Grand Theft Auto VI

Sinistkir13

Trakanon Raider
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re-watching GTA III and GTA VC's trailers and comparing it to GTA VI's trailer I'm reminded why I didn't finish GTA V despite having played like, every GTA game and expansion from III to V.





GTA V's main storyline was a lot of uhm, I'm not sure how to put this, massive budget storytelling and unique gameplay experiences. I think the last mission I did was where I hung out in a helicopter shooting things with a rocket launcher and they had a carefully crafted narrative, custom helicopter + rocket launcher gameplay and a lot of extra stuff to make the game feel more like a movie than a game. All I really wanted to do was what was highlighted in the GTA III trailer: you drive around and shoot things in an open-world sandbox game.


Watching the GTA VI trailer, it's a looooot of dialog and basically nothing that resembles the core gameplay mechanics. Maybe the genre has passed me by, but I also played Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time recently and the ratio of storytelling / random bullshit to core combat was too high for my liking. The joke I made was it was the best movie I've ever played. Still a great game but by the end I was just waiting for it to be over so I could go start playing a game with no dialog and cutscenes.


But back to GTA, I'm reminded of this cutscene from ProZD.



I'm pretty sure that no matter how good it is and how much $$$ they spend on it, the amount of fun I'll have playing GTA VI will be based on the ratio of time I spend driving (a normalish car) / shooting (a normalish gun) relative to cutscenes and goofy game mechanics.

I never even got to GTA V, but how you describe it reminds me of this somewhat lengthy video that resonates with Rockstar's increasing prioritization of a movie-like experience over sandbox experiences and player freedom in their missions.



Gutting the emergent gameplay element to missions that allowed you to utilize the open world sandbox in favor of whatever the script dictates was disappointing to hear because the story was never why I got into the games in the first place, it was just a bonus.

The final nail in the coffin for my interest in Rockstar's games is their outdated controls, because without fail they manage to make their games feel terrible to play, as though each game's controls were untouched for a generation.

Rockstar games have always been clunky, but going for realism in recent titles can't help because their own balancing favors realistic, highly (arguably overly) animations that look good over what plays well, and RDR2 was supposedly even worse than anything they've made prior.

Obviously it's too early to tell going off of cinematic trailers, but that in conjunction with the mission design are going to be the make it or break it gameplay side for me. I still don't trust them not to shoehorn any woke garbage in the game, but that's going to be for the console players to find out because I'm not buying one regardless.
 
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