How do you feel about GTAV almost 6 years later? Does it hold up or do you see flaws you didn't when you first played? Also, how do you feel about Rockstar being scummy with the casino they introduced in GTA Online?
Iād been sitting, waiting for GTAV on PC to get cheap enough where I wouldnāt feel guilty for double dipping after owning it on 360. That actually happened in June-ish, and I started replaying it, albiet very slowly.
It holds up a lot better than GTAIV does, Iāll tell you that.
What strikes me is just how much money Rockstar spent on that game, clearly in excess. The game is absolutely stuffed to the brim with tiny, one-off details that nobody would ever see. Some of it was undoubtedly added for the PC/Xbox One/PS4 ports that increased the overall detail, but still.
On one hand, it makes Los Santos feel like a living, breathing space. Every road, every sidewalk, every corner store feels important. At the same time, though, it is at the heart of a crossroads between whether or not any of this makes the game more fun to play.
Itās tremendous just getting out of your car and exploring the streets of GTAV in first person. Thereās nothing like it. But when you get bored of doing that, whatās left?
Thereās no changing the fact that there are places on the map that, at least in single player, are totally empty. They serve no purpose. Thereās stadiums, horse racing tracks, and yes, that casino. Obviously these are spaces that now sometimes have functions in GTA Online, but six years ago they didnāt, and itās possible they were never meant to. You canāt tell me that six years ago Rockstar was honestly planning on opening the casino in GTA Online now.
Which is the number one problem Iāve always had with this game, and it was technically a problem I had with GTA4, too: theyāre smaller games. Thereās less to do in them. Some of that makes sense, given the increase in development costs. All games have technically shrunk in scope (hello, Skyrim).
But Rockstar went out of their way to spend money on frivolous things. And, obviously, theyād already built a lot of these locations. If you happen to go to the dog track in the original Xbox 360 version, itās got a really eerie feeling to it. All of the ambient sounds disappear, no pedestrians spawn anywhere inside of it, it feels kind of unfinished. Obviously if itās there, it was probably for something, but they didnāt have the resources to make it work.
But they had enough time and money to produce something like an hourās worth of fake TV shows and fake movies for the player to watch. They created entire named NPCs that arenāt involved in missions, but have unique designs, unique animations, and sometimes minutes worth of dialog you may never hear.
Again, these are all really cool details! But you also have to stop and think about priorities. If cutting down on these unique one-off details gave me more missions, more actual gameplay, I might take it. Because once you hear the sidewalk preacher give his sermon once, you donāt need to hear it again, and it doesnāt really provide a whole lot of additional fun, either.
Because thatās the long and short of it, really: there just doesnāt feel like thereās enough game in GTAV. Itās a big game, thereās tons of atmosphere, but you run out of things to do pretty quickly (especially for Franklin). The ending doesnāt even feel like an ending, it just kind of trails off in to a wet fart. The story has nothing to say and our characters donāt learn anything or meaningfully grow as people. There needed to be more side activities, there needed to be more heists (which were planned), there needed to be real single player DLC (which was teased)!
Instead, Rockstar poured everything they had in to GTA Online, something that is apparently an insane nightmare to actually try playing, especially on PC where hacking is easy, rampant, and usually unpunished.
And even though I think thereās a lot about GTAV thatās still pretty fun, itās difficult NOT to be incredibly bitter about the whole game.
Thatās not even touching on, like, the trend since GTAIV of telling serious crime dramas in a world still obsessed with teenager toilet humor. GTAV in particular feels like, because the game has so much detail, that bar of quality for jokes was astoundingly low. There are so many places to put jokes now that they couldnāt just hire one person to make up funny things for all of them, so it feels like whatever the person assigned to that section could come up with, they used. It leads to a lot of stuff that is tragically unfunny or just plain stupid because a dozen people who have never written a joke in their lives are painting these textures. And its everywhere! On everything!
Meanwhile the actual storywriters of GTA sit, noses firmly in the air, sipping expensive brandy and smoking cigars, pretending theyāre writing Goodfellas or something, while they have fake airliners named after farts, fake internet services named after piss, and fake electronics companies named after boners.
At this point the casino in GTA Online doesnāt even surprise me. Spend real money on fake money to buy fake casino tokens to gamble. Just the worst. GTA Online made this one of the most profitable games of all time and apparently it wasnāt enough money for them.
Itās gonna take a lot more than just an outrageous development budget for me to care about GTA6.
