You hear it rather than see it: a hiss, quickly upgraded to a whoosh. Then a boom, as your custom supercar is engulfed in flame – triggering the trademark snapshot sound that arrives whenever you’re wasted in Grand Theft Auto Online.
You rarely even catch a glimpse of your assailant, since they don’t typically come in to land. Why would they? The Oppressors rule the skies. They don’t ever need to come down.
Oppressor is not a melodramatic label I’ve invented for anybody who blows me up while I’m having a nice drive through Los Santos. It is, in fact, Rockstar’s own name for the flying motorbike that has plagued its servers for several years now.
In its first iteration, the Oppressor was a rocket-propelled bike with wings and a front-mounted machine gun. This, I regret to say, was as low-key and demure as Pegassi’s line of murder machines was going to get.
Next off the production line was the Oppressor MK II, a hoverbike with space for two homing missile launchers. Space that every griefer with access to a Shark Card has since filled.
Log onto any Rockstar-run GTA server today, bring up the map, and you’ll see their tell-tale icons zipping back and forth across the city like Uber drivers, their cool bags filled to the brim with death.
Well, you might be thinking, what do you expect? You’re playing Grand Theft Auto, the home of the smash and grab. You can hardly expect an adherence to the UN’s rules of engagement from players weaned on five-star crime sprees. To which I would answer: you’re absolutely right. But it’s on Rockstar to design weapons and vehicles that support its criminal ecosystem, rather than undermine it.
Cargo bane
Much of GTA Online’s endgame is rooted in the gathering and transportation of illegal goods: weed grown on farms, cash printed at counterfeit factories, meth manufactured in labs.
Players oversee their own property empires and, when the time comes, guide their product safely to buyers around Los Santos. Once they’re on the road with their stock, Rockstar sends out an alert to all other players on a server, giving rivals a chance to disrupt the sale and make a quick, nasty buck.
It’s a unique mechanic that I’m quite fond of — placing you in a state of paranoia, knowing you have something to lose. If you’re part of a co-op gang making a delivery, one player is incentivised to put pedal to the metal, while a partner-in-crime keeps an eye on the map like a rally co-driver — calling out sudden changes to the route in order to avoid clashes with fellow cons.
But the whole exercise is rendered farcical once the Oppressor gets involved. Only a handful of high-level vehicles in the game can be upgraded with a lock-on jammer to counter homing missiles. And during most cargo deliveries, the vehicle you drive is picked by Rockstar, who hand you the keys to a specific van, seaplane, or occasionally, bin lorry, which means that in many instances, you’re an easy victim for whichever airborne psychopath decides to soar across your path and unleash a salvo.
Seconds later, you’re watching a product that took days or weeks to gather — and which could have made you rich — smoulder on the tarmac.
It’s an outcome that feels cruel, and worse, arbitrary. Evading the Oppressor while driving isn’t an option — and even pulling over to mount a full-scale defence feels like a Hail Mary. The flying bike moves like a wasp, buzzing up and down, left and right.
Now and then I’ve managed to pop one out of the air with the railgun — a magnet-powered rifle that also sits at the science fiction end of GTA’s armoury — and I can’t deny it feels fantastic. But more often than not, there’s little you can do. The picnic is prematurely finished, and the wasps have won. It only remains to pack up the Tupperware and trudge sullenly home.
New hope
Against this backdrop, a potential Grand Theft Auto 6 Online could offer a reset: a chance to scrap with other players on something resembling an even playing field, even if that field is a Floridian swamp.
Of course, over time, a similar escalation of outlandish and overpowered gear is likely to occur. Rockstar will want to dangle silly, shiny things in front of the whales who buy those Shark Cards. But I hope that when that happens, the studio makes wiser decisions about the vehicles it sets free in its PvP ecosystem.
The last time an Oppressor rider blew up my stuff and flew away into the night, I followed them. I tracked them down to a barren slope north of Vinewood Hills and watched as they went to mount their beloved grief-mobile. The explosion, as I set fire to the bike with a single railgun shot from afar, knocked their avatar backwards and sent them rag-dolling across the screen.
A message informed me that the bike was insured, and I’d be paying out thousands of in-game dollars to replace it. I laughed — a bitter, cathartic laugh. But the truth is, I’d already lost. I’d lost the moment the Oppressor came off the production line.
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