy example because having your goods destroyed in a sale mission can cost you millions of dollars and days of work, setting your progress back significantly.
  • Sale missions can be extremely tedious even without the threat of griefers. You often have to drive a vehicle and deliver the goods to multiple points from across the map. If you have a lot of goods, you will need multiple vehicles, which makes the sales impossible for solo players as they need to complete the sale before the time limit. The vehicles you get are thankfully not that slow most of the time, but exceptions exist, chief among them being the memetically hated Post-Op van mission. You have to drive a slow-moving mail truck to deliver the goods in this mission. Everytime you reach a destination, you have to get out and personally place the package at the buyer's doorstep, which takes up a lot of time. It's impossible for solo players to do anything more than two post-op truck at a time.
  • Even if you somehow manage to get into empty public session, Rockstar can find away to make the grind hard for you. Import/Export missions in empty lobbies will always spawn two pursuing cars to damage your vehicle during delivery. These annoying cars aren't hard to destroy or particularly dangerous, but they will constantly shoot at and ram your vehicle to reduces its sale value.
  • Unless you have three friends to selflessly help you, it's only possible to source one cargo at a time in Smuggler's Run missions. It takes around 15 minutes to finish one cargo source mission, and each cargo is only worth a paltry ten grand. By comparison, contact missions which cost you nothing to start can give you 20k for the same amount of time and work. It's pretty telling that not even triple pay weeks can convince players to do Smuggler's Run mission.
  • Similarly, CEO crate missions give you the option to choose between sourcing one crate at a time and sourcing multiple. Choosing to source a single crate falls into the same problem of tedium as the hangar example above, so many players prefer the later option despite its higher cost. However, that comes with its own set of problem. Choosing to source multiple crates can sometimes give you a simple mission where you only have to deliver a single vehicle to its destination, but sometimes you will get missions where you have to deliver all the crates individually. Unless you have friends, you will have to do multiple delivary trips. These missions also have a hidden timer that's only shown when you have five minutes left. Worst still, the distance between the crates and their destination are often very vast, so you will need an aircraft to even stand a chance of delivering them in time.
  • Subverted with the launch of the Cayo Perico heist. It can be done solo, and the setups are themselves pretty fast to the point where it is undisputably the fastest money per hour in the game. Even a player who's not entirely focused in in grinding can make 1.5 million per hour with it, which is miles ahead any other activity the player can do, beating all the passive income business and even CEO crates by a huge margin. The only things that hold the player back on this heist is the price point of a basic submarine (the base of operations for the heist) costing 2.2 million, which can be a bit of a hassle to grind for new players who don't have access to other profitable things in the game. Unfortunately, the heist became a straight example when it got Nerfed in the Criminal Enterprises update — the solo version of the heist was slapped with a cooldown timer of three in-game days (roughly two and a half hours) and the main target and secondary targets are weighted to generate in favor of the latter on the next replay to discourage players from speedrunning to the former.
• Armor Is Useless:
  • A basic Pistol can rip even Super Heavy Armor to shreds in no time. Unlike the single player campaign, armor in general is merely an extension of the player's health bar, which gets depleted just as fast as body armor does.
  • Various other forms of armor in the game zigzag this trope:
    • The Armored Kuruma is almost completely covered in bulletproof armor plating, including a large part of each and every window. Even the tiny bits that are unarmored take some concentrated firepower to get through, unless an attacking player has armor piercing rounds. It's a Game-Breaker that completely trivializes most Player Versus Environment content, but when taken out of its element, it shows its weakness: it's just as susceptible to explosives as any civilian car.
    • Most armored vehicles released after the Armored Kuruma flip the weaknesses around, being susceptible to small arms fire but having the ability to tank at least one explosion, making them slightly more useful in Player Versus Player contexts.
    • Warstock Cache & Carry has an item called "Ballistic Equipment". As the name implies, it's a full suit of ballistic armor, with an infinite ammo minigun as a bonus. The armor itself isn't like regular body armor; it instead increases the player's maximum health to the point where they can tank one or two direct explosions without getting ragdolled before being left with a sliver of health. However, it has a lengthy list of drawbacks for the sake of gameplay balance; the player's running speed is slowed due to the armor's weight, they can't switch to other weapons, can't enter vehicles or building interiors (to prevent camping), and entering any deep-enough body of water instantly kills them.
• Arrange Mode: The arcade game The Wizard's Ruin has a "Grog Mode" that's unlocked when beating the game for the first time as Thog, the main character. Unlike his brother, Grog cannot use his Mana Meter to level up for a stronger melee attack, but as a tradeoff the meter itself can hold more mana, letting him spam his Desperation Attack more often (which is vital to scoring high and getting in-game achievements). Some of the game's enemies also have their attack patterns changed slightly.
• The Artifact: The game retains various remnants of earlier concepts from back when it was supposed to have a different direction, and features that have been replaced or made obsolete by newer additions:
  • The PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game have locked slots in the character selection screen, implying there would have been eventual ways to unlock them. No such thing ever came, and the enhanced version of GTA V even got a completely new character selection screen without such slots.
  • Player's rank doesn't do much anymore other than showing how much have you played the game - there's vanilla game content like weapons, car colors and tuning parts locked behind it but there's also a whole arsenal of DLC weapons with no such restrictions. A single DLC vehicle (Dubsta 6x6) used to require rank 100 to unlock, but that restriction was later dropped.
  • Originally, getting killed in free roam would have you drop a larger portion of cash that you have on hand and not in the bank, this was changed to only $500 for balance. However, if you're carrying more than $5000 on hand the game still displays a notification that you should deposit it as fast as you can to not fear losing it.
  • The Import/Export update added a fleet of Special Vehicles with unique features (such as Ruiner 2000 with weapons, a parachute and jump ability) which required owning a dedicated vehicle warehouse to house, and they would be called using a special menu. Later updates abandoned this format, adding newer vehicles with similar features that are just normal personal vehicles stored in regular garages, called upon through the Mechanic like any other car. The aforementioned original fleet of special vehicles, however, still requires you to have a vehicle warehouse for you to own them.
• Art Evolution: As well as carrying most of the fundamental improvements introduced for single player in the 8th gen versions, Online is constantly evolving with each new update.
  • Vehicles in each new update generally improve in modelling quality. Some vehicles will feature characteristic handling and unique interiors and details, often some sort of reference to their inspirations or even subcultures which they are associated with. Vehicles designed with first person in mind will be filled with more minute details. For example, the Vapid Winky, the in-game equivalent to the Willys Jeep, features visible VIN tags on the interior. While most of the cars in the base game and even GTA IV do some tweaking to avoid comparisons to real cars, the general direction of design with each new update skirts closer and closer to outright copyright infringement.
  • Weapons and props improve in the same way, down to their icons in the weapon wheel.
• Artifact Title: Can be applied to one's own Beater Dukes. Parts can be applied that restore its condition, but it will still be called a beater.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • If you thought the single-player taxi challenge was too easy for you, call in a limo driver from the Diamond Casino, tell them to hurry to your destination, then marvel as the driving AI struggles to cope with controlling a vehicle larger than a van at speeds they're not programmed to handle. If the limo manages to not fly off a cliff or get stuck on something, it'll be battered and broken by the time it reaches its destination. Even if you don't tell them to hurry, chances are they'll still get a few scratches on the limo because the AI isn't equipped to handle limos. The similar SUV Service offered by the player's Agency is plagued with the same problems.
  • NPC actors placed on floating objects in the Capture Creator can't find their pathing (being in midair and all), so they just stand still and just shoot or melee things from the spot they're standing on. Also, actors tend to do absolutely nothing with some of the newer weaponized vehicles and aircraft.
  • In free roam missions, enemy NPCs sometimes have the bad habit of going after a player that's not involved in the mission at all. This can result in things like a sale mission taking longer to do because the enemies the sale's players are supposed to kill are driving off to the other side of Los Santos trying to kill an unfortunate passerby.
  • One of the player's Agency Security Contracts involves protecting the client's assets. Occasionally, a pair of cars holding Elite Mooks with Molotov cocktails will appear and try to burn the assets. Problem is, on some variations of this mission, they'll get out of their car and attempt to torch their target, but end up killing themselves because the Molotov hits the car they just got out of.
  • Anytime an NPC catches fire, they will just writhe and flail about on the ground screaming until they burn to death or, very rarely, the fire goes out. Apparently Stop, Drop, and Roll isn't a thing in the GTA universe.
  • The LSPD fit this trope to a T, being so incredibly stupid it's a wonder they know how to breath; standing still in the open while being shot at, engaging in combat with heavily armed and armoured vehicles with their inferior weapons such as taking on a tank with a handgun, flat-out ignoring orders to stay in formation or retreat, continuing to engage a suspect regardless of how many fellow officers have been killed, giving away the element of surprise by shouting tough-guy lines, firing their guns in dark areas thus the muzzle flash alerting criminals to their positions, shooting at incoming vehicles, setting up roadblocks on the wrong side of the highway, heavily damaging their cars during pursuits, hitting other officers with their cars and sometimes plowing into them hard enough to kill them, as well as continuously killing and then stealing cars from the wrong people which leads to the slaughter of every officer at the impound.
