It will arrive in “next title update”.
Rockstar has confirmed that it will release an update that officially implements a recent fix made by fans to reduce the painfully long load times of Grand Theft Auto Online by up to 70 percent.
At the end of February, a programmer named t0st took a small survey of GTA Online’s notoriously prolonged load times – those that can leave players waiting longer than five minutes to start a game – and made a series of fascinating discoveries.
The full story was easily turned into something close to the layman’s terms by Will Judd of Digital Foundry, but the quick version is that a peculiarity of the GTA Online loading processes has caused him to perform almost 2 billion item checks (largely meaningless part) before each game.
GTA Online: Visit the island of Cayo Perico.
After a few adjustments, t0st put together a fix that managed to reduce the loading time for GTA Online from six minutes to one minute and 50 seconds – a reduction of almost 70 percent. The fix was shared with GitHub and the world waited to see if Rockstar would respond. And now it happened.
“After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that the player did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to the loading times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved,” the company said in a statement provided to the PC Player.
“As a result of these investigations,” he continued, “we have made some changes that will be implemented in an upcoming title update.”
Rockstar has not shared any details of its correction – there is no indication that the official implementation will have a 70% reduction in loading time similar to that experienced by t0st, for example – and there is no word yet on a deadline for the official launch.
However, Rockstar confirmed that it spoke to t0st about its discovery, “and I would like to thank you again for your efforts.”