43
votes
Who likes GTA?
I love gaming and I love lots of different genres of games. Yet somehow I can’t get into gta. I’ve tried. I played it a couple of times. I looked at the extended gameplay reveal. Yet, it doesn’t seem to click.
Now that’s all perfectly fine. Not everyone has to like everything. But because it’s such a huge game in terms of people playing it, I am really curious.
Is there anyone here who does love playing gta? And do you mind sharing what you love about it?
I don’t want to argue or convince or be convinced. Just really interested in learning about your perspective!
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.
I've played all the GTAs, so I'll definitely get it. But in like, 10 years, when (and if) it's 25€ on Steam eventually.
By then they’ll just be starting to consider making GTA 7!
Nah, probably the early development and prototyping is already done on GTA 7. 6 took a decade+. I'm sure their plans are already in motion for the next one.
They'll have a concept of a plan.
I got GTA IV for 7,49€ a year after release, GTA V was available for free on PC (Epic) 5 years after release, once they see pretty much anyone who would ever pay for it at high prices had already bought it, they'll likely discount it.
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.
I feel the same way about open worlds. Even Elden Ring for me felt less cohesive and memorable compared to Dark Souls or Bloodborne. But what is different about Kingdom Come for you?
I definitely vastly prefer Dark Souls as a series to Elden Ring. I think I only just hit 70 hours in Elden Ring, with long breaks in between. Meanwhile, I have well over 100 hours in each Dark Souls game, even across multiple releases.
As for KCD, it might just be that it hit at the right time. I first played it in the early days of the Pandemic, 2020, when there wasn't a lot going in my life and my kids were still very little.
Last year I ended up playing about 25-30 hours of KCD2 and while I enjoyed it, I eventually fell off, mostly because I just wasn't in the mood for a "talky" game as I refer to them. I do intend to go back and at that point, I'll have a better understanding.
That said, I think it's the strong characterization in KCD. Henry is a great character, likeable and the people he gets surrounded with, such as Hans Capon are also quite fun and likeable. The world feels alive in a way that GTA doesn't. GTA feels just like NPCs spawned in for the purpose of filling the world, where in KCD even if it's just "Barmaid" as an NPC, they feel like people. They have a bed they go to at night, a job they get up for, you can meet merchants traveling about the world and later see them inside a random town.
That's what I'd say, but I can't fully put my finger on exactly why KCD hits when something like RDR2 doesn't for me.
Let me see if I can give it a shot since I feel very similarly to you in many of the games you describe. For older games, when people look back on them, I think one of things people miss is taking into context what other games existed at the time of release. A lot articles like to sensationalize GTA for the crime, but for most people it was a new way to experience a game. Sandboxes were still relativly few and far between, and the unique things to do in GTA, the different cars you could swap to that drived differently and the scale of the city and roadways of the overhead map games were unprecidented. Nothing else like it existed.
When GTA hit and you were in 3d, it was honestly mindblowing. I was limited in playing since I didn't have a PS2, but eventualy got one and played the heck out of GTA3 and then GTA vice city. Nobody else had fake avertisements, radio programs, and real songs. Nobody else had 'grab and go' cars you could just drive around in. This was also still a time when it was very exciting to play movie scenes. Game were always reaching to be movies in a way, so all the references and setups similar to action sequences in the movies was indeed a huge fantasy.
GTA SA then brought a scale to the world, 3 differnt cities and the countryside, the working out and getting fat or strong, more vehicles, more places to go, a fun story, that imho sort of lost it at the end. GTA IV upped the graphics level but to be honest I did not get very far in this one as I didn't like the driving at all and it didn't feel like much had changed over SA, even felt a step back in places.
Then GTA 5 hit and they did everything right. The level of detail was insane, we were not used to something a simple as shooting out the specific car window and having it react appropriately. The world scale as amazingly perfect, none of the say skyrim problems where the scary mountain is about 30 seconds walk away from the town. It was paired down yet felt like the cities and places they were trying to be. All of the mini games, the scale of the world was nuts. The story is just the story, a few more crime hiest scenes we had never played, but that was starting to get old even then. But again the world was just an amazing sandbox that was unmatched at the time, despite the love or hate of the content in the game. One thing that did fade with 5 was the interactivity of the world felt like it was falling off. Once you had experienced driving and flying most of the vehicles and gone through the story, it became something you've done before. The shooting is good but it's the same shooting in every game. The slice of life elements start to have little meaning and aren't really as fun to do on their own vs other games.