• Ascended Meme:
  • A "shed" was seen by fans in many pre-release screenshots and some trailers, prompting players to speculate what could be inside it. While it turns out it was actually a cable car station, the parachuting mission involving diving off it is called "The Shed".
  • Carrying a tank by a cargo bob and using it as an improvised attack aircraft, as popularized by Achievement Hunter, is used in one of the resupply missions of the Gunrunning DLC.
  • One of the Diamond Casino heist prep missions involves infiltrating the Los Santos morgue to steal a keycard off of a now-deceased Diamond Casino valet, still in uniform and all. This is a nod to the player base's (continued) tendency to kill the valet standing at the front door of the Diamond for no particular reason. Lester even lampshades this by opening his briefing with a talk about how life-threatening the job of a valet is.
  • The Short Trip mission "Fire It Up" from The Contract ends with Lamar insulting Franklin in a similar manner to Story Mode's first mission (after the prologue) back from eight years ago.
• Asshole Victim: The targets in the Payphone Assassination Missions that came from The Contract are a wide variety of scumbags the world is better off without. In alphabetical order:
  • The CEO, a corrupt construction company CEO involved in almost every kind of crime that can come with the industry.
  • The Cofounder, a hedonistic creep dragging his company down with him.
  • The Dealers, an aggressive gang of drug dealers with no standards, so much so that even other criminals want them wiped out.
  • The Hitmen, a gang of criminals hired to silence a corporate whistleblower.
  • The Judge, a greedy and corrupt judge willing to let the guilty go free for cash and lock up innocent people.
  • The Popstar, a rich creep who used his cash to get away with everything from hit-and-runs to spiking women's drinks.
  • The Tech Entrepreneur, who plans to steal untold amounts of user data and sell it off to the highest bidder.
  • The Trolls, a gaggle of internet trolls spreading the most vile things online and planning to tank various stocks, hurt countless people.
• Attack Drone: The drones launched by the Terrorbyte added in After Hours are armed with a stun gun and a self-destruct. Taken up to eleven in The Contract, as you can now modify certain player vehicles with both grill-mounted machine guns and remote-control capabilities.
  • Invoked with the RC Bandito added in Arena War. This remote control vehicle is able to be equipped with the ability to deploy up to three mines of the player’s choosing, is able to self-destruct, and is also invisible to the radar.
  • The Contract takes it even further by being able to have remote control installed to your personal vehicle instead, courtesy of the Agency's Imani Tech, which works in a similar manner to the RC Bandito. Unfortunately, this only works for select few vehicles introduced in the update.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The luxurious Swift Deluxe Helicopter and Luxor Deluxe Jets allow you to hang out with other players inside and drink champagne. Too bad that they cost incredible amounts of money, and are magnets for griefers everywhere. Fortunately, both vehicles were later added to the in-game internet in Story Mode, for those who want to enjoy the luxury without the threat of being blown up. You'd better hope you have it insured though!
  • The megayachts from the Executives and Other Criminals update can fall under this too. Depending on customization, the price can range from $6,000,000 to nearly $10,000,000. However, they are nothing more than pieces of property that don't even come with a garage. Furthermore, the yacht is always out at sea, making it too far from stores or other conveniences. At least it comes with a respawning helicopter, a valuable transportation feature, and is hella defensible with its anti air missiles, ability to disable the use of weapons while on board, and immunity from player traps like proximity mine since your yacht doesn't exist if you're not in a session.
  • While a lot of cars in the game can be this when you look at performance vs price, the cars that get the most attention are low riders. A well pimped out lowrider could run you the same or higher cost than a hypercar, but don't really boast many advantages over the common cars they are based off of, many of which can stolen for no cost to the player. The hydraulics system is useful for changing the clearance and center of G when going from roads to uneven terrain, that's about all they can do that other cars can't. They really exist to show off and boy do they.
  • The Mobile Operations Center (MOC) that came with the Gunrunning update. It's a gigantic semi hauling an absurdly huge trailer. While both are heavily armored, more so than the Insurgent, and the trailer can have turrets fitted, the trailer is so huge that turning corners without hitting another car, sign or anything else is impossible, several overhead things are slightly too short to pass under without having to abandon the trailer, such as the bridge frame leading to the Mount Chiliad tunnel. Granted since its required to do certain things, most notably modding weapons and doing special mission that greatly discount the other DLC vehicles, its not entirely useless.
  • The Vigilante added in the Smuggler’s Run update. The stupid thing is the Writing Around Trademarks love child of the 1989 Batmobile and the Tumbler armed with machine guns and missiles. The car is powerful enough to send vehicles flying by running into them and it has a stupidly powerful rocket engine that recharges almost instantly and can blow cars away just by activating. However, the car isn't inherently bulletproof, thus the cops and anyone else can make short work of you, there is no horn, thus hitting the horn will trigger the rocket engine and the rocket engine is so powerful that, if you're not careful, could send you flying halfway across the city and into the ocean!
  • The Criminal Enterprise Starter Set. For 40 real-life dollars, players can start off their criminal career on the right foot by automatically obtaining with a collection of locations, vehicles and gear along with a cool million totaling just over $10 million in-game dollars. Sounds cool, right? Well, when they call it a "starter set", they mean "starter set"; everything they give you is the cheapest you can obtain yet leave out a Hangar, warehouse and Facility, the vehicles are either average or the worst choice you can have, the weapons are unimpressive and the clothes and tattoos are most likely not your cup of coffee. (This was later lowered to 10 dollars)
  • The orbital cannon. Yes, it may be fun nuking people from orbit without any fear of retaliation. However, it costs $500,000 per shot ($750,000 if you're using automatic targeting). This thing will drain your money quickly if you go overboard with it.
  • Pixel Pete's Arcade. It's the cheapest of the retro arcades to buy, coming in at a comparatively cheap $1,235,000 (For reference, the next cheapest arcade, Wonderama, is over 300 grand more expensive). The impractical part? It's in Paleto Bay. Meaning you are in for LONG bits of driving during setups, requiring you to basically traverse the entire map and back several times during hest prep.
• Bag of Spilling: Downplayed Trope, as it only affects the Cayo Perico heist. Equipment and weapons you get in heist setups will not be carried over to the next time you do the heist. To justify this, Pavel explains "You leave a loose end, El Rubio will strangle you with it" and tells tales of a crew that successfully robbed Cayo Perico but were later tracked down and killed because they used their own weapons.
• Beach Episode: The free Beach Bum update, adding a number of beach-themed clothing, vehicles, and Jobs.
• Book Ends: In the heists update the titular heists start and end with a bank robbery, the second one is obviously far more dangerous but also pays out much better.
• Boom, Headshot!: Killing an enemy with a head shot results in the player immediately gaining 25 reputation points.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The Up-N-Atomizer pistol. It's a short range weapon that deals low damage but high knockback, making it incredibly useful to save vehicles you managed to get stuck during sale missions. Downplayed Trope, because you can use it to have fun with the physics engine and troll players... But it's still mostly useful for the boring yet practical purpose of saving your cargo. For other niche uses, it's good to use against the Oppressor MkII, the griefer's vehicle of choice, as it's a flying motorcycle whose rider can be knocked off by the pistol's massive projectile when they're zipping around too much to be hit by conventional guns or homing missiles (and can save you a tidy $10k on consoles if you decide not to blow the bike up afterwards); and perhaps most boringly it can be used to blow up any stationary explosive prop like fuel tanks and munitions crates in one shot, without having to resort to expensive explosives or large amounts of bullets. It's only ever necessary to clear certain missions, but over a long grind the saved money will add up.
  • The Sparrow helicopter. The helicopter itself is unremarkable, but it has the unique distinction of being the only aircraft that you can call and it will spawn right next to you no matter where you are. This, combined with the fact that it's on it's own cooldown timer from your personal vehicles, makes it very useful as a general purpose vehicle or when you need a quick getaway and your actual personal vehicle is destroyed and on cooldown.
  • The Velum approach for the Cayo Perico heist. Sure, arriving in a smugglers' plane might not be as exciting as infiltrating via. an underwater grate or parachuting from a high-altitude stealth plane, but unlike those other methods you can use it to escape when you're done, and the airfield is also where you can shut off the power to the cameras and the anti-air around most of the island.
• Black Market: You can eventually become a member of the black market as either a CEO or as a Motorcycle Club President. The products that you can sell range from hard drugs, to counterfeit goods, to high-end cars. If done correctly, this can be quite lucrative.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: In-game money can be purchased for real money. This is, however, somewhat balanced out: you still have to reach a certain level before you can purchase and use some items. Over the years, though, the real money cost of GTA$ hasn't kept up with the rising costs of better equipment and vehicles, and better money making options were released like the Cayo Perico Heist. As a result, GTA Online is like Warframe in that you technically can pay to win, but it's extremely ill-advised and simply grinding is usually the better option.
• But Thou Must!:
  • In the mission "Diamonds are for Trevor", you have to make your escape with Trevor's boat, even when you could take a helicopter or any other faster, much better transport.
  • The Heists are especially bad about this. Of note is "Series A Funding - Coke", where the goal is to storm a yacht and steal the cocaine onboard; the crew is split into two teams; two players attack the yacht by boat, two by helicopter. Despite both teams going to the same location, the mission won't progress if a member of the boat crew tries to take the helicopter, or vice versa.
