Who likes GTA?

It's a power fantasy. 1 and 2 were sheer "What could you do if you could do anything?" brutality. Just do whatever you want. There wasn't a ton of persistence yet, aside from zones to move through, but you could just drive around and be a terror. There was also a huge amount of responsiveness for the time. Pedestrians actually jumped out of the way, or got run down! This was basically unparalleled. It felt so much more alive than other games of the time.

Three was the real shift. It gave a (for the time) huge sandbox to play around in. It held on to the liveliness of the world while shifting to 3d, and the world was even bigger and you were more anchored to it, in as much as you had roots in the world.

As we're coming up on 6, the series has gone from big to biggest. It's likely to have a world of unparalleled size, complexity, and reactivity. You're going to be as close to a real person anchored in a real world that you're likely to experience outside of real life. If you ever thought that if you had your shot at the big time you might be able to end up on top, this is the story for you. It'll be a wild story set in a wild world.

I'm not likely to get it, but I have deep nostalgia for the series.

Seems like I'll just echo the choir here:

Loved it back in the day. Played a ton of the demo for the original game on my PC and later actually got the actual game and played through most of it. 2 had awesome graphics at the time, but I didn't enjoy it as much, because it felt too futuristic to me.

I actually got a PS2 specifically for GTA3 at the time. It seemed a revelation and it was, I played the hell out of it. Ditto Vice City and later pirated San Andreas on PC and played it a ton. GTA 4 I really liked, but I didn't play it to that same level of the other games. I played a lot of GTA Online, but the loading times and hackers eventually drove me off and I've never been able to get through the campaign of 5, I can't say why.

GTA has lost the magic for me now. I'm not sure if that's because I'm older or because I've seen it before. When I was a kid, I used to look out at the skyboxes in Doom and Duke Nukem and fantasize about what it would be like to go out there and explore. That's largely been done now, but again, I'm also older; now I tend to prefer a more straightforward experience. I've explored cities in games, they're neat, but they're just not what I want from games anymore. In this GTA 6 just doesn't appeal; I don't care about Rockstars caricatures, I don't care about being a menace.

I don't want to spend my limited gaming time driving to my next objective, I just want to play something and have a relatively pure gameplay experience with the 30 minutes to an hour I actually have for gaming in a day. The entire Rockstar formula just doesn't appeal to me anymore as a middle aged adult, even Red Dead 2 didn't really grab me, but I had hoped it would given it's a more grounded game. I can't say exactly why that is, but looking at the games I often prefer to play these days, they're stuff that's more strategy (management, tactics games), more story heavy (focused RPGs like Pillars of Eternity) or straight up gameplay focused (like Elden Ring or Uboat). But I do think it's just Open World games in general for me these days. I did play and complete Cyberpunk a year or two ago and in that I felt that it would have been better had they completely cut the open world and made it a focused, linear game.

The only exception to the rule in recent years has been Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

Maybe it's burnout, or maybe that it's that every other game absorbed most of the open-world mechanics, but I haven't had the urge to revisit GTA since Vice City.

The radios of the early games were half the draw, and Vice City was just glorious.

I played Saints Row 4 and Just Cause 2 a good bit, but haven't revisited the formula since.

I quite enjoy some GTA fun. I played a TON of Vice City back in the day, and have dabbled with III and IV, but then really embraced V.

I really enjoyed the story mode in V, and found myself wishing that there were more to actually do at the end of the game. I'm not super interested in side activities, I just wanted more things to spend my money on. If they had implemented a stock manipulation feature that could have been playable outside of the one relevant section of the game where they brought it up, I probably would have gone all-in on that for hours for a bit of Just Cause-style mayhem.

Because I was looking for more, I tried out GTA Online but I found it to be a miserable experience. There is little less appealing to me than trying to mind my own business and do my own thing just to get mowed down repeatedly by some gonk entertaining themselves at my expense, so I gave it up. I did come back to it recently after a friend of mine who was really into Online told me they finally had private lobbies, and I was enjoying the open world stuff, but the missions in online are all designed to be taken on by a crew, making the solo experience for them a miserable meatgrinder whose rewards weren't worth the time and frustration I had to put into the game so I uninstalled after a weekend.

For whatever it's worth, my friend that was totally into Online claims that the Golf activity is the best golf video game she's ever played.