With 6, it looks a lot like 5, but I think why pepole aren't going crazy is that they aren't showing us anything new in gaming. It's a nice looking GTA 6 game, and honestly, I don't expect them to do much more than that, I don't know what else they could do.
The difference is here and now, we've experienced about everything gaming can come up with, amazing life sims, amazing sandboxes, amazing shooters, amazing driving games, amazing strategy games etc. There are so many games that have given so many experiences, that GTA 6 couldn't possibly design anything as exciting as each one of their successors that punched through technology and interactivty layers in the past.
On to dark souls. I also perfer darksouls vs elden ring. The reason is simple imho, the open world in elden ring is very bland, there is nothing to do or interact with, it's usually just an open area with out any intersting geometry between amazing set pieces. Dark souls 3 is just all the set pieces connected together, and dark souls imho is best when it's doing their dungeons. Not to say elden ring is garbage, i just felt spreading it out didn't add anything and took away from the parts I like. Also they threw so many of the bosses at you that it didn't feel special beating them when you had taken down 15 of the same things by the end of the game, and also the attacks did not sick to their classing 'time to react to every attack' and some just came out way faster such that you had to know their tells vs reading animations.
Finally onto KCD2, I also played 28 hours and had to pause, but loved it. I recently got back in and reached the same spot and am doing my 'ready for talky playthrough'. The reason KCD stands out as a sandbox is again, there is nothing else like it. The way the systems work together in the game are unique to most RPGs, there is an amazing level of interactivity in how things flow. The mini games around building stuff are unknown (a part of why I like vintage story is it does similar things). The combat systems are unique. The world is incredibly realistic feeling and so not video gamey, which feel really rare. All in all both games are very unique. I also agree on the story as well, the plots are intersting, they start narrow and expand in scope, rather than throwing you into a bunch of stuff that you don't yet care about, they make you care about the thing you are doing a lot.
On RDR2 though, I really liked that one from start to finish, I think for me the main thing was the story grabbed me, and i loved the incredibly detailed animations and world crafting. That first town in the game feels like a real town, one of the most realistic towns I've played in any game, ever. Just having people call to you across the street as you walk with a far ranging audio sound is just some little detail that is missing in a lot of games.
I do hope GTA6 has a lot more work like that in it, that is really what i'm looking for over the story , and honstly have always been, just showing me something gaming hasn't done yet or at a scale that we've never seen, kind of like what baulders gate 3 did IMHO.
I think this transition to open worlds for everything has lost a lot of the collective experience that made the games so memorable. You can't really talk to a friend about the game anymore since both of you have totally different experiences, like how boring hearing about someone's dream is.
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.
Kudos to the radio comment. The tall radio writing was hilarious. Great to the point that as a casual player, I'd just stay in the car the whole time. Once you got out, who cares.
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:
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 played the hell out of GTA IV and had a blast with all the activities and missions and expansions.
I played GTA V several times, from PS3, remastered on PS4 and on PC, and while fun, what was abundantly clear was that there really wasn't much to actually do in the game. The missions are hard "on rails" pass or fail. Zero options. Other than that, some filler activities like parachuting, plane drops. You couldn't enter any buildings. Couldn't go to restaurants. I don't know, but it felt like a real step backwards from IV in terms of interactivity.
As for the radio and the "satire", it was just so on the nose wink wink aren't we funny 15 year old boy humour that it started to circle back around from "isn't this ironic" to "no, we actually think this." It got really grating for me after a while.
I am a fan of most of Rockstar's output, seemingly against the grain here, so I'll wax poetic on why I have always enjoyed these games, and why I think a lot of people cant seem to quite gel with what Rockstar is doing. I think what drew me in to most of the games in their catalogue, going back to playing Vice City and San Andreas as a kid, is the world's Rockstar creates with each release. The humor ranges from gross and low hanging to fine, the gameplay is serviceable to quite good depending on the title and it's age, but the sense of place these games offer are, in my opinion, unparalleled by any other open world game on the market, bar maybe Suckerpunch's recent outings in the "Ghost of Tsushima/Yotei" series. (Even then, those games are going after different things, with a more condensed world that acts more as a traditional game space than a believable space the player inhabits during their playtime.) Getting to know the map of a GTA game is satisfying, driving around the map while listening to Rockstar's wonderful and varied radio stations is borderline therapeutic, and depending on the game, I think they offer genuinely compelling character driven narratives that align to identity of each space Rockstar is trying to capture, for better or worse.
