GTA 5 Complete
I finished GTA 5 a few weeks ago now, and my experiences can be summed up with this:
The game overall was actually phenomenal, albeit strangely balanced. It has been ages since I played GTA 3 and Vice City, but I remember those games being centered on steady progression with gun unlocks and even vehicle selection. For example, you couldn’t find the fastest cars in GTA 3 until the first bridge gets repaired, which only occurs after finishing several story missions.
In GTA 5? Some of the best cars are practically outside your first house. Indeed, several more things appear to be cash-gated too – gun unlocks and such – but completing a successful heist towards the beginning of the game ended up giving my characters over a million dollars apiece. Body armor costs $2500? No problem. Pretty sure I went ahead and unlocked most of the guns right away too.
The best of introductions.
One of the more consistent pieces of feedback I heard about GTA 5 going in was that nobody really liked Trevor as a character. Turns out Trevor is one of the more authentic characters in the game, IMO. Granted, he’s a batshit insane psychopath, but the body count of the other main characters are nearly as high, and yet they act like it is no big thing.
I did try out the GTA Online aspect for about a hot minute. One of the tutorial missions required me to go to a specific clothing shop that was currently being camped by a player with an attack helicopter though, so I Nope’d right out of that server. This aspect of GTA is apparently wildly profitable (to the tune of $500 million), but I have little desire to grind (or pay) my way to progression in this sort of game.
Christ, the visuals are amazing.
The single-player portion of the game though? It was a blast to play through. The three-person narrative worked out well, the graphics were sublime and ran at a silky 60 FPS with a GTX 970 the majority of the time, and there were plenty of emergent shenanigans. I barely played GTA 4 or San Andreas, so it’s hard for me to say how much the formula has improved, but the game is quality regardless.
Posted on April 27, 2016, in Review and tagged Emergent, GTA 5, GTA Online, Wildly Profitable. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
In An Age 
The whole “Trevor is how people actually play GTA” thing is spot on, but I still didn’t enjoy playing the role of a crack-head. As for the character switching, it worked most of the time for me as well, but would occasionally annoy me in terms of the forced stop/start with the stories.
I don’t get the appeal of GTA:Online at all. I mean is it all just kids who find it hilarious to camp and swear that makes it a success? Because gameplay wise I didn’t see anything that would justify the annoyance, and I actually gave it multiple attempts.
Good game overall, but didn’t leave me dying to play GTA VI.
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Yeah, it will be interesting to see how GTA VI plays out. It will get made, of course, but I cannot imagine what they could really improve about the overall experience (graphics, gameplay, etc) other than the story, which is a weird position to be. The sandbox element is still there, but it’s hard to imagine that holding my interest by itself these days.
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Is it still the same formula though? That’s the thing that turns me off GTA, after playing GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas, I feel like I’ve played this game and don’t need to again.
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It depends on what you mean by “formula.” If you’re talking about the general narrative formula of escalating violence and mayhem… yeah, it’s pretty similar to the rest. If you’re instead talking about gameplay formula, then it’s wildly different. Like I mentioned in the post, you get practically infinite money right near the start of the game, or at least more than enough to last you quite some time (unless you’re purchasing property). The weapons are unlocked as the game progresses, but you can drive around the entire map pretty much from the word Go. Same deal with the fancy vehicles and such.
And now that I think about it, what they did with the narrative was pretty cool as well. It doesn’t follow just one person, so if you aren’t feeling a particular character, a few story missions later you will be doing something else entirely. I enjoyed all three characters’ stories though, so if you hate one or two, it will be a bit more of a slog.
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