The latest expensive sports car added to GTA Online via a recent update is the Itali GTO, a car inspired by the sleek, fast Ferrari. But unlike those Italian supercars, the Itali has a quirk: it’s really bouncy and hard to control. After spending nearly $2 million in in-game currency on the Itali GTO, some players are disappointed.
The Itali GTO costs $1,950,000, and that’s without any upgrades or modifications. At first, many players thought the car looked great and loved the amount of detail Rockstar had included in its model. When players slammed on the gas, they found a very fast car with a high amount of acceleration. But soon after these initial positive impressions, players found some problems.
For many fans, the Itali GTO is nearly impossible to control at high speeds, especially when driving the uneven streets of Los Santos. Across the GTA Forums, Reddit and Twitter, players are sharing videos and stories of how the Itali GTO is too bouncy and unstable. One player compared driving the GTO to taming a wild horse in Red Dead Redemption 2. Many players are reaching out to Rockstar, hoping they might make the car less shaky. Meanwhile, other players are happy with the car and feel like it adds more challenge to the driving in GTA Online.
Broughy, a popular Youtuber who is an expert on the cars in GTA Online, released footage of him testing the car on Twitter. The footage shows him bouncing around and spinning out over and over. This tweet and his following videos made the new bouncy car an even bigger discussion in the community.
First ever experience of the Itali GTO. These bouncy cars are awful. This is not going to be a fun day… pic.twitter.com/hokBPys4J8
— Broughy🥈 (@broughy1322) December 28, 2018
I decided to give the new car a spin and see how unstable it is for myself. It only took a few minutes of driving before I could feel and see the bounciness. Turns that I could easily make in older GTA Online cars were now much trickier. Even when I was going straight, I found the rear end of the car hopping around. These hops didn’t always ruin my handling or control of the car, but they made it look like the car was broken. The bounciness made the car feel less like a super-expensive automobile and more like a cheap, lightweight toy car.
This isn’t the first time an expensive car in GTA Online has launched with some issues. Back in 2017, Rockstar released a slightly less expensive supercar that had a steering issue. But that was an actual mistake that was eventually fixed. The GTO seems to be designed to handle this way.
The Itali GTO, like some other new cars that have been released recently, has different handling flags then other GTA Online cars. Handling flags are the in-game coding that tells the car how to behave, how fast it can go, weight, etc. These new handling flags are the reason the Itali GTO is so bouncy. Some dedicated players have even created videos showing how the Itali GTO would drive without these new flags. The results are night and day different: The car is more stable and less shaky.
While other cars released recently have had these same flags, few have been as fast and lightweight as the Itali GTO, so they weren’t nearly as bouncy. The light weight of the GTO, plus its high speed and the flags create a bouncy combination that is frustrating to many players. But because this issue is caused by new handling flags Rockstar added into the game, the reality is that this might be how Rockstar wants new sports cars to behave. Some fans believe these new flags were created as a way to stop players from easily curb boosting, a technique that allows players to exploit the way older cars behaved in GTA Online to gain speed boosts in races.
Many fans are worried these new handling flags are here to stay. (Kotaku has reached out to Rockstar for comment on the Itali GTO’s intended handling.) Rockstar hasn’t publicly confirmed if future vehicles will have them, but it seems possible that we could see more cars that handle like the Itali GTO in the future.
Zack Zwiezen is a a writer living in Kansas City, Missouri. He has written for Gamecritics, Killscreen and Entertainment Fuse.
Comments
8 responses to “GTA Online’s Expensive New Car Doesn’t Handle Well”
Do you want to know why people dislike the handling of this car?
Because Rockstar has basically dumbed down the handling of all the cars to be AWD and super grippy. Because previously people would complain about RWD cars.
Your average GTA player does not want realism. They want a car that sticks to the ground like superglue while holding down accelerate.
That’s not really it at all… Traditionally GTA V has had a mechanic for all cars called curb-boosting where any bumps the car hits actually increase acceleration of the car – most of the racing community hates the mechanic because it’s not realistic at all but Rockstar have never removed/changed it.
The new handling flags seem to be their way of dealing with that situation by making the car suffer violently over slight bumps (among other things like adding artificial downforce on top of the downforce mechanic they already added) – except they still haven’t actually bothered to remove the curb boosting mechanic so cars like this new one end up getting half their speed from hitting bumps in the road, which thanks to the new handling flags, is pretty much the entire road.
My point was more that the community only likes cars that are AWD and grip the road like no real car would.
Anything that deviates from that and its disliked.
I’d still disagree with that. The Zentorno for example was still popular long after the Osiris and T20 were released (both were slower but had better grip/traction so the three were pretty close for times).
Another example would be the Elegy, old king of the sports class. People didn’t just love it because it was free, it was fun to drive (and fast) compared to it’s far more grippy competition like the Feltzer.
I’d say what the community really likes is having the fastest car, regardless of how it drivea. Lately though Rockstar only adds cars that are either AWD/high-grip like you’re talking about or cars that aren’t even close to the top of their class.
Zentorno is popular because it’s a cheap supercar. A relic of the old gen era.
Who plays GTA for realism?
It’s mind boggling how many people spend obscene cash on games which are basically pay to win, and have awful controls.
Hey you can have this car for only around 30 dollars worth of shark cards, that’s only half the price of the game itself, its an absolute bargain!