  • And in the Prison Break, the first guard the 'prisoner' and 'guard' players pass by will inexplicably become hostile even if both players are blending in perfectly, resulting in an immediate shoot-out. There is no way to sneak past him, so shooting first is pretty much the best option.
  • Averted with several setups for heists that can be massively optimized by use of glitches and/or workarounds. In Pacific Standard- Signal, you are tasked with driving a bunch of Jetskis to an island, shooting a bunch of cops, rescuing a guy, and escaping on a boat. You can skip the Jetski part, and find helicopters that have spawn points around the city. Picking the guy up by helicopter is massively easier than using the boat.
    • Also, the finale of the Pacific Standard Job has been optimized to perfection. Usually, you need to break into a bank. Two of the four heist members have the ability to grab the money. This money is constantly decreasing as the people with the money get hurt. If one person does it, then the other members can protect him. Also, the game expects you to make your escape on bikes, which obviously offer little protection. If a player has the Armored Kuruma car in a specific garage, he can go get it mid-mission and then pick up the person who has all the money, who has stayed in the bank and is relatively safe from gunfire. Enjoy actually getting $1,250,000 to split between your guys, instead of far less.
  • In the Cayo Perico Heist setup for the Kosatka Sub approach, you have to steal a Sonar Jammer from a nearby Merryweather test submarine. Paval will mention that all the equipment for this heist will have to be destroyed because otherwise it could be traced back to you, and El Rubio (the guy you're stealing from) is a very powerful and meticulous man. However the entire point of the Sonar Jammer is so that your sub is never detected during the heist, so if Rubio looks for it at all, it would defeat the purpose of having it in the first place. But nonetheless it must be disposed of like all the other equipment, since otherwise it would permanently unlock the Kosatka as an approach for future heists (and the Kosatka is also one of the best approaches too).
  • Another involving the Cayo Perico Heist. To scope out Cayo Perico, the player is tasked with interupting a drug deal so they can steal a Velum and infiltrate the island whilst disguised as a smuggler. Once the player has gathered the intel, they return to Los Santos and the Velum is stored in a hangar, whereupon it can be used to return to the island for further intel gathering as many times as the player wants. Despite this, if the player wants to use the Velum as their approach vehicle for the heist, they are required to steal a seperate one in a prep mission.
  • The game doesn't allow players to steal other players' valuable cargo in Free Roam lobbies, only giving the option to blow them up for an extremely paltry sum of cash. The only types of cargo this doesn't apply to is already low-value to begin with, such as Vehicle Cargo, Heist prepping equipment, and Business Battle cargo crates.
  • The Doomsday Heist and Diamond and Casino Heists all have preps that can be done solo in free mode. However, to account for the fact that there can be more party members, the game forces you to collect multiple pieces of equipment even if you have no intention of bringing that many people (such as four Strombergs). This is most noticable with the Getaway Vehicle prep for the Diamond and Casino Heist; some of the drivers will provide 4-seater cars as options but you still gotta steal two cars, even though you and everyone else can comfortably fit into a single car.
  • The finales for the Contracts added in the Los Santos Tuners update (which are basically a form of mini-heists) only allow you to pick a single vehicle from the Tuner class added in the said update to use throughout the mission, with the ability to call any other car or aircraft disabled.
  • Missions (which include some older Heist setups) that split the party into teams will harshly enforce the teams' objectives. If anyone attempts to deviate from their objective (say, leaving their designated vehicle or location) the game will start a countdown that will arbitrarily fail the mission even though you have not ticked any other failure condition. This is especially noticable on missions where one team is suppose to be on lookout or has a much easier objective; you are all but forced by the game to sit there and twiddle your thumbs until the other team finishes their task, and you can't help.
• Butt-Monkey: An entire faction gets this. The Lost must have fallen severely out of favor with the Plot Gods, because they are a constant and recurring target for various quest givers (Trevor especially).
• Capture the Flag: Added to the game sometime after release. In an update, players can make their own CTF missions with the Mission creator tool
• Cash Gate: Subverted. The game will keep telling you to get an apartment or garage, but it's possible to reach the highest level in the game without having one. It does make it difficult or impossible to get certain things, like cars you only can purchase through the Internet namely any high end or luxurious sports cars you can't merely steal off the streets and take to a mod shop to buy insurance.
• Character Customization: Players can create their own character for play online. Options allows the player to determine their character's appearance based on who would've been that character's parents, including everyone from Story Mode (in addition to characters from previous GTA games, and even John Marston from Red Dead Redemption), in addition to options for hairstyles, facial structure, and starting stats.
• Checkpoint Starvation: The multiplayer missions. Some of them tend to be quite lengthy, and have all of them have no checkpoints at all. Do a mission where you must ambush a drug deal, go to the mountains, hack the computer, and then run to the other side of town to ambush more Mooks at the airfield? Failing will be quite devastating.
  • This was later averted in heists, however.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Tolerated, if not flat out encouraged by the game mechanics. Some jobs allow the person who completes it to keep all the cash for themselves, players can rob each other for money, and can put a bounty on each other. Of course, you Troll, you can just do it just to piss people off, too. If you get too carried away, you will be labeled a "Bad Sport".
• Collateral Damage: Committing suicide by shooting yourself in the head actually fires a bullet from your gun, and it can hit other players.
• Cool Bike: The Bikers DLC gives you:
  • Liberty City Cycles Avarus and Sanctus choppers.
  • The Maibatsu Manchez, based on the 500cc KTM.
  • The Nagasaki Chimera trike.
  • A Nagasaki Street Blazer ATV.
  • A TRON-based Nagasaki Shotaro.
  • Pegassi gives us the Faggio Mod and Faggio Sport motor scooters, as well as its sports bikes known as the Esskey (based on the Ducati Scrambler) and the Vortex (based on the Ducati 1199 Panigale Streetfighter).
  • Shitzu gives us its sports bikes known as the Defiler and Hakuchou Drag (returning from Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned), based on Suzuki's Bandit 1200 Streetfighter and Hayabusa, respectively.
  • Western Motorcycle Company proudly presents: the Nightblade, Wolfsbane, Zombie Chopper (all returning from The Lost and Damned), Zombie Bobber and Rat Bike, all respectively based on the Harley-Davidson models Night Rod Special, 1200 Custom, Fat Bob Custom, and KKF 14.
• Cool Car: Many of the fancier rides in the game such as the Infernus, Entity XF, Cheetah, Turismo, etc are these. Unlike single player, you unfortunately can't just steal them off the streets and take them to your garage or to LS Customs for modification. You have to save up your money and then purchase them off the ingame website LegendaryMotorSports.com.
• Coolest Club Ever: The After Hours update allows the player to run their own nightclub and use it as a money laundering front for their other illicit businesses.
• Conspicuous Consumption: Online is built around this trope. From mega-yachts to gold jet-planes to high-rise offices to being able to store up to 209 personal vehicles, ^note  10 of these must be motorcycles players can expect to spend quite a bit of money.
  • The orbital cannon introduced in The Doomsday Heist update takes this up to eleven - not only is it $900,000 just to install, but it also costs $500,000 just to fire (plus another $250,000 per shot for lock-on capability). That's US$9.99 per shot.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The RM-10 Bombushka gunship/cargo plane's weaponry and ability to transport vehicles fail to justify its existence. It is slower than a blimp, costs over $5 million and can be destroyed with a single RPG^note While most air vehicles have the same durability, they are much more agile and smaller so they can actually dodge incoming fire.. It can't even transport vehicles when upgraded. The real kicker is that the Avenger surpasses the Bombushka is every aspect with similar price and weapon loadout but it can VTOL, tank up to 24 RPG hits and can upgrade weapons/vehicles.
  • The Volatol is arguably worse. While it is a huge plane that can drop 100 bombs, it is a huge plane with a massive hitbox, slow speed and terrible turning. The plane can be downed with a single RPG and is easy to hit thanks to its aforementioned size and sluggishness. These shortcomings meant it fails as a dedicated bomber, which happens to be its intended role.
• Cooperative Multiplayer: In addition to deathmatches and other standard multiplayer modes, you can plot your own heists, stick ups, and other missions with friends. Interestingly, the person who actually grabs the money is the one who decides the payout between the other members of your crew, so it's possible to take all of it for yourself and completely screw everyone else over.
• The Cops Are Cheating Bastards: Though the cops of V were noticeably smarter and deadlier than previous games in the solo campaign, they're downright inhuman at times Online, likely for balance against numerous players. Their accuracy and damage are significantly higher, to the point where a cop armed with a shotgun can chip off a good 75% of your health in a single hit from 4 or 5 city blocks away. Cops also spawn more rapidly and pursue the player more relentlessly. Couple that with the removal of an arrest system so any wanted level = kill on sight and you've got some pretty bloodthirsty and bullshitty peacekeepers of Los Santos.
  • You'll also find that civilians and store keepers are far more aggressive in Online than they are in story mode. If you hold up a store, there's a much greater chance that any civilians outside will start plugging away at you while you're holding the storekeeper at gunpoint, additionally you really don't want to turn your back on the storekeeper after the robbery is complete...
