Despite the box being unticked, my digital download copy updated itself yesterday without first asking.

 

RPH obviously won't load.

 

I had the previous game version backed up in RPH. It reverts successfully, however then when you try to start the game, social club throws up a "unable to launch...verify integrity' error.

 

GTAV and social club are blocked in my firewall but clearly to no avail.

 

Anything I can do or is the RPH backup corrupt or something? 

Forgot to mention - 

 

Vanilla game has the same launch error with the backup game version

 

Trying to start the vanilla game with the new update fails with a RPH unsupported error, even if I delete the RPH.exe and .ini files from the root folder before trying, which is interesting. 

Is it actually possible to bypass social club/the update check sequence and launch the game directly?

It's impossible now. Rockstar basically screwed single player gamers and modders when they released their launcher. And now you cannot even run in offline mode on Steam to prevent updates. If Rockstar releases an update for GTA Online, despite you only playing offline and within LSPDFR you don't have a choice to decline said update. You will have your game updated, whether you like it or not. I have been playing since LCPDFR in 2010 and it gets more and more frustrating with the updates Rockstar puts out. I would not be shocked if GTA 6 straight up had no singleplayer mod support. Hell with the way things are going with single player games I'll be shocked if the next GTA even has more than a 10 hour singleplayer story lol. Such a shame.

16 hours ago, Internal Affairs said:

It's impossible now. Rockstar basically screwed single player gamers and modders when they released their launcher. And now you cannot even run in offline mode on Steam to prevent updates. If Rockstar releases an update for GTA Online, despite you only playing offline and within LSPDFR you don't have a choice to decline said update. You will have your game updated, whether you like it or not. I have been playing since LCPDFR in 2010 and it gets more and more frustrating with the updates Rockstar puts out. I would not be shocked if GTA 6 straight up had no singleplayer mod support. Hell with the way things are going with single player games I'll be shocked if the next GTA even has more than a 10 hour singleplayer story lol. Such a shame.

You can bypass the launcher, refer to this video on how to do it, I have been using this since the summer special update and it works fine. I'm running on the new R* launcher, though you have to have a shortcut on your desktop or somewhere in order to launch the game since it says "Update" instead of play inside the steam launcher.