As was to be expected when taking GTA 5 Cycling out for its first spin, I lost a fair bit of time in setting this one up today. And then like a chimp, I managed to crash the ride. But I did get to try GTA 5 Cycling, and whilst this won’t be a full review, it was nevertheless a really promising first encounter.
Getting GTA 5 Cycling up and running was not super straightforward. A solid video from GP Lama really helped, but I still hit on a fair few issues along the way. I have made a page on how to get started with GTA 5 Cycling in case you are at all interested.
In many ways I was looking forward to trying GTA 5 Cycling. I’d been “saving” it for Thursday, as a bit of a treat for completing the two hard Zwift Tour de France rides. However, I decided to skip today’s TdF ride as it was a like for like repeat of Sundays ride. I have no idea what they are thinking honestly. Its staggering how little innovation is coming out of Zwift HQ lately and when there’s free mods of the quality of GTA 5 Cycling as competitors, they really should be doing more.
I had expected to be on Zwift from 5 till 6. As it was, I didn’t get on GTA 5 Cycling until about 5.20pm. Teething problems. I couldn’t figure out how to take a screenshot, which would have led to this blog post being a little less visually exciting.
Also the menu system isn’t super intuitive. But to be fair, it’s easy enough once you know the keys and what to do. I put all the stuff I figured out on that linked page above.
And hey, you can change your route without ending your ride which is something Zwift is yet to sort out. Marvellous.
Unfortunately I feel I made two mistakes today.
The first was riding in the dark.
The second was in riding the Alamo Sea route.
The darkness led to some lovely scenes (which I largely failed to capture), but out in the sticks it was fairly quiet and there wasn’t a great deal of that GTA weird and wonderful world interaction happening. I did get chased by a dog, and something random exploded off screen, but that was about it.
The Alamo Sea route was perhaps a bad one to pick as my first ride. I really need to turn down the Tacx road feel. Some of those country dirt tracks were scrunch for want of a better word. I’m not a fan of gravel at the best of times.
With auto followed road markers, no cops, and invulnerability turned on, I was led on a jolly, albeit slow tour of Trevor Country. That’s my least favourite part of the the GTA 5 map. Always has been. I prefer Michael’s area.
But anyway, the sat nav worked fine, though in miles rather than kilometers. I need to change that I guess. And the overlay bike computer did everything you’d expect, heart rate, watts, distance and time. All present.
I think I synced to the Neo 2 rather than my pedals as I was seeing a big difference between reported watts and what the garmin was telling me. That made for the trip around Mount Chilliad to be harder than it ought to have been.
And then I royally messed up.
As I have to press and hold the function key on my wireless keyboard whilst pressing f12 for the screenshot, I accidentally pressed the key right next to it which puts the computer to sleep. Silly me.
Much like when I did this same mistake in RGT Cycling, the sensors won’t reconnect when the PC finally wakes again from hibernation.
Alas I decided to end my ride there and do 10kms on Zwift instead. Volcanos ahoy. Managed a 6.05m lap. One day I might break under 6m but today was not that day.
If the weather holds I’m going to try and head outdoors tomorrow. Not sure where or what just yet. If not, another GTA session is on the cards.