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Averted to all hell in later waves of Survival, where the enemies get military-grade weapons and tank plating for armor. While this can be (slightly) justified with the police, it gets a bit jarring when meth-addled hillbillies and common thugs have the same equipment.
  • In a way, however, Survival also plays it straight; enemies seem to feed off each other's aggression when grouped together and will continuously charge even well-entrenched camping positions according to predictable patterns, which can make cutting them down relatively easy. But it's common for a few stragglers to become stuck in parts of the environment, or, if your cover is a little too good, lose interest in finding you altogether and remain "dormant" in one place, which means that if you want to clear the round, you'll have to give up the advantage and leave the safety of your hiding spot to seek them out. A single enemy, especially on later waves, seeing you before you see them can mean game over at the last second.
• Crime of Self-Defense: Online has no code defining what counts as self defense. As such, you'll get a wanted level for fighting back against hostile NPCs or players, and if you destroy another player's personal vehicle, it doesn't matter if they pummeled you, shot you or blew you up, you'll invariably have to pay their insurance. This gets especially aggravating if explosions are the only consistent way of killing them if they're driving (i.e. driving an armored Kuruma or an Insurgent).
• Critical Existence Failure: Tires on the open-wheel race cars do not suffer any loss of grip regardless of their current durability, until the durability not only drops into the red zone but is halfway between the maximum threshold of said zone and zero durability, at which point grip levels basically drop off a cliff. It's a completely different story when tire wear mechanics are enabled on other car classes though. Not only are there now noticeable differences in grip levels between each of the 3 tire compounds, but the loss of grip as the tires wear can also be noticed, with much less of a "plateau -> drop off cliff" effect that the tires for the open-wheel race cars have.
• Cutting Off the Branches: From the Gunrunning update onwards, Online confirms under no uncertain terms that Deathwish is the canon ending of GTA V:
  • Although killing him is optional, Michael canonically didn't kill The United Liberty Paper Contract in "The Wrap-up" as he appears as a supporting character in The Doomsday Heist update.
  • From The Diamond Casino and Resort update, one mission has Tao Cheng mentioning that he survived an assassination attempt in the Pacific Bluffs Country Club (which is where one of the assassinations took place in Deathwish).
  • Trevor is mentioned as having become a lifestyle coach by Ron in the Smuggler's Run update.
  • Although not mentioned by name, Franklin refers to Michael as still working at the movie studio during the mission "Off Course" in The Contract.
• Cutting the Knot: Tired of everyone killing you when you get the high priority Simeon vehicle? Want no competition in destroying the target vehicles or planes? Want to survive a bounty placed on you for some easy xp, money, and an achievement? Just go into an invite-only session without inviting anyone else.
• Defunct Online Video Games: The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of Grand Theft Auto Online became examples of this trope on December 16, 2021, six years after Rockstar officially stopped updating them.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • Normally, if you steal a car, the protagonist will smash the windows to unlock the door. However, if you are stealing I/E vehicles, the protagonist will pick the lock instead. Any damage done to the vehicle is paid out your own pocket, so the protagonist is trying to maximize profit by not breaking the windows.
  • Agent ULP's phone call to the player regarding the IAA missions added in the Criminal Enterprises update has an additional line mentioning them doing well in Operation: Doomsday (as in, the Doomsday Heist) if they've cleared it before his call. He'll also try to begrudgingly thank the player for rescuing him during Act II of the heist, but he'll turn around and say he's not contractually obligated to.
• Disc-One Nuke: The armored Kuruma car in GTA Online is a defensive form of this trope, and an ideal choice if you are getting tired with 12 year olds gunning you down. Unlocked during the very first heist mission string, it features armor plated body panels and windows that offer near-total protection from bullets, making nearly every mission vastly easier to complete because players can simply turtle inside the vehicle while shooting out of its window slits. While the $525,000 price tag is hefty, players who preordered the game and received a huge bonus cash grant were able to immediately afford it and a cheap safehouse to put it in. The Insurgent, which is like the armored Karuma, but with the ability to survive a few rockets, can be bought after unlocking it from a certain heist. An update made the Insurgent available to purchase right away without having to beat the heist and its price tag is around $600,000, which most have gotten by now thanks to the double cash events Rockstar periodically holds.
  • Playing it a bit more straight are the DLC Weapons, like the Special Carbine, Bullpup Rifle, Heavy Shotgun, and the Homing Launcher. The Special Carbine is a Carbine Rifle that's a little bulkier, but you can get it from the start, and upgrading it is worthwhile for heists, the Bullpup is a basic Advanced Rifle that is not nearly as strong,The Heavy Shotgun is a straight upgrade to the already overpowered Assault Shotgun, which only has a better fire rate, and the Homing except to say, if nothing else, it can be bought at level 1, while the normal rocket launcher is locked at level 100.
• Disproportionate Retribution: It's rare for a game mode to have an objective that actually warrants the amount of force being employed (especially by the authorities). Criminals escaping via motorbike into the hills? Send fighter jets after them!
  • The Heists Update introduced a side activity in which Lester asks you to distract the police. You only need to drive into the area to get the cops after you. While this could be justified by you potentially disrupting a police operation, you'll eventually get helicopters and NOOSE sent after you.
• Double Unlock: You have to reach a certain level to unlock some items, and then you have to buy the item with in-game currency.
• Driven to Suicide: If you cause your own death, the game will say "You committed suicide". If you actually commit suicide (an option, where you can put your gun to your own head and pull the trigger), it says "You took the easy way out".
• Driving Up a Wall: Open Wheel cars can be driven upside down along the roofs of tunnels. This is based on Real Life speculation that the aerodynamic design of Formula One vehicles generates enough downforce that you can, theoretically, drive one upside-down, although no one (that we are aware of) has ever tried to test this theory.
• Early Game Hell: Especially if you don't have friends playing the game. To unlock the more efficient ways of grinding money you need to put down a hefty sum to unlock them first. Good luck scrounging enough for an Apartment, then running Heists with randoms.
• Emote Animation: There's a handful of emotes, most of them used to gloat or offend someone like Flipping the Bird and saluting with a smug look on your character's face.
• Energy Weapons: Present and accounted for in the Up-n-Atomizer (a concussive Ray Gun), the Unholy Hellmaker (a plasma assault rifle), and the Widowmaker (a massive gatling laser cannon).
• Evil Versus Oblivion: The Doomsday Heist in a nutshell. You want to prevent World War III because your criminal empire wouldn't survive long After the End with no client or resources. Without fuel, how would you enjoy your Weaponized Car or jet plane?
• Excuse Plot: Most game modes give a flimsy reason for teams of players murdering each other. Cops confiscated our weed? Start a massive shoot-out in the streets. Crooks made off with important evidence? Storm their HQ and kill every last one of them. The most blatant is probably Deathmatch, which just tells you to kill as many people as possible for their money.
  • Hell, the whole plot of GTA Online. The only reason why your character is in Los Santos in the first place is because he or she met Lamar on Lifeinvader.
• Experience Points: Successfully completing missions, pulling off robberies, winning races, and other activities will earn you Reputation Points that allow your character to increase in rank and unlock better weapons, vehicles, and other purchasable items.
• External Combustion: One of the modifications you can fit to practically any car that fits into the mechanic shop is a bomb that can either be detonated remotely via cellphone, or set to detonate the next time the car is started. Enterprising players who became tired of griefers carjacking them at gunpoint learned that they could fit one of their fancier cars with such a bomb, then cruise around the city waiting for a player brave or stupid enough to try and jack them. Once the would-be thief is merrily is on their way, the car's owner simply whips out their phone and...boom.
• Expy: The protagonist never speaks and takes jobs from just about anybody paying, much like Claude.
• Foreshadowing: One of the random dialogue Pavel says after being caught and thrown off of Cayo Perico says it's a long swim back to Los Santos. You can escape the island during the heist by swimming out to the ocean.
• Freudian Slip: In the patch list for the Tuners update, one of the patches fixes a bug with obtaining English Dave's "Beetle".
• Game-Breaking Bug
  • In the days after launch, the overloaded Rockstar cloud servers began to break down and prevent players from accessing their created characters. Players were instead given an innocuous prompt to start a session with a new, generic character, not realizing that this would overwrite all previous online character data and reset their progress. Rockstar was forced to put out a PSA warning against the generic-character feature before patching the whole thing out.
  • The servers themselves are a continuing problem; Rockstar released a large sum of money to all Online players as an apology for the server woes early in release, but they missed the original stated date by several weeks because they were worried the servers would nullify the deposits.
  • The original update that added Online Mode caused a little-known bug for a number of unlucky players who found their single-player games utterly broken, with all mission hubs inaccessible and progress rendered impossible as a result. Additional updates have corrected this bug but those affected must still replay from the beginning to get their progress back.
  • There's currently a money hack running rampant that allows players to attain billions of GTA dollars from store robberies and bounties. The hack is so easy to do that some players believe it to be a honey pot.
    • Rockstar responded and removed the ability to hack yourself or other players to multi-millionare-dom. All hacked money was removed from players' bank accounts. Those who were hacking also had penalties applied while innocent players who just got the money were left alone.