I do plan on getting VI whenever it eventually comes to PC (assuming it does), but I'm not feeling particularly pressured to get it either. In the meantime, I'll enjoy it 2nd hand from my friend who I'm sure will lose herself to it completely for at least a few hundred hours.

Are you familiar with the Situationalists, particularly the concept of the spectacle? It posits that one of the consequences of mass media is a that individual lived experiences have been replaced by partitioned and distilled images.

The Situationalists saw the physical geometry of urban environments as a driver of this partitioning and rebelled by vandalizing advertistments and staging highly public performance art

GTA taps into this same idea with its parodies of American culture (e.g. NASDAQ to BAWSAQ), and the highly permeable environment where you can enter any vehicle and drive it anywhere, upending the familiar urban environment in the process. Its basically a Situationist simulator and I think it scratches a itch for people that they often don't even know how to describe properly.

P.S. I am neither an avid GTA player nor an art history major so if someone with more experience in either of those things disagrees with my view I would love to hear it.

What I like most is the plethora of things to do in these games. Just a small list of things that come to mind:

• sit in a car, listen to really awesome radio stations with the most hilarious adds and interviews
• take flying lessons
• watch people walking down the street doing crazy people things and overhear odd conversations
• take a motorcycle, car, submarine, drones, planes, etc. etc. and just cruise around
• steal a cab and start doing rides
• do the most insane side quests that can go from robberies to killing sprees, or just very benign stuff like doing a deliveries or chasing celebrities for a picture
• play golf
• get killed by a mountain lion (or am I mixing Red Dead and GTA memories here?)

And this is all just basic stuff, without even touching the main story line. There's always so much to do, and even a lot more if you start to invent your own challenges. And I've never even played online, some people prefer that over the story.

For me, playing always goes from doing some mainline quests, then getting lost in side quests, and back again. With 5 there was so much stuff to do, that even after finishing most of the side quests and the main story, I still feel like there is so much that I haven't done yet. I see people online that have come up with things to do that seem like so much fun, I sometimes wonder if I should dust the 360 off and start playing again.

I love GTA online, with some very, very strong caveats, because the way I play it doesn't seem to match how virtually anyone else I've met online plays it.

I detest the open world stuff. I hate the heists, the stupid property purchase stuff, the dumb missions, the random rolling around getting into death matches with players who have the latest overpowered crap that Rockstar had them buy shark cards to use.

What I do like is curating playlists with my friends of custom games in a private lobby. We'll do a round of sumo (everyone is in the same car, they try to stay in increasingly small bubbles around a small, set map while everyone tries to push everyone else out), a race or two. Rockets vs cars (cars go over a huge ramp to try to kill people on a platform, who are trying to blow up the cars with rocket launchers), and lots of other games like that. There are a ton of really fun custom games that involve cars and guns, because that's what GTA is great at.

Its a ton of fun, it's not super tryhard and sweaty, you don't have to grind for anything, and it's not full of hackers, because it's a private lobby.

Every time I play the game though, it becomes more of a pain in the ass to do the one part of the game that I think is any good. They randomly delete fun custom games for no reason, the interface is god awful, the game has always taken forever to load, and they force you to use that stupid in game cell phone for everything.

If there was a similar game that just had the custom game stuff with similar gameplay that I could join my friends via steam with, we'd drop it in a millisecond.

I did mostly enjoy the GTA V single player campaign when it came out, and I've played through all of the games campaigns since GTA III, and they're fun, but mostly forgettable. They're definitely not a top 10 single player campaign or anything, but if I'm buying GTA VI for the multiplayer, and I probably am, I will likely play through the campaign also.

I think most people that are still playing GTA online are either very invested in the grindy min maxy aspect of all the random dumb money making schemes that Rockstar puts into the game a few times a year (which I'd rather gouge my eyeballs out than engage with), or they're playing on custom RP servers, which... online RP has always struck me as a really sad approximation of a real social life with actual friends. Not hating on anyone into that stuff, and I love role playing, but only with actual people I'm actually friends with. I think the people who heavily engage in online RP communities tend to take it far too seriously, and use it as a substitute for actual human connection, which, to me, feels deeply unhealthy.

