Wasted

Grand Theft Auto V

Single Player, PC (Windows, Linux Steam/ Proton), 2015

GTA V is one of the most sold PC games of all time; even after 6 years, Steam charts show many active players. It was a “benchmark” in open world design (and has since served as a “benchmark” game in PC hardware reviews – excuse the pun). Now with another release of the game on new PS5 and Xbox Series looming ahead, it is perhaps the right time to look at this game from the perspective of one who has played this series across multiple titles.

Grand Theft Auto series, from the 2D top-down editions in GTA I & II, to 3D universe of GTA III, Vice City, and San Andreas, to HD universe of GTA IV and V, has incrementally evolved to almost acceptable movie making platform, and while at it, has managed to entertain the gamer in us with excellent narrative and single player experience. GTA San Andreas was the previous benchmark in the series in terms of open world design, with 3 cities and entire counties between them. GTA IV was a giant leap in terms of story telling, perhaps Rockstar’s acquisition of Max Payne franchise had a positive effect on its narrative. Their USP have been Tarantino-esque story telling in an open world environment.

A benchmark in open world design

The Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) in V allow the ability to have very high quality textures and draw distances. Vegetation, in particular, is completely redone and still looks good in 2021. It also allowed to program NPCs individually, though the variance and quantity is more limited by CPU power, and certain games like the new Hitman series do this better (though Hitman’s world is much smaller even with all levels combined, when compared to V; it is also a much later game (2016)). Rockstar is a pathfinder when it comes to attention to detail. From buildings to cars to pedestrians to occasional wildlife to ambient noise, everything is almost* perfect when one roams about in the open world. We often joke about Ubisoft Open World being almost a trademark in design, but Rockstar preceeds Ubisoft and is the inspiration for several other open world designs too. It is as immersive as the engine may offer.

*The world is not without flaws, especially in engineering, so to speak. No matter how powerful a rig is thrown at it, we will always see that dreaded shadow line rendering a few feet ahead of our character. Sometimes gradually looking up/ down will also gradually render/ de-render that ladder shadow, even though shadows of other objects further are already in frame. Then there is texture pop-in; even RTX 3080 Ti won’t be able to “completely” prevent it I am sure. (This is actually a bane of open world design; it is imprudent to accuse Rockstar of this especially when they do it better in V than most others).

Another issue with the open world is the inaccessible areas that make the world feel empty^. It takes place in the same region as San Andreas, so those who have played that naturally expected V to have everything that SA had, and better. Sadly, not just they excluded San Fierro and Las Venturas, their excuse for doing so to make Los Santos detailed instead, falls flat too, if we remove the enhancements due to PC hardware evolution. A prison compound, a large military base, the airport, turf club, dam, shipyard, cable cars, malls, etc. are either inaccessible or under-utilized in campaign. Hell, they even removed the “Tenpenny” bridge from Grove Street! The much advertised underwater content also features in just 1 mission, with low visibility and controls clunky enough that you will “gasp” to relief once it is over. NPCs have predefined routines, but more than once I found them to just moving in circles around an area.

Once I loaded the game as Michael, who just gave a lift to his son. I came out of the car and followed Jimmy. I found him to be as lost as Rockstar’s single player priorities.

^Unless one finds his own game by just shooting at stuff without reason. This meaningless shooting essentially comes from boredom, because there is really not much to do in this open world outside the story missions. Past titles of the series had way more content.

Mission Design

Which brings us to the bane of Rockstar’s game design – its missions. Rockstar does not know how to design video game missions. They think a mission is just like an episode of a TV series, by whose norms they do fine. But that is not how a video game should be. This issue persists since their days of 3D universe. Anyone who has played San Andreas for example, cannot forget how bad that train mission was, with Big Smoke missing close targets then yelling at CJ for not following the damn train enough. That mission, if it was in a TV series, would be thoroughly enjoyable. But a video game needs better controls, shooting mechanics, and AI. Rockstar finds them more difficult to design than a monkey trying to design a wheel.

For the fans of RC missions in San Fierro, they have a parachute jump mission in V.

The fact is, even Rockstar knows this. Which is why in V, they gave the option of skipping a mission if the player chooses to. Also, they gave the option of retrying it from a checkpoint. unlike in previous games where you had to restart the entire mission, and you could not skip. They clearly wanted GTA to be more accessible and less frustrating, so that they could sell more copies. Not a bad idea from the context of a for-profit company, but they don’t deserve ANY award in mission design, which many people seem to give them blindly (surely they must have played by skipping missions).

Can poor mission design be complemented by allowing to “skip” it?

Gameplay

The less said about shooting mechanics, the better. You can instantly snap to cover, but sometimes the side of the box where you take cover, is in line of sight of the enemy! If you panic and course-correct, your character will simply stroll like taking a morning walk, as if no bullets are flying around. So much attention to detail in the open world, but absolutely no attention to how the protagonists behave, what they say, how they move, in a live fire situation. Irritatingly, the characters repeat same monologues over and over during shooting.

