The Contract, GTA Online’s latest update and the big end-of-year DLC we’ve been expecting, is out now. Players are tasked with teaming up with Franklin Clinton, one of the three protagonists from the story mode that is making his return alongside Online mainstay Lamar and their trusty dog, Chop.
The new update features an unprecedented focus on solo story content, being essentially a single player update within the Online framework. New missions tell the story of F. Clinton & Partner, a high-class “fixer” agency that solves the issues of Los Santos’ elite - discreetly. Your first client is Dr. Dre, appearing as himself in GTA Online once again after his debut in The Cayo Perico Heist. Fictional Dre has lost a mobile phone in Los Santos loaded with unreleased tracks, and he’s hired you to find it before the new beats leak. This is the narrative window dressing of actual new songs written by real Dre debuting in GTA Online. Alongside a new Agency property where you can hang out with Franklin and the team in between side-contracts that help solidify the business’ legitimacy, you can also visit a virtual recreation of Dr. Dre’s music studio where the recording happens. Rockstar is clearly flexing its newfound connections in the music industry, which has seen other real-world musicians appear in the game, focusing previously on up and coming DJ talent. Based on the way Rockstar describes the new missions in the release announcement, Dr. Dre is just the first big client of Franklin’s business, and what we’re seeing in The Contract is a model for upcoming GTA Online DLCs, featuring what we imagine are more such single player-focused storylines centered around the fixer agency. Of course, alongside all the music production and contract work - which appropriately involves assassinations as well - there is other new content that gels more with what we’ve come to expect from these updates - new cars, new guns and new clothes. The Contract also signals a return to the “drip feed” style of content release that Rockstar Games has employed in the past, where following a big release the devs would sprinkle smaller bits and pieces of content in weekly updates for the next few months - we’d get a new car, or a new game mode every week. Alongside new content, The Contract also brought some quality of life updates to the game. Players have been joking about the incessant and annoying amount of phone calls and text messages they’d get on the in-game phone from various NPCs trying to rope you into playing their particular missions. Mercifully, these got dialed way back. Other improvements include safe capacity increases, maintenance cost decreases and a bunch of UI streamlining, moving various sub-menus and displays, like those for daily rewards and objectives, to more easily accessible places on the interface. While we’re busy immersing ourselves in this exciting new content in GTA Online on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PS4 and PS5, things are a bit darker over on the launch platforms - pitch black, to be precise. Yesterday, GTA Online shut down permanently on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 where it all began. It’s better to focus on new beginnings rather than things ending - The Contract might give us a look at what the future of GTA Online content will look like.