  • When the Capture the Flag game mode was first released, players discovered that hovering over the capture point in a helicopter with the objective in tow resulted in millions of experience points per hour. Rockstar responded by removing every CTF map containing a helicopter.
  • Servers have issues with keeping some players in a session with other people. While this is usually just an annoyance in public lobbies, this issue become greater in missions, where all the enemies will likely tear apart lone players, and will likely cause some hairs to be torn out during Heists and Lamar missions, as these will be failed if there are less than 4 players in the session at one time.
  • The servers are still not perfect, but cloud failures and unexpected failures are much less common.
  • The game's complete lack of sanity checking when it came to peer-to-peer communication or communication to Rockstar Social Club eventually bit this game in the ass in late January 2023, when an exploit partially enabled remote code execution through GTA Online itself and players were advised not to touch the game at all until it was fixed, or else potentially suffer lasting damage to their PC. Security experts already knew about this since close to the game's PC launch as it was already laughably easy to execute arbitrary code limited to within the game itself, and the game's lack of sanity checking already existed long before the PC version on Xbox 360 and PS3 (see the money hack linked a few bullet points above).
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • To a small extent with the Diamond Casino heist. Unlike the original and Doomsday heists, the Diamond Casino heist justifies repeat playthroughs in its cutscenes — the Cheng family wants the online protagonist and their crew to rob the Diamond blind so that the Duggans write the casino off as a liability, making it safer for the Chengs to take back. However, this is as far as the writing goes in its justification, because all the dialogue treats every run as if it were the first (aside from one or two throwaway lines).
  • The Cayo Perico heist follows a similar formula. After the first playthrough, the protagonist's disguise changes from a "tour manager" for Keinemusic to blending in with the island's cargo pilots, owing to El Rubio's increased paranoia. Pavel will also express some glee at the prospect of robbing El Rubio again, mostly just to make a fool out of him. However, like the Diamond Casino heist before it, most of the mission dialogue remains the same as it was the first time around.
  • If you do the Cayo Perico heist rerun on hard mode (which Pavel says is you returning almost immediately after robbing El Rubio), El Rubio can be heard yelling over the comms about how the guards better get their act together since no one wants to attend parties on an island that is frequently getting robbed.
• Global Currency Exception: Diamond Casino chips. Other than their obvious use for gambling, the casino's clothing and decoration store only accepts chips for purchases. Buying things en masse becomes somewhat annoying when one considers that the only way to get more chips is to win them, trade for them at the casino (which has a GTA$50,000 hourly limit), or grind them at a very slow pace through Casino Work jobs in free roam.
• Griefer: With a name like Grand Theft Auto Online, its to be expected that other players will try to wreck your shit for the lulz factor at any given moment. Obnoxious players in particular (preferably with a high bounty on their heads) will often patrol the streets of Los Santos in a Rhino Tank (or more recently, the Oppressor Mk. II flying motorcycle) blowing up anything that moves land or sky. Unless you have an RPG, expect to get killed repeatedly even if you are just minding your own business and have no intention of trying to kill said griefer.
  • For the lucky few who can afford the incredibly expensive Deluxe versions of the Luxor or Swift, they can expect griefers to be hot on their tail. The only way that the player can avoid having Griefers destroying their prized aircraft is to use Passive Mode or get the vehicles insured as quickly as possible.
  • People in a chopper with rockets or a military jet (which has the benefit of better lock-on targeting) can be just as bad as their fellow trolls in tanks as they can more easily get away from your line of firing.
    • You can also be said griefer if you so choose though ironically repeating said behavior will likely put you in the "bad sport" lobby complete with a dunce cap!
    • With the heists update, you can be a jerk and not give your fellow crew members their fair share of the score.
  • And, sadly, the personal vehicle system also makes it harder to respond to somebody being a jerk, because if you destroy their vehicle while they're attacking you in it, then you risk having a penalty put on you that puts you in servers with other people who are much more likely to do horrible things for no reason.
  • Hackers have become more and more rampant in Online as time has gone by, and the nature of the hacks used has also become more advanced and more malicious over time. Money hacks and invincibility are one thing, but spawning masses of objects into the world that can negatively affect performance to the point of crashing the game for other people is entirely another. It has technically reached a point where the advice by many honest senior players to new players is to launch a private friend-only or solo session and stay out of the public ones.
  • When somebody with a vehicle warehouse is trying to sell a car the game makes it clear that to successfully profit from ruining their mission other players have to steal the car being sold and take it to a designated area, however other players will fuck with the seller by going after it with the intent of destroying it, which doesn't give payout.
  • In general, the fastest money-making activities in the game are restricted to public free roam sessions, and attempting to do them results in the participating players getting marked on the map, opening the door wide open for military aircraft-delivered griefing. The only thing sellers have going for them, barring like-minded and equally-armed friends, is the fact that their delivery vehicles are extremely durable compared to their non-mission counterparts. For someone looking from the outside in, one might argue that the mechanic serves a similar purpose to games like EVE Online, Metal Gear Solid V, or The Division. However, attacking players get chump change for their efforts (in fact, if they're not in a military vehicle, they'd lose money destroying other players' cargo), so the implication is that griefing is encouraged by the developers only for griefing's sake (or perhaps frustrating the victims into buying Shark Cards).
• Guide Dang It!: The game is pretty good at telling you most things, however there are a few spots it does miss.
  • The game relies on giving you various hints during the loading screens or when they are needed due to nearby events. This is normally ok, but sometimes the hints that it gives you could be more useful if they appeared before, such as information about Armored Trucks or that high end vehicles you find on the street can't be made into personal vehicles and must be bought.
  • On the prison break finale, the two players busting into the prison are expected to start a shootout as soon as they get off the bus. The game doesn't mention this, and the way the mission is set up heavily implies that you're supposed to be keeping the disguise up until you meet the target, rather than start firing as soon as you enter the prison. The only hint is one guard who, after you pass him, inexplicably starts shooting at you for no noticeable reason.
  • On the Pacific Standard setup where you're tracking the locator, one player drives and the other uses an app on their phone that will point out the rough location of several mail trucks. The driver is supposed to take the tracker to these trucks so the tracker can take a picture of its licences plate. What the game doesn't mention is that, while using the tracker app, pressing the D-Pad directions will put an arrow up on their driver's screen pointing in that direction, allowing players to communicate the location without a mic.
  • Certain businesses (the nightclub, special cargo warehouses, and the arcade) let you upgrade the vehicles used in their respective sales/heist. While at least the nightclub has Gay Tony [[{Player Nudge} call you and tell you to upgrade the vehicle used]] if your vehicle gets destroyed multiple times, there is nothing telling you that you can upgrade the various special cargo sale vehicles using the red toolbox inside warehouses and getaway vehicles by getting in and pressing the button.
  • On the Cayo Perico heist, there is no indication outside of one of Pavel's random dialogue after being caught and thrown off the island, is that you can escape the island during the heist by just swimming out to the ocean.
• Hacker Cave: The Benefactor Terrorbyte is a mobile one for the Player Character. Inside, one can hack into any of their business computers and run a resupply run for that business. In addition, the player can run missions for Paige.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Zig-zagged in a very strange way. The game lets you name your characters online, but after that, you'll probably never see said name again, unless you've created multiple characters and are in the character select screen- the parts of the game with voice acting will never mention your name, and in cases where names are shown, only the player's Social Club nickname ever comes up, not the name of the character that the player has designated.
• Heroic Mime: Zigzagged. The multiplayer protagonist doesn't speak during the cutscenes, for obvious reasons. Similarly, when the player phones Lester for assistance, the protagonist is not heard speaking, only Lester's responses (lampshaded by Lester sometimes addressing the player as "my creepy silent friend"). But they can "speak" during gameplay if the player talks through a mic, complete with generic mouth flaps.
• Hold the Line: The Survival missions in Online require the players to hold off 10 increasingly difficult waves of computer-controlled enemies.
• Holiday Mode:
  • All of San Andreas has been covered in snow on a weekend on or near Christmas every year since 2014. Rockstar went the extra mile in 2020, having another snow day on April Fools.
  • In a similar vein, Rockstar has been running Fourth of July events since 2014, which is usually one of the only times of the year that players can buy and restock the Musket and Fireworks Launcher from Ammu-Nation.
  • 2019 saw the debut of limited-time Halloween events, like alien-themed Survival missions and peyote plants in Free Mode that turn you into random animals.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Whether they're shooting at you from a moving vehicle while your behind cover, or from a chopper about 200 feet in the air, the enemy NPC's WILL end you.
• Improbably Cool Car: Despite the in-game website claiming that only 10 were made, it is entirely possible for all 30 players in a lobby to drive around in their own Truffade Z-Type.
• Joke Character: A Joke Vehicle in this case, the Maxwell Asbo, in essence a faithful recreation of a mid-2000s Vauxhal/Opel Corsa. From the name itself ("asbo" is a British slang term for a problem child) to its wide array of bodykits and its very pointed choice of inspiration, the Asbo is a clear reference to Chav culture. It's also, regardless of how it's modified, one of the worst handling cars in the game.