Controls are all over the place when you want to run. Your character would look like Bugs Bunny if filmed from the top. And avoid drive-by shootings unless you can find happiness by looking at a wall. If you are hit, the wound actually looks too realistic to continue shooting. It breaks immersion, because no way can you continue with 3-4 bullets in your chest. This can be avoided by switching to 1st person mode, which is mostly well done except the nauseating head bobbing which does not completely go away even if turned off in settings. You lose armor even when falling from a height. The protagonists make funny sounds when shot – e.g. Franklin sounds like a cockroach went up his asset. Gun sounds and recoil are comical. While gun holding has come a long way since those robotic gamma-poses (Γ) in San Andreas, you can still shoot a military grade sniper rifle accurately while standing. Compare with any Far Cry game and you will know Rockstar actually is mediocre compared to Ubisoft in these things as celebrity media often won’t tell you.

Sometimes, characters won’t mount the ladder on their way down, and fall to death. There is no sneak ability at all; you might be fooled since there is a “sneak mode”. And you cannot crouch. Perhaps Euphoria animations do not support it, and poor indie studio Rockstar did not have budget for “trivial” things (which were ok by 2008 standards but surely not 5 years later). Even if you hide in a bush before the cops arrive, they immediately know where you are! A cop after aiming at you, will pause for 2 seconds, as if posing for a photo. The cops’ cooldown period is inconsistent, and with the vehicle controls so bad already, it is not fun at all. Your car will sometimes break through a barrier, and sometimes get stuck. Vehicles with high bodyroll will not roll, but your low clearance Obey (Audi) will. The indie studio could only design vehicle tyres like water balloons. Car movement/ damage, character falls from height (especially on water), etc. happen as per Rockstar’s own customized version of Newtonian Physics.

Surely one of the objectives written in their office whiteboards must have been:

How to frustrate the player

Because when you complete a mission, you won’t feel any sense of achievement. It would be just sheer luck that promoted you to next checkpoint. This may be a reason why they still celebrate “Mission Passed” with a bang, as if even they don’t believe you did it! Actually yes, we did not; they did for us by some magic.

I often find watching Youtube walkthroughs of GTA games more relaxing than actually playing them myself.

What a pity.

A missed opportunity is to not have radiant prison break/ drug deals/ burglary/ hostage rescue missions based on under-utilized areas. Remember that police database you could access in IV in any cop car, that gave info on game characters? Well that is outright removed. After every shoot-out even with 5 star wanted level, the police is kind enough to leave you at a hospital and not in a prison. But they are not kind enough to forgive you if you hit their car for “their” fault. There are some radiant quests, like Trevor kidnapping innocents or dudes killing purse-snatchers, but way more content is simply missing from the open world. San Andreas had so much content, yet 11 years down the line, the region feels so empty even with much more immersive graphics. For some reason, clothes stores become accessible for Franklin after Michael completes a mission, even if stupidly enough, all clothes are not available to all characters. Maybe the indie studio did not have the budget to have clothes in multiple sizes.

Shamefully, the entire campaign is built on heists, which actually make more sense as radiant. There are so many unused buildings to recon, plan a heist, then execute. After the first heist, it says your crew will gain XP with each, but all subsequent missions are also bunch of linear, borderline quick time events, so it does not matter.

The biggest fallacy of Grand Theft Auto series is that the missions are linear. There is exactly ONE way to complete a mission, and by design that is anti-pattern in open worlds.

Narrative

V has some of the most forgettable protagonists of any GTA game. Where went the exemplary writing of CJ’s funny one-liners, or the Serbian Niko who still manages to put a smile on whoever remembers him, being from the darkest game of the franchise, with his Baltic curses (voice-acted by an American by the way, that’s how well done those games were)? And they have the “cheek” to assassinate characters from past game? That eastern European guy Lester talked about had way more character than any of his mates ever could dream of. Had I not put hard-earned money in the game, I would have stopped playing immediately after the sadist writers killed Johnny K from the Lost and Damned. That blot on Trevor’s characterization did not leave the game ever for me.

After the kill, Trevor lectures Ron and Wade about respecting women, while minutes ago he was “respecting” Ashley I guess, by stomping on her childhood boyfriend. There is no similarity between Johnny of Alderney and Johnny of Sandy Shores – the former a second-in-command of a Biker Gang, latter an insecure dork.

Did killing Johnny K really make Trevor the “bad-a$$”? It just made him an “a$$”.

The guy who thought this was the creative freedom he needed in his narrative, needs to check up his brain and donate the unused organ to a museum, unless he killed Johnny because his ex designed him.

GTA IV was excellent in satire. Each radio/ tv advertisement, program, billboard, and internet sites made fun of modern America (in fact, the satire applied to any contemporary society, which made it even better). V has those things too, but they are either overdone, or not funny, or could not stand out enough in the story as they could within the dark narrative of IV. Most of them felt like “meh, it was funny the first time”. They are buried beneath the noise and chatter of the NPCs and the directionless protagonists. From a homie seeing his hood disintegrate in the backdrop of LA riots of 1992, to a Serbian soldier betrayed at Bosnian warfront, a biker wanting to take over but subdued by his incompetent boss, the Housers and Benzies gave us 2 long-lost diaper-sharing friends, to do their heists again, not because they are good only at that, but because of the global recession, as if they were well-settled tax-paying citizens before, who lost everything due to Wall Street greed. Cute.