More than anything else, I think the reason to play these games, the reason I keep coming back to them time after time, is for the world that they build as a foundation for each outing. It's why I have hundreds of hours in each title, including GTA V which I think isn't that great of a game after playing it for over a decade. The gameplay itself can sometimes be caught between open ended sandbox and linear narrative in a way that is clashing and off putting to certain players. Even still, I love existing in these spaces, and its the one thing Rockstar has rarely fumbled in all of their output. If you want (very lengthy) expanded thoughts on the series and why I think the games have become more polarized as time has gone on, I've tucked them away in the box below.
Long winded retrospection on the evolution of Rockstar's output & my reasoning as to why the games have both the cultural status and complicated reception they carry.
Nowadays, what is considered believable and impressive has shifted, but at the time of release, each game pushed the boundaries of what was possible on the consoles they released on. GTA III practically pioneered the open world genre as we know it, and each subsequent release raised the bar in some aspect, whether it be size, atmosphere, or simulation complexity. GTA: Vice City was an effective time capsule of 80's nostalgia. GTA: San Andreas felt like an expansive world with multiple states and cities, all capturing unique vibes, and had probably the most fleshed out world in the series in terms of interactivity and systems. Continued hits led to a cultural weight behind Rockstar's output, each game being a technical showcase as much as a kooky sandbox. This continues in GTA IV, which is a very physics driven title, which remains impressive considering the limited hardware to work with on its original platforms of release. It was also a notable upgrade in cinematic ambitions for Rockstar, which have always injected cinematic inspirations into their games, but now the games had more believable characters and more of a focus on cinematography and direction. I think this is where the divide in what people want from Rockstar games and what Rockstar is trying to deliver with their games starts to widen.
From IV onward, Rockstar starts to deliver stories with more substance, if you dive beneath the satirical surface, at the cost of tightening the reigns on the player. Niko's story focuses on the shattering illusion of the American dream in a gritty HBOesque narrative, and as such they reel in the absurdity, reel in the player's ability to cause mayhem, and reel in the expansive maps to a claustrophobic rats nest interpretation of New York, instead of the glitzy dreamland it can often be sold as. And much more than previous games, the character you inhabit feels like a fleshed out character you control through a narrative, rather than a caricature to possess to interact with a sandbox.
Red Dead Redemption continues this trend, focusing on a former outlaw in the dying throws of the Wild West, and reigns in the chaos even more, bucking sandbox player freedom for a character driven romp through the cowboy genre and western pastiche. John Marston, the protagonist of the first Red Dead outing, is character with principles and ideals, such as a commitment to wife and son you never even see for the majority of the experience that is held so strongly, that the game doesn't let you hire prostitutes, a first in Rockstar's output since GTA III. That may be a small and strange thing to highlight on paper, but I think its emblematic of a move away from full player freedom and a further step on the path towards character driven experiences. You can still shoot up a town and run from the law, but beyond that most activities and interactions in the game are firmly in the bounds of "is this something John Marston would do?" Missions become more linear, story telling is stronger but more focused in scope, and sandbox complexity takes a back seat. Even still, the world they create is as masterfully crafted as ever, offering multiple different flavors of western landscapes and phenomenal ambience. As a lifelong fan of the western setting, it's a joy to just exist in the space, listening to the sparse guitar and crickets.
Then we come to GTA V, which was a seminal release in it's day, 13(!!!) years ago, but I think has aged the worst out of any Rockstar's output in the HD era. It hit this critical mass that few games do, selling faster than any entertainment property ever, because even still, Rockstar is pushing the boundaries of what is possible in these types of games and the consoles they release on. It is definitely dated now, but even the original Xbox 360/PS3 release of GTA V is astonishing in the fidelity and scale for a console with 512mb of ram. Unfortunately, I think Rockstar's cinematic ambitions cause this game to suffer more than any other, depicting a shallow, hollow, corrosive image of life in LA/Hollywood. Characters are almost unanimously shallow and shitty people who are rarely fun to be around, the game focuses on spectacle more than systemic substance, and outside of the main narrative there are few interesting things to engage with. At the same time, its the most widely accessible game to date, the map is their best yet, and the multiplayer, GTA Online, is a seismic shift in the series's tone, gameplay, and focus. It's the most chaotic sandbox that Rockstar has offered in years, free from narrative ambitions and chained instead by capitalist satire morphed into genuine greed. The studio has more money than god, all eyes on them as a borderline religious figure in the industry, and instead of chasing another GTA V, they pull a 180 back into Red Dead Redemption's slower character driven gameplay with the release of Red Dead Redemption 2.