• Kaizo Trap: The end of the Prison Break Heist finale has players parachute out of their getaway plane to swap over to a helicopter to fly back to Los Santos, with Agent 14 debriefing the heist crew and talking about the next heist already. However, the mission is very much not over and players can still die from hitting the ground too hard or accidentally blow up the chopper hitting something.^note The chopper is placed on a slanted beach with some trees nearby, so this is very much a possibility. And yes, because there are no checkpoints in the original heist series, the whole finale has to be restarted from the beginning.
• Karma Meter: The High Life update introduced a stat called "Mental State", which starts at 0% and works its way up whenever a player kills other players, NPCs or blows up cars. Harming other players causes it to raise the most. Staying out of conflict and/or playing anything outside of Free Mode empties it.
• Level Editor: A relatively simplistic one, called the "Content Creator", was launched soon after the game, allowing players to create their own deathmatches, races, and Capture missions, some of which may be "Rockstar Verified".
• The Load: In Heists, the person who got "Bronze" rank usually ended up as this. It pretty much always goes automatically to whoever used your team life, and aside from that, it goes to the person who accomplished the least related to the task or did the worst job at it (reached the destination slowest, killed the fewest targets, took the most damage). Depending on your group, though, this can often just be a bad luck run, and someone always has to take the role, so it's zigzagged from the player's perspective, while the game sees it as being played straight.
• Macguffin: Any game mode involving a "package" that has to be captured or protected. What the actual package is (money, drugs, evidence, etc.) is completely interchangeable and exists to give both sides something to fight over.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Because damage sustained by the player character takes a while to fully disappear, the player can be casually walking around Los Santos with gaping holes in their face and major organs.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: GTA Online can take anywhere between three to ten minutes to load. This is down to server population, loading all the players and their actions, the map itself and anything else online-specific. In other words, get ready to listen to Tangerine Dream Mona Da Vinci A LOT when you're loading in to the online.
• Meme Acknowledgement: The Madam Nazar fortune teller bot in the Casino heist update spouts these out at random; some of her lines are just regular cliched fortune teller lines, others reference her game of origin, but many also joke about the various glitches, memes and conspiracies not only from this game but the entire franchise. This page lists them all.
• Mundane Solution: There isn't anything stopping you from escaping Cayo Perico during the heist by just swimming into the ocean.
• Mundane Utility: There really isn't anything stopping you from using a supped up hypercar to reduce your commute time.
  • With the addition of Sercuroserv CEOs its far from uncommon to see people using their CEO abilities to call in Buzzard attack helicopters, and then using them run various errands faster.
    • Or if they're rich enough, buying an Akula gunship helicopter and using its stealth mode to simply get around without appearing on a potential Griefer's minimap.
  • Some players will only go shopping in their choice of armored car, or better yet with a Securoserv protection detail in a turreted limo guarding the door.
  • The hydra is a fighter jet the player can own, which already makes it a must-have. However with its fast speed and VTOL capabilities its not uncommon to see people use them to pick up groceries at the convenience store and then rob said convenience store.
  • Have to get through a hilly windy road? There is nothing better for that than the Ruiner 2000 with its parachute and jump functions.
  • The APC is the most heavily armored and one the most heavily armed vehicles in the game. Its also both amphibious and a personal vehicle making it a great choice for going mudding or getting to your yacht without having to switch to a boat.
  • The Mobile Operations center is essentially a mobile fortress that's hauled by a trailer. You can use it quickly lose your wanted level by just entering the trailer. Or you can use the built-in closet to throw together an outfit on the fly.
    • If you want to forgo practicality, you could install a living quarters on one and just use it to hang out with friends in it.
  • The Cayo Perico Heist update gives us the Kosatka, a fully loaded submarine with guided missiles, sonar, the Sparrow attack helicopter, and the Kraken Avisa submersible. But it also has a fast travel feature whose price per use drops to merely $2,000 after completing the heist. It's common for players to use their Kosatka as simply a Warp Whistle and then the Sparrow to fly themselves onto land.
• N.G.O. Superpower: SecuroServ is this in all their glory. They perform numerous dirty deeds for their clients from assassinations, to running illicit contraband, to bribing the police. No task is too small or too against the law.
• Nintendo Hard:
  • Heists revolve around this trope, as the developers' idea of "hard" is throwing an absurd number of enemies at the player. Some Contact Missions (namely, ones that require more than four players) also subscribe to this idea.
  • The arcade machines that players can buy for their arcade properties are, rather appropriately, this trope. Lester even lampshades the difficulty of the side-scrolling beat-em-up The Wizard's Ruin after completing the arcade setup mission.
• Nipple and Dimed: Just like in the main game, you can visit the Vanilla Unicorn. Unlike the main game, the girls keep their tops on during private dances.^note This has been changed in the Xbox One, Playstation 4, and PC versions. 360 and Playstation 3 versions still play this trope straight. A female protagonist will also shower with a bikini top on, which is odd considering due to camera angles you only ever see a character's back when showering.
  • Bizarrely, Online does still contain nudity; if you go to the Playboy mansion lookalike, you can encounter a woman wearing nothing but her bikini bottoms.
    • For a while at least, there was a glitch a player could do to make their female character appear topless!
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Helping the police take down another player will invariably end up with them turning their guns towards you.
  • Additionally, some of the strangers requiring help are actually elaborate scams. If a woman comes screaming for help claiming that her friend is being assaulted, going to help may end with you being robbed and maybe gunned down to death by said woman and her co-conspirators. Don’t go... or go prepared if you’re looking for some cheap experience and money.
• No-Harm Requirement: The first and the last heist require half of the crew to keep the people in a bank foyer down without killing them, while the other half gets the money. Failing to do so, or killing one of them will fail the mission in the first heist and spawn N.O.O.S.E. teams in the last heist. You will however need to kill armed guards in the last mission.
• Non-Indicative Name: Most mission names are appropriate and often have a nice pun to them, but a few have no apparent relation to what's going on. Rooftop Rumble, for instance, has nothing at all to do with rooftops.
  • The Doomsday Heist is a notable example, as you're not actually pulling off a robbery, you're actually trying to save the world from nuclear armageddon.
• Not the Intended Use:
  • Muggers can be hired, for $1000, to mug a specific player, causing the mugger to steal a portion of the cash they have on hand, rather than deposited at a bank, by the mugger running up and attacking the player. However this has the extra effect of basically ragdolling the player, presumably to keep retribution from being swift and effective from the mugged party, and also causes the mugger to steal any vehicle the target player may have been in. Considering the closest a player gets to knocking somebody over is killing them, muggers are a solution to keeping their target alive.
  • The longer a mission goes on, the more money and RP it gives out upon completion. This was made to keep shorter games and longer game from paying out differently, so 2 short games would basically pay out as much as 1 longer one, but people who know the mechanics may intentionally stall at some points to reach the time goal to increase the rewarded payout. ^note  it's roughly 3 minutes from the first tier to the second tier of payouts.
  • The VIP/Bodyguard system can be used to have fun with your fellow Organization members, as it allows for launches due to friendly fire being off by default.
  • While they are usually miniscule amounts, the bounties NPC characters rarely call on the player are basically free money if you prefer to play alone, since they can only be claimed by other players.
  • The "Commit Suicide" option in the Interaction Menu was probably meant for players stuck somewhere inescapable or to spawn farther away than usual to escape someone who's spawn camping in free roam. Instead, it's most notorious as a tool used by kill/death ratio-obsessed tryhards in free roam to preserve their K/D, as a suicide used to not count against it. Even when an Obvious Rule Patch made this option count against K/D, tryhards still used it to escape the cops and get right back to farming kills on AFK or underleveled players.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The Hang-On and OutRun-inspired Race'n'Chase arcade cabinets are named after the beta version of Grand Theft Auto (Classic).
  • The Los Santos Summer Special update added two new arcade games, one of which is QUB3D, the falling block puzzle game from Grand Theft Auto IV, appearing almost exactly as it did in that game. To make the reference more obvious, the game's description on the arcade games website says that "it's the same game you've been playing for decades".
  • The Surfer Custom introduced in the Los Santos Drug Wars update has a livery based on The Truth's Mothership.
  • During the start of "Fire It Up", Franklin said "Oh, shit. Here we go again..." during what appears to be an out-of-body experience, before Lamar concludes it as a side effect of an LD Organics marijuana.
• Optional Sexual Encounter: Like in single-player, you can pick up hookers. Unlike in single player, they have a strange habit of running screaming from your car after you're done. You can also get the numbers from the girls at the Vanilla Unicorn once you've gotten an apartment, but they'll only answer if you've got a particularly high end apartment. And then subverted; turns out they're just there to give you a free private dance with constant touching.
• Outside-Genre Foe: The Big Bad of the Doomsday Heist employs an army of cyborg clones, some of which are capable of turning invisible.
• Play Every Day: This game has two relatively minor examples:
  • Daily Objectives, which reset once every day at 6 AM UTC. Players get a small pittance (GTA$30,000) for completing all three on the same day, but there is a "streak" bonus for completing all dailies for a week straight (GTA$150,000) and a month straight ($750,000). Since there are ways to earn that much money in a few hours, much less a month, most people eschew the dailies unless they're doing it for fun.