That reference to recession was only to create hype because the game’s trailers came out in its backdrop, but apart from random mortgage signs there is nothing about it. Hilariously, Michael wants to do heists again only because he pulled down some don’s house, and the don’s bank could not just write it off or claim insurance. Even the witness protection program he was under, must have cost much more than the liability he caused, but he decided he had to close it himself without informing or taking help from his custodians. Then again, the time taken by Franklin to migrate to Vinewood from Idlewood is so little, and the protagonists get so much money after each heist, that you won’t be alone to doubt if this game was in backdrop of recession. Also, Franklin must be the most redundant character ever in a video game. Or maybe he is the “tutorial character”?

There is very little incentive to explore the world. Apart from a murder mystery that requires a trail to be found, there is not much. I never thought one day I will miss the seagulls and pigeons of Liberty City! Even the activities are dull. While Roman’s frequent “Cousin, lets go bowling” was very annoying, IV had more enjoyable activities like bowling, darts, pool, dining, and even the basic “Hi-Lo”. Here they have tennis which is about ok, but activities are an afterthought compared to IV.

Packaging and Installation

This one is right on the podium of Hall of Shame, especially compared to GTA IV which was excellent in terms of price and package. It was INR 998/ $15 (including EFLC) new, when launched in 2008. Read that again – that was IV’s price “at launch”, and the disks contained everything. But V was INR 2499/ $35 even after 2 years of release, and required 8 GB of extra download (after 56 GB of install disks) to even start. The single player content of GTA IV + EFLC is much more than GTA V. If the above price accounts for the stupid GTA Online which original fans of the series do not give two hoots about, then they should have had a single player edition priced lower. If I want to play the campaign, why should I pay for multiplayer? That too in this age of digital distribution and when they already require large downloads even with physical copy.

Periodic updates that run into gigabytes, all related to multiplayer, will be downloaded even if you don’t play it! And the diktat of always online in single player – any game which requires this is probably snooping on the players for who knows what data. Though not in the same league as more contemporary sh!t like Valorant who wanted a place in your kernel layer (the dare of it), it is a matter of great shame for Rockstar who even allowed activation of GTA IV/ EFLC from another computer while the one installed on could remain offline.

The reason is, they “want” you to play the online version, and they want more of your money in micro-transactions.

Rockstar is arguably as greedy as EA and the other bad boys out there – milking the franchise of the success of its predecessors – who were successful because of the single player campaign, then sticking out the finger to the core fanbase and unleashing paid pieces in gaming media about how great, 10/10 this game is. Now, GTA IV too received perfect scores from the very same media, while being completely judged on the single player content. So on the same scale V is at most a 6.

Sales are NOT causally related to quality of a product.

Hype is what drives the sales, which admittedly works because the franchise/ company already made its name through couple of previous titles. Look at Cyberpunk, even with an unfinished game the company managed to make huge profits. Look at Last of Us 2 – how many can disagree that Naughty Dog “used” the original title to sell the second game? Would both these examples have survived the same extent if there was no hype and/ or it was a new IP? So it is immaterial if GTA V is the highest selling PC game of all time. It speaks more of the series or company reputation until that particular game, than its actual quality.

One last thing – Rockstar cheaped out on their reactions to some modders who wanted to create a complete San Andreas experience, and they should be ashamed. If you leave something incomplete and others want to complete it, why stop them? (There is no conflict of interest as they stopped investing in single player mode anyway; there is no planned DLCs.)

Beneath the graphical improvements, V looks like two steps back from IV. The only thing this game is good for, and will remain so, is PC hardware benchmarks. To clarify, this is not an engineering design to be proud of. Any game that was un-optimized at launch, or not optimized even later, would be a good fit for benchmarks. It will be ahead of its time because it did not play well on contemporary hardware. Remember Crysis? That was un-optimized too at launch, and the meme “Can it run Crysis” was only because the game needed hardware to brute force through it.

There is no better game to test your overclocking than the best selling game to be released the 6th time soon.

Pros:

• Excellent open world design, high attention to detail
• Graphics scale well with hardware, fit for hardware testing/ benchmarks
• AAA level voice acting and motion capture animations
• Decent selection of songs (though not as good as other GTA titles) and immersive radio banter

Cons:

• Un-optimized game when run on hardware from its era (those meant to be played on)
• Little/ insignificant improvement in gameplay over IV
• Badly designed, frustrating linear missions, and controls
• Poor story; main missions are of radiant category
• Forgettable protagonists or antagonists (who were they?)
• Vast sections of open world un-utilized in campaign
• Higher priority/ budget for online, in a series made successful by single player content
• Always online requirement in single player, redundant gigabytes patched frequently

6/10