I liked Chinatown Wars, Red Dead Redemption 1, and Bully way more than main GTA games. Except maybe San Andreas, but that was my first experience with a game of this kind of scale. I find them okay, but never felt the need to replay any of them once finished, and never touched GTA Online. And since the 6th won't come out on PC before 2027 at best, I couldn't really care less.

I really enjoy that Rockstar creates about as open a world as open world games can get with each release of theirs. I have over a thousand hours in both GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2, not to mention GTA 4 and RDR1, and it's so easy to spend countless hours driving, flying, horseback riding, exploring, and making the most of an environment where if you want to do something, you can go and do it, no questions asked.

The games are built around gunplay but that's not the main appeal to me, even if I enjoy the shooting ranges in GTA or the target practice in RDR2 with glass bottles scattered across the map.

The new GTA 6 Extended Look has confirmed to me that the new game will have the side activities I like to see in their games, plenty of ways to go and do exciting and novel things, and hopefully even see the equivalent of Cape Canaveral in the Florida-inspired map.

If you want to try and get into it again, my advice is don't approach it as a mission-based story with an open world on the side, as Rockstar games are notoriously weak in the structure, freedom, and gameplay of most missions. Find the things in the game that appeal to you and use the progression of the story to advance those interests. GTA V has many game mechanics that are locked behind a certain mission or part of the story that must be completed, and getting to the other parts of the open world is my motivation for playing missions more than the mission itself, in most cases.

Lifelong fan of the main series going back to playing the original top-down entry on Playstation when I was far too young. Vice City and San Andreas remain some of my peak gaming experiences. Never bothered with any of the online stuff, I'm very much a 'let me go hog wild in the sandbox,' make-my-own-fun kinda player. That's where the main fun is for me, just driving around and finding interesting stuff to do, whether intended by the devs or not.

I'll be picking up GTA VI for sure but this time round I'm happy to wait the year or so for the PC release, no way I'm buying a PS5 for it.

I like shooters, I don't dislike third-person, I enjoy open worlds, I do play minigames, and I put a pretty good amount of time into GTA V and had fun. Logically, I know I will enjoy GTA VI and probably sink a lot of time into that too, though I'll stay away from the online stuff this time. The thing is though, I also enjoy so many other games that aren't just GTA and I am fortunate to have the spare cash and time to actually buy and play multiple games a year (as they come out, not simultaneously), so my excitement for GTA VI is just about "nice, looks good". I'll get it when it comes to PC, in the meantime I have plenty of other high quality titles to be excited for.

I only played GTA V on PC long after it released and had mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand the ambition, the tech, the spectacle of some of the missions and the sheer amount of things to do was very impressive and enjoyable. (The GTA VI reveal looked awesome in these regards, too.)

On the other hand I really disliked that basically everybody in the game is an asshole, the satire was mostly shallow, I disliked the forced torture scene, some of the activities like Yoga were just nonsense, the on-rails-missions that allowed zero player freedom were really disappointing, and at the end I was just fed up with the overall tone and setting of the game because the writing and direction was so one-dimensional.

e: oh, and I remember that the launcher was slow, had connection problems, wouldn't let me log in, etc. Kinda weird given that otherwise the production value of the game was so high.

I loved GTA 3 when it came out. I was in 6th grade and caused mayhem with my friend because we weren't good enough to complete the missions. I never got into Vice City, but played quite a bit of San Andres until I hit a wall.

That was it for me and GTA. I never fully understood why people loved the series that much, but I'm not much of a gamer outside of a few classics and a sports game once in a while. I lost interest in the mayhem and now favor games where I can level up a character and peacefully explore an open world.Then a few years ago I played Red Dead 2 and completely fell in love with the game. It's the only game I've ever hit the 100% mark, and I've done it a few times. Each playthrough, I noticed something new, or experienced an interaction for the first time I played it so much that I had to force myself to take a break after I saw a white bird while I was driving and reflexively thought "Snowy Egret!" I saw a YouTube comment once that said, "You don't play RDR2, you move there for a while." That was the case for me.

I loved RDR2 so much that I picked up GTA 5, hoping it would scratch that some of that itch. It was fun and hilarious, but being five years older, it was missing some of the immersion. I did one cruise through the missions, which are much friendlier to a casual like me, but that was it. I didn't abandon it, but I didn't get the hype, either.