I think Red Dead Redemption 2 outclasses all of Rockstar's previous output by far, it's not even close. At the same time, the divide between the players expectations of the Sandbox and Rockstar's intent for the experience is at its widest. Especially after GTA V's style over substance, all gas no brakes approach, it could be jarring how much they slowed everything down, from the story pacing to the animations and movement. It's a brave choice, coming off of the runaway success of GTA V knowing it might alienate players of that game. Luckily the game they made was so compelling it sold almost as many copies anyway.
The game is more committed to its characters than ever, with Arthur Morgan being one of the all time greats of player characters. Beneath a gruff towering mass of muscle and questionable morality is a complicated man with depth and unexpected insight, who is still written with enough room for however the player might choose to play him. It's genuinely astonishing how well they pulled this off, and how deeply they committed to their choices for the game's design around Arthur's character. In every aspect, the game encourages you to slow down and take it all in. Hunting and fishing are large parts of the games recreational systems, and both require thoughtful preparation and care to really make the most of. You can't really rush RDR 2, not if you want to get the best experience from the game and truly absorb what it's trying to impart.
Outside of the open world, Rockstar's heavy hands are much more noticeable. The more you try to poke at the edges of the narrative experience the more you see the ropes just out of view, cordoning off experimentation and freeform mission structure in favor a cinematic mostly linear narrative that has you shooting countless people throughout the runtime to make the TV show a bit more interactive. I don't mind this so much, I'm not really looking for freedom in the mission structure in these games, but a lot of people rub up against this. People see this expansive open world with so much to see and do, and expect it to translate into the campaign. This is reasonable to an extent, but its never been how Rockstar operates, at least in the modern era of their games, and its never really advertised as such. In the end, I think its a problem of mismatched expectations of what Rockstar wants these experiences to be, and what players idealize these experiences to be in their heads.
From the looks of it, GTA VI seems to be injecting more Red Dead DNA and for me, that is fantastic news. It's another brave choice, going deeper into the systemic sea of Red Dead instead of going back to GTA V's flashy accessible puddle. The line between cutscene and gameplay seems more blurred than ever, and while I'm on board for more of Rockstar's storytelling, I can see this being a big issue for a lot of fans. The game isn't in our hands yet, but it seems like you might be relinquishing control far more than prior entries during the main story, while having far more systemic substance in the open world in trade. I have already seen so much negative discourse from people who hyped themselves up far too much for what was always going to be another Rockstar game that pushes the envelope technically and in narrative. It was never going to be a truly life changing game, it was never going to redefine gaming forever. That's just what people wanted it to be after so much build up. Take the game for what it is, what Rockstar has intended it to be, and I think people will have far less disappointment around it. That's not to say people can't like Rockstar's output, or the studio itself, I just rub up against people who are angry about a game they made up in their own heads not materializing.
(Wow thats a lot of yapping, thanks for reading all that if you made it this far. Am I rambling incoherently? Am I full of shit? Please let me know. I love hearing measured takes on these games that have more thought than a 12 year old's comment history.)
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.
Your experience really matches mine. I really enjoyed the GTA V story mode, and enjoyed screwing around in GTA Online, but trying to actually progress in GTAO feels like an uphill battle stacked against me that'll be inevitably ruined by cheaters.
The golf mini game is great, one of my fondest memories of GTAO is playing the golf mini game for several hours in the middle of the night while chatting with a friend.
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.
You should definitely play GTA4 some day! I'd rank it very close to 5 in terms of gameplay, with a bit worse graphics but possibly higher realism. The story is definitely darker however, if you're not into that.
The thing is only story in GTA5 was good for me. While I got so many hours just cruising and exploring places in San Andreas, I didn't feel the vibe to do it in GTA5. That said, if the GTA4 is close to 5, I don't know if I would enjoy it. Maybe the story.
But I don't want to pay single cent to Rockstar anymore, so no GTA4 for me. I hate them so much I don't even want to pirate it. I'd rather play different game(s).
