It was when it first came out on ps3 for me. It was fun to run around as a nobody, get into gangland shoot outs and feuds with other players, have death matches in the hood, etc. But very quickly, within six months, the game had become full of cheaters and modders with tanks, so I stopped playing. I went back to it years later and it was not GTA, it was Saints row essentially, with flying bikes and laser guns and shit, it just became stupid and silly.

I played the story on PS3 back in 2013 then picked up the PAC version and only played online that time around. I did put about 200 hours in to it which is a lot for me, j probably have 4 or so games with that many hours or more.

If you're looking for story it never got good, particularly because your protagonist is a silent insert with no supporting NPCs to carry it, but if you're favourite part of story mode was the general exploration and open world stuff, it's pretty good. I sometimes played with friends but I think 90% of the time I put in was mindless time wasting which it was good at, although I was a teenager and I'm not looking to waste time like that anymore. I also got into modding it in about 2017 and had a really good time with infinite money and cheating benevolently which probably got me an extra 100 hours of enjoyment out of it.

I think it had a golden age which you've missed. The first 6 weeks it was out, it was totally broken and then for maybe the first year and a half it was really low on content compared to story mode. Eventually the first wave of heists and tools and resources to support race / minigame makers came out too and that was a great era. Eventually though as players left more and more over time it was becoming more and more targeted at those few "whales" who were probably spending thousands on the game, with all content becoming inflated in cost to sell shark cards. By the time I dropped the game, it was practically impossible to progress without buying the digital currency, and any money exploits or cheater's were gone, leaving only the destructive cheaters. I have no idea if this has got better I haven't touched the game since maybe 2019.

At first, maybe? When I first started last year, I was pretty hooked since it was something new to me, minus the constant hackers spamming the message and grievers, it was so bad that I had to play private lobby only. The only thing to do is doing the same thing over and over again to earn money just to spend it to do the same thing again. There's no new mechanics, no story, nothing, just a constant grind and your reward is more grind.

Now I feel a dumbass for wasting two months of my life on it. Even Genshin is way better than GTAO, it actually has interesting story, fun mechanics and great characters. I've been playing GI since 2020, got a bit burned out and currently addicted to Witcher 3 but I still play it daily. But GTAO, fuck that shit, I left it more than 6 months ago and the thought of considering looking back never once crossed my mind.