A few traffic pylons in Grand Theft Auto V might not seem like something people would care about. But a recent GTA Online update has changed how these fan-favorite pylons react when hit. This has annoyed many and led to people begging Rockstar to fix the pylons and stop changing GTA V.
If you’ve played Rockstar’s open-world crime sim or watched videos about all the details hidden in GTA V, then there’s a good chance you already know of the infamous bright yellow highway pylon paddles that separate lanes of traffic on a specific bridge in the game. These paddles would react realistically to people and cars in both GTA Online and GTA V, laying down flat if you drove over them or snapping off entirely if you ran them over with some speed. Now, after a recent update, that’s no longer the case, and players are frustrated that such a cool detail has seemingly been changed in GTA V’s single-player mode for no good reason.
On October 19, Lucas7Yoshi shared a video on Twitter showing how the yellow highway paddles found on the bridge near the in-game military base no longer bend and then flip back up when driven over slowly. Instead, after an update in June, the paddles now instantly break when contact is made.
Kotaku has contacted Rockstar about the paddles and the change.
Admittedly, this isn’t the end of the world, but it does highlight a problem with GTA V being connected to GTA Online. While Rockstar treats these games as separate things in 2024—marketing them differently and even selling them separately—they are still connected and share the same tech and code. So when Rockstar changed how paddles work in GTA Online in June as part of the process to add them as usable props in the game’s online racetrack creator, it also changed them in GTA V. Even if you never play GTA Online, this tweak has changed the single-player portion of the game for no reason. These pylons had been flopping around for a decade now across all platforms. But no more.
As pointed out by players on places like Reddit and Twitter, this change doesn’t ruin the game but it does rob GTA V of a fun, well-known, and cool detail and makes the game world just a bit less dynamic as a result. And it’s a shame that unless you own GTA V physically and don’t update it, you lose this detail.
It makes you wonder what other tiny details have been tweaked over the years in GTA V that players have not noticed or which never got as much online attention as the pylons.
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