  • The Diamond Casino Lucky Wheel, which gives players one random prize and is available exactly 24 hours after the last spin, akin to a "login bonus" in other free-to-play games. The 1-in-20 grand prize is the car displayed on the podium in the lobby, which usually rotates once every week. Unfortunately, most cash prizes on the wheel are relatively minor (and the grand prize car "sells" for nothing, since sale prices are based on its purchase cost, and it's given for free); the the most useful thing one can earn from the wheel is a free resupply of one of their businesses, which is obtained randomly when landing on the "Mystery" slot. On the other hand, said slot can give a measly pack of cigarettes...
• Police Are Useless: Zig-zagged. In some missions where the police are explicity involved, they can do a very good job of shooting you dead or trapping you, but in all the rest they're entirely absent.
• Police Brutality: Entirely possible depending on who's playing as a cop in most game modes. Since the cops are basically just palette-swapped versions of the crooks, it's likely to see police cause as much wanton destruction and death as the crooks themselves.
  • Also, the police in Online never attempt to arrest someone with a wanted level, and will always shoot to kill.
  • They will also kill civilians on a regular basis. If a large grouping of cops either kills or loses their target(s), they will mill about for a while in the area. There is a good chance that a pedestrian will then bump into one accidentally and be promptly slaughtered. this gets even more horrifying if one or more civilians nearby has a gun, as they will try to defend the victim from the cops, with predictable results usually.
    • Also, there's a good chance that this will lead to a spiral in a populated area, such as the downtown streets. Get a bunch of police together in one tight intersection, wait for the chance civilian bumping into a police officer, and then watch as the police open fire, cause nearby civilians to panic, speed away and hit a police officer in their panic, get ruthlessly gunned down, and the cycle continues.
• Power Creep: Applies to many vehicles added in the various updates, as well as some weapons to a degree. The High Life update introduced the Pegassi Zentorno, a supercar outclassing every other one in general performance which led many players flocking to its ownership overnight, all until a bit over a year after, when the Progen T20 became the best all-around supercar. It even happened with some Muscles and Sport Classics - the Lampadati Casco, a late 1950s sports coupe introduced with the Heists outclasses most other Sport Classics, including a Miura-based 1960s supercar; and the Coquette Black Fin, which beats out modern Muscles and even Supercars!
  • The DLC weapons aren't really that balanced for being available from Rank 1, especially the Homing Launcher, which can basically replace the RPG. The rest of the guns aren't too bad, but they do often replace or remove the need for more conventional weapons earned by leveling, with the only weapon class not having a straight-up replacement within the DLC weaponry being sniper rifles.
  • The Doomsday Heist DLC, as well as Gunrunning before it but not to the same degree, introduced the personal flying vehicle with homing missiles. The Deluxo isn't the fastest aerial attack vehicle, it can only hold 30 missiles, and it's expensive, but it's a personal vehicle, meaning if you harass somebody in it and they destroy it they have to pay 10'000 for the insurance and get a bad player mark. Every other vehicle of this type cannot be personal and so cannot give you a penalty for blasting it out of the sky for launching missiles at you, but this one is more annoying for that sole reason.
    • The Oppressor Mk 2 is the same but even worse, with the ability to prevent homing missiles from connecting with it by throwing them off course and being faster while still being free flying unlike mk. 1
  • Another way this has worked out is the migration of more content into the free world. While that's what people wanted, there are now a lot of high paying missions that it only takes one failure to prevent the payout for, while you often have to pay to get them going. With the above mentioned flying homing missile shooters as well as them respawning while your payload won't respawn. While there still are options to make money without resorting to free mode, the fact that most business content added in is only in free mode has made it so it only takes one obnoxious jerk in a room to ruin buissness for everybody else.
• The Power of Friendship: It's more profitable to tackle missions as a team than alone. Not only are they easier to accomplish, you get twenty percent more EXP for completing them as a team, and you get even more for doing them with members of your Crew. Of course, just watch out for that "Disorder" mentioned above.
• Power Limiter: The game prevents players from simply stealing high-end vehicles off the street by preventing them from driving the vehicles into garages with the in-universe explanation that such vehicles are tagged and easily traceable. Instead, players will have to pay millions of in-game currency obtained either by playing missions or purchasing cash cards with real-world money. Also, stealing cars can result in a bounty being placed on the player's head and end up targeted by other players looking to make a quick buck.
• Present-Day Past: Originally Online's story takes place a few months before GTA V's single-player campaign to prevent players who jumped right in without playing single player first to get story mode spoilers cementing it in early 2013. Later content updates caused the game to descend into anachronism as post-2013 vehicles and weapons were added and characters discussed or referenced contemporary events. In one MOC mission Agent 14 explicitly mentions that 'it's 2017', indicating Rockstar has retconned the time period to match the current date.
• Press X to Die: Your character menu has an extra option which is not present in the character menus for either of the three main protagonists: "Commit Suicide".
• Prisoner's Dilemma: A subtle one but interrupting freemode events tends to be one with skewed punishments. A lot freemode events where you destroy cargo don't pay out that well, roughly $20,000 at most, whereas payout for the delivery player tends to be much more, such as $200,000 in some cases. While the other players don't see that money, all players playing in a more trusting, less hostile fashion also means when the other players want to do similar events, if nobody bothers them then they get more money than destroying the shipment and in turn having other people try and destroy theirs and succeeding would. It can be divided up as: if all players don't ruin each other's work earns them 10X payout on their own ventures, ruining somebody else's venture and successfully running your own earns you 11X, and ruining somebody else's and having yours ruined is 1X, and not ruining somebody else's and having yours is 0X.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Zig-Zagged. The only things your character's sex affects are their animations, clothes available to them (recent updates tend to add unisex clothes, though) and some dialogue. There are no male prostitutes or strippers either, however, and prostitutes don't have unique animations for female characters, so every female Player Character is seemingly turned on by somone performing a jerking motion above their crotch.
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • A downplayed example during the Doomsday Heist: At one point, Avon and Lester get into an argument about the economic viability of cryptocurrency (e.g. Bitcoin), with Lester calling them a bubble, something that was all the rage back in 2017 when the Doomsday Heist update was released.
  • A lot of the business quality of life updates shipped with the Criminal Enterprises update were justified in-universe with some combination of gas price inflation, supply chain disruptions, and record high heat waves driving more people indoors — all things that were happening the world over in real life to various extents when the update dropped on July 26, 2022. Oddly, none of the older functions of the player's businesses were changed at all, despite these justifications.
• Required Spinoff Crossover: With Red Dead Online, this game's Spiritual Successor. A variety of promotions held by Rockstar involve playing one game and getting bonus content on the other, mostly going from GTA Online to Red Dead Online.
• Respawning Enemies: For the most part, as per series tradition, only cops (and if you're in Fort Zancudo, soldiers) will respawn to pursue the player when killed...unless, of course, you're playing missions such as "Dry Docking" or "Stocks and Scares". For whatever reason, almost any mission that takes place on Elysian Island will put you up against infinitely respawning Merryweather mercenaries. Have fun trying to open a safe with them breathing down your neck.
• Rewards Pass: Of a sort. The Expanded & Enhanced version of the game has an optional subscription service called "GTA+". Unlike Take Two's previous endeavor with this trope in Red Dead Online, there's no level grinding involved.
• Rice Burner: Many vehicles you are tasked with retrieving in the Import/Export missions have... less than tasteful modifications applied to them.
  • Of course, players themselves can invoke this trope as well. You want a chrome Adder with pink dollar rims and green neon? There is absolutely nothing stopping you.
  • Most likely unintentional but the Itali GTB Custom, which you get by buying the regular Itali GTB and then taking it over to Benny's. Performance testers discovered that the Custom is around a full second slower than the original, with the cause being that unlike all other cars, spoilers don't improve traction with this one. As a result, it's a car with more customizable parts but is slower than its non-Custom counterpart.
• Save Scumming: A rare example pertaining to an online game. Since the game saves data to Rockstar's cloud servers at regular intervals rather than after every action, it's possible to get refunded for certain things simply by quitting the game or otherwise forcing a disconnect quickly enough and rolling back progress by a few minutes. Examples include getting refunded for car and weapon mods, Diamond Casino losses, or even Orbital Cannon fees.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The high-priority vehicles. Woe betide the newbie who picks one up, goes through all the trouble of losing the cops, and pays all the money to repair/respray it, only to be gunned down the second they leave the Pay 'n' Spray and have it swiped from underneath them.
    • If you know that someone is lying in wait to kill you and steal the high priority vehicle, however, the schmuck status can be inverted by placing an ignition bomb on the vehicle so that if you get gunned down after exiting Los Santos Customs, you'll get the last laugh when they blow themselves up.
  • Custom deathmatches with titles such as "100000 RP + $$$ + Rank Up". The titles promise easy and quick RP and money. However, once you play them, you'll find that these deathmatches are rigged so that the creator always wins. Everyone spawns in an enclosed area armed with only melee weapons, but there is a tank, helicopter, or stash of guns in some hidden area that only the creator knows how to get to. The creator will then proceed to rush to his hidden weaponry and continuously spawn kill you.