I wasn't excited for GTA 6, or even considering buying it until I watched the first couple minutes of the GTA 6 Netflix special yesterday. It looks like they've added the mechanics that made me love RDR2 much, and the level of painstaking detail in that world blew me away. I can't wait to cruise around south Florida and be the nicest career criminal the world has ever seen lol.

I played IV well after launch, enjoyed it quite a bit. I bought V around PC launch and also liked it. While I prefer single player, I also did some online with friends.

I didn't like it enough to do what some people are doing - buying a used console to get access to 6 on day one. I'll wait for a PC release without question, and even then probably wait for the first sale. (Assuming it doesn't completely flop for some reason.)

Well, that's a nicely timed question.

I played GTA since GTA 1. It was a sandbox game for me at the time - I couldn't speak english well enough, I didn't care about story, I just got PC and played games I managed to get. So it was basically drive around town, find cool stuff, wreak havoc, get killed - rinse and repeat.

GTA2 was better in many ways. I knew a bit of english, there were three gangs you could work for and working for one of them lowered your disposition with others, so you had to pick which one you ultimately want to pursue. I managed to actually play the game as it was intended, but never finished.

GTA3... Now this is one I only recently got into and played almost since the end (there is one mission where you have to drive a car with high pursuit right from the start and I just couldn't make it). GTA3 was quite well made first 3D GTA. There were many details that made the game feel like real life. There were downsides though - killer rampage pickups, overall cartoony pickups (graphics of the pickup symbol) and the worst one for me - your character was mute, didn't say a word. The last one is especially bad because all the mission briefings were: no words from you and two sentences from the mission giver in style of "That guy took my thing, you have to kill him." This was let down for me because I have already played newer games in the series beforehand.

Vice City - Now we are talking! Only recently I bought used Playstation 2 disc with this game to replay it in emulator (as Rockstar is full of shit and when they released the botched "Definitive edition" of the games, they took old games down from everywhere). Miami Vice, Scarface, 80's drug scene, neons everywhere, girls in bikinis, movie studios... Vice City has atmosphere! The game is great, you are no longer mute, the story is told through cutscenes that have more than two sentences - this is beginning of modern GTA games for me. There are still killer rampage pickups and they still ahve cartoonish/shining-from-afar graphics, but the game is really great.

San Andreas - The best one in series (for me). It just managed to hit everything the right way. There are skills for the first time, they actually do something, the map is divided into specific cities, each has its own atmosphere. 1992 riots, gang wars, casino jobs, your own airfield, area 69 (or whatever it's called in the game). This is top GTA.

I haven't played GTA4.

GTA5 - This is real life simulator, kinda. It looks absolutely gorgeous, you play as three characters at once (each with their own "character"), the city is huge, the outskirts just as much, there is a lot of land to drive on. And that's kinda it. The story may actually be good, but this GTA didn't tickle my curiosity about the city or wilderness. I did missions, and those were really good, but while the game has many options for players to do things like invest money, buy companies etc., you don't have to. And the game doesn't have anything else to give, doesn't spark the flame for me. Even if I finished it, it would be just for the good missions, but I wouldn't explore the land on my own and will be done with the game when the story ended. I didn't finish it, as Rockstar bundled their fucking launcher with the game that kept on bitching about needing to sign in every other day or so. And since I wanted to play the game and not mess around with it, I went the easy way out - uninstalled the game.

I played GTA 1, 2 and 5 on PC (5 on Steam Deck).
I played GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas on PS Vita.
I played GTA Vice City and San Andreas on tablet.
I'm gonna replay Vice City and San Andreas on Steam Deck as I own Playstation 2 discs of those games and I have set them up in emulator.

I love the franchise and have played them all dating back to the original PC game on MS-DOS, but I haven't played it in 5-6 years--GTA V on PC and played Liberty City Stories on PS2 for the first time--and have never played online. I'll definitely play GTA VI once it finally comes to PC. It's too rooted in my nostalgia to pass up.

If you ever get the opportunity, I highly recommend the 2-player free roam mode in San Andreas. There are a half dozen places on the map where you can trigger it. Takes me back to HS/college and just spending hours blowing up shit and testing the game physics/limitations with my friends.

I just can't stand how movement feels in GTA V. Driving/walking/aiming... I tried give it a chance since it was so hyped, but I couldn't get into it. Am I missing something, is there better settings or a mod that fixes it?