10 Video Games That Got Really Good When You Stopped Playing

People had been begging Rockstar for Grand Theft Auto Online since the PS2 days. In fact, the PC versions had already seen fan-made multiplayer mods rise in popularity. When GTAV came out with a multiplayer mode weeks after its release, eager fans jumped head first into an empty pool.

There was a story and some missions, but the novelty of causing chaos with your friends wore off fast with no endgame. Even worse, players endured massive lag, disconnections, and crashes. Many players would also log in only to find their characters mysteriously deleted entirely. And this is how GTAO remained for a while, with little updates and fixes sprinkled here and there. A lot of us forgot about it.

But after the Heist update, Rockstar leaned hard into GTAO. Through regular content updates large and small, the mode, once thought dead and buried, became Rockstar's primary focus and continues to remain popular ten whole years later.

Entering the game now is overwhelming and sometimes exclusionary, as the community that grew within GTAO became entrenched in the game. A lot of gamers who quit during those first couple years and never came back arguably missed the boat on this one.