  • The game tells you to press the chat key and sing in the shower to earn extra RP. Yes, it does give you RP- a measly 50RP. But you also broadcast your (probably terrible on purpose) singing to everyone on the server. The severity of the repercussions depends on whether you're in a public server, a crew-only or friend-only session, or alone, at that time.
  • With some careful placement, its possible to open a car's door place a proximity mine inside it, and shut the door with no one being any the wiser. If you see a special vehicle, or worse a target vehicle,^note neither of which cost the owner/thief a dime if they blow it up from the Import/Export update just sitting in the road, there is a good chance it has proxy bomb in it.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: For Trevor at least, the Series A Funding heist turns out to be entirely pointless, as the drug deal at the end (with all of the product that he's just paid the four of you to get for him) is actually a sting operation by the DOA, and Trevor is forced on the run with nothing but an Impotent Rage figure as consolation.
• Silent Snarker: In cutscenes for missions and heists the player characters sometimes react this way to the eccentricities of characters like Lamar and Lester.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: In the "The Contract" update, the player is sent to a Triad-owned nightclub to retrieve a videotape so they can track down a person of interest. While the player is going to the club, Franklin asks Imani why she doesn't just hack their security system. She tells him that the system is so primitive, it's not hooked up to the internet.
• Sinister Surveillance: The Terrorbyte fulfills this with the player scanner. This allows users to see a wide array of stats from another scanned player from their weapon accuracy to their favorite vehicle to the number of sex acts that they have purchased.
• Sky Heist:
  • In the "Do You Even Lift?" mission, the players have to acquire one or more Cargobob helicopters, and then they are tasked with stealing four vehicles by airlifting out of their driveways and delivering them to the top of a multistorey car park in Pillbox Hill.
  • A nightclub owner who books The Black Madonna will be asked to use a Cargobob to rescue her from an impromptu concert. By the time the player gets there, she will have already been put into the back of a police car and the player will have to use the helicopter's winch to carry the whole car to safety. Unfortunately, this also results in an Accidental Kidnapping as there's a police officer in the car with her.
• Sky Pirates: In Smuggler's Run, one of the mission involves stealing cargo from airplanes. While they're flying. By shooting them down with a jet fighter!
• Smuggling with Dolls: One scene for one of the heists has the players deliver a truck of action figures with cocaine inside them to... surprise! Trevor; one of the main anti-heroes from the campaign. Naturally, he plays with them.
• So Last Season: Plenty of vanilla game content or content from earlier updates gets obsoleted or at the very least downplayed in its usefulness by later additions. The Rhino tank was once a fearless death machine, later becoming far more impractical due to better ways to blow up others such as spawnable Hydra jets. Various armed vehicles become supplanted by weaponized vehicles added in the Gunrunning update, which are not only more powerful (a flying bike that can shoot rockets, a muscle car able to shoot rockets and dual miniguns without the need of a second gunner, etc.) but can be actually owned and called like any personal vehicle unlike the earlier Pegasus vehicles. The Annihilator helicopter is a cross-game example even, once fearless in GTA IV multiplayer but not even useful at the beginning of GTA Online's life, not armed with any rockets and with more cumbersome handling, unlike the Buzzard.
• Statuesque Stunner: The player character of the game if female stands at an impressive 5'9" when not wearing high heels.
• Stealing from Thieves: One of Paige's Terrorbyte heists involves interrupting a robbery in progress to kill the crew and snatch the take for yourself. Keep in mind that on your way to the drop-off, your location will be broadcast to everyone else in the server, so there's a good chance that another player will invoke this on you in the same mission.
• Stock Ness Monster: One can show up as a rare random event during the Cayo Perico Heist's intel gathering and finale missions. Unlike most other easter eggs, Pavel has some dialogue related to it, and seems to be awfully familiar with the creature, calling it "an old friend of mine".
• Story Branching: A variation is present in the Diamond Casino Heist. Players are given a choice between three different approaches to the Heist: Silent & Sneaky (using stealth to slip into the vault undetected and escape without anyone knowing), The Big Con (using disguises to sneak into the vault while hiding in plain sight), or Aggressive (barge in, guns blazing, and strongarm your way into the vault). Each approach has different ways it can be accomplished, including different entry points, exit points, disguises, weapons, and so forth.
• Spoonerism: The apltly named Cunning Stunts update is just begging you to do this.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Some guy won't stop killing you? Simply call the Police, and they'll take him down for you.
  • The reason why Trevor sends you to rob the Ballas during Series A Funding? Earlier, he found a bunch of public photos on Snapmatic featuring the Ballas posing with weapons and lots of drugs. Even worse, he implies that the images were also geotagged.
• Take That!:
  • In previous games people have commented on the absurdity of pulling out a large weapon out of nowhere (usually a RPG). The heists update has one of the characters say, "You know in those games where someone pulls out a rocket launcher and people say 'Where is he keeping that, that's so unrealistic!'. I say you haven't spent enough time in the US judicial system."
  • One of the decal options for the Sultan RS plasters Princess Robot Bubblegum's eponymous character all over the vehicle. The Sentinel Classic has a similar customization option◊, humorously named "2D Relationship". Last, but not least, the Zion Classic released in the Diamond Casino and Resort update has the option to place a full-fledged PRB body pillow in the back seat to go with the gaudy livery. As the GTA wiki states, this is a jab at the real life itasha subculture in Japan.
  • In one of the Cayo Perico heist's setup missions, Pavel will mention the "great American sport" of shooting down flying bikes with guided missiles, a rather obvious jab at Griefers that get their kicks blowing up other players with the Oppressor Mk.II.
• Third-Person Seductress: If you play a female character in Online mode, you can modify her appearance and apparel to your heart's content. And yes, you can also make your character Stripperific too.
• Time Skip: The recent Gunrunner and Smuggler's Run updates seem to take place after the events of the single-player game. On one gunrunning mission, Agent 14 mentions that it is now 2017. And on the Smuggler's Run introduction, Ron states that Trevor had gone "Vinewood" on him and left the business to him to run.
  • As of the Casino series of updates, the game's events take place in 2019.
  • Continuity Snarl: Owing to Online's non-linear progression. Agent 14 doesn't give a definitive answer as to whether he and the player already met (the player may have bought a bunker before ever doing any heists) and the player can still do contact missions and the Series A heist for Trevor despite him "going Vinewood".
• Took a Level in Jerkass: It seems that, before the single-player story, everyone in the LSPD had terribly itchy trigger fingers. For one, they'll always shoot at a player with a wanted level, even if the player in question only has one star. Also, they see defending yourself against someone shooting or punching you or helping them bring down a gunslinging maniac as crimes.
• Trick Bullet: As of the Gunrunning update, the player can employ an R&D team to research a handful of different ammunition types for certain guns. These range from the borderline useless tracer rounds to the heavy sniper-exclusive explosive rounds.
• Troll: You can be an uber dick to other players if you so choose given the name of the game. i.e grab a random car off the streets or one of your fancy rides (that has insurance for obvious reasons), drive to the nearest LS Customs, order an ignition bomb, park it outside the entrance to said mod shop to where its impossible to enter it without moving the blocking vehicle and wait for an unsuspecting player to try and move it out the way.
  • Another popular method of trolling is to join high paying missions, such as Rooftop Rumble, pick up the package that needs to be delivered, kill the other players by running them over, and then refuse to deliver the package.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Unless avoiding the cops is specifically part of the challenge, the police will never be alerted during missions. This is especially glaring in Rooftop Rumble, in which you'll get into a large shoot out right down the block from a police station.
• Videogame Cruelty Punishment: Killing two hostages in Online during the Pacific Standard Job will cause the tellers to raise the alarm and call NOOSE!
• Villain Has a Point: During a setup mission in Series A Funding, Trevor tells the Online Protagonists to be careful on what they post online and make sure their settings are secure. After all, a bunch of public photos featuring the Ballas posing with weapons and drugs along with said photos apparently being geotagged were how Trevor found a target to rob.
• Visionary Villain: Cris Formage. You can rip him off in single player mode, but the first time you die in Online mode, you are confronted with Formage floating down from Heaven to meet you and tell you about passive mode. Maybe the Epsilon Program isn't such a scam after all...
• Weaponized Car: Starting with the Import/Export update, the storage and customization of weaponized vehicles have been possible with the vehicle warehouse.
  • The Gunrunning update has added further to this with weaponized vehicles available as personal vehicles.
• We Only Have One Chance: The Prep phase of the Cayo Perico Heist has three "Disruption" missions: Destroying armor shipments to leave guards more vulnerable, killing weapons dealers to give guards weaker gear, and destroying Buzzard attack helicopters to prevent summoning them if/when you are discovered. You have 10 minutes to finish each one when activated and Paval warns that you have only one attempt, meaning that, if you fail, you cannot try again until next heist. On the other hand, successfully completing each one will make your current heist on the island much easier.
• Zerg Rush: The Entourage PVP mode. 1 VIP in heavy armour and armed to the teeth, 1 to 5 bodyguards armed to the teeth, 2 to 6 assassins with barely adequate weapons. The VIP is able to tank massive damage but cannot run, and has to reach the evacuation point in 10 minutes, the bodyguards have only three Videogame Lives and must protect the VIP, the assassins respawn forever, and must kill the VIP.