well I guess the other main thing is the 'back' button menu, you change some things from there.
like for $100 you go into 'passive mode' where you can't kill anybody and they can't kill you (free roam) of course which is good. you can also choose how your car is locked, i.e. you can make it so only friends/crew, crew, friends, you only, anybody etc can get in your car. you can change your player action (activated by pushing right trigger), like flipping the bird, rock horns etc... you also have an inventory where you can change some clothes like glasses, mask etc and you can also save food there for health, so you can basically have backup health at any time on foot. pretty handy during a mission.
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the graphics overall are definitely worse than SP, especially on characters but I guess that was to be expected. I think it has a lot of potential with more types of missions like heists etc when everything is running smoothly. there doesn't seem to be all that much to do at the moment, even though what you can do is fun. though I was pretty limited by the missions I could do, it seems a few came on the disk which worked, but a lot you had to download which didn't seem to work for anyone. 1 or 2 were of the regular ones were glitched too and didn't work at all.