I was really impressed with the extended look trailer (watched it on YouTube, was at a karaoke night when Netflix had exclusivity), and it even showed that the footage Cyberleek posted was from a much older build.
Not gonna buy it on launch. I skipped the PS5 and they're now prohibitively expensive to buy. I'll wait for the PC port.
Like others here, Vice City was the last GTA game I played. I tried 4 and couldn’t get into it. These days I just don’t like open world games. I have enough open world IRL. When I play, I want a more focused experience. Rogue-likes have been my jam for a while because they are quick and intense. Jump in, play as little as 30 minutes, jump out back to real life responsibilities. Easy.
Aside from the open world bit, I can’t relate to the power fantasy in GTA games anymore. Being Scarface may have been fun when I was younger. These days the idea of robbing a store in a very realistic game just doesn’t appeal to me at all. Quite the opposite.
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.
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.
Liked Vice City / San Andreas and had my fun with those.
4 was okay but I lost interest in it, just didn't have the same vibe and pull as the previous, and that continues to this day, after 4 I haven't cared at all. The movement even felt off in 4 and the gameplay could not keep me interested.
Did not want 5, do not want 6. Not interested in Rockstar anything. Will never give that company a dime. 5 was only good for memes.
Like you, I've personally never gotten into GTA.
Thinking it over, I wonder if the issue for me is that it's just a little too close to everyday real life? I spend enough time driving around in the city in which I live for real, and there's a significant enough level of drugs, crime, and violence here, as well as homelessness. People in my neighborhood living broken lives...
I'm not against violence in games - I co-led a UT instagib CTF clan in my younger days, for Pete's sake! And I've played plenty of violent games. But as I mull it over, either all the violent games that I've played have either had fantastic settings, or on the occasion that they involve modern real-world mundane settings, it's abstracted out in some fashion. In general, I think one of the things I enjoy the most about video games beyond the challenge is the escapism, and GTA just looks a little too close to home for my tastes.
Perhaps I'm missing out a great series by not bothering with GTA. But I'm sitting on a Steam backlog big enough to last me for years if not decades, so I'm not too worried about missing out.
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.
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 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?
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 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.)
I played GTAV, and had enough fun to finish it but didn't really like the story or characters much. I got much more fun out of GTAV Online where I could create my own character, but mostly liked just driving around the city and found most of the activities boring, grindy, or both. It's such a complex and pretty map that almost feels wasted on the rather simple game mechanics.
I played a decent amount of GTA Vice City and a lot of GTA 4. I actually purchased a new GPU when I was in college so I could play GTA 5, but I didn't end up having the time to beat it with everything else I had going on. I enjoyed the parts of it that I did play, and do plan to one day sit down and play through it again, and maybe revisit the older titles, like San Andreas, that I didn't play that much of.
I saw some of the gameplay leak for GTA 6, but I just can't bring myself to care that much about it. When I was in college the idea of dropping some money to upgrade my gaming rig to play a game was exciting. Now that I have kids and with the price of PC parts, I don't think I'd pick up GTA 6 anytime in the next decade.
Contrary to what seems to be the norm here, I've never really enjoyed story-driven games, not GTA or any other game where I have to keep track of a bunch of characters and plotlines. That said, GTA V was one of the first games I completed, and I think that's because as far as story go, this one is fairly simple while the gameplay feels smooth and satisfying.
The cars are as responsive as they can be (most of them, anyway). The driving is simple and arcadey, but it has some game-specific mechanics that are fun to learn. The guns all have their own personality, they sound amazing and feel great to shoot. Planes are incredibly fun to mess around with, the world itself feels alive, and there are a million side missions to play whenever you don't feel like continuing the main story, and this was amplified by the hundreds in RDR2 by the way, that game I did finish the story a couple dozen times already while the online is just super annoying to play.
I've spent more time in GTA Online than in every other GTA game combined. Again, that seems to go against the general opinion here. I'm a very competitive person, so getting destroyed by some random kid with the latest overpowered weapon, car, or flying motorbike didn't make me want to quit, it made me want to improve, learn how to deal with whatever ridiculous thing Rockstar added next, and grind enough money to buy it myself if necessary.
Nowadays, I mostly enjoy driving around the map, doing my own thing, and occasionally playing Batman. If I see a high-level player bullying someone, or random players whose only goal is to ruin everyone else's experience, I start killing them until they leave the lobby. Honestly, that's about as satisfying as this game gets for me.
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.