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> The problem with GTA is that it's a fairly shallow game, which limits what kind of immersion you can experience. What?

• syndacks 4y ago
  Most missions: - get to some location (after a cut scene dialogue) - do the task (with some unique element ie kill the character who was fucking someone’s wife) - return to the original location
  • moron4hire 4y ago
    The missions are the least interesting part of the game. Who even plays the missions for any reason other than just to open the locked portions of the map? EDIT: Also, your description of the "mission structure" is so vague it could apply to any mission-based game, anywhere.
    • pas 4y ago
      all my GTA knowledge is from GTA II and a few hours with III, but ... okay, so what do you do after the locked parts are no longer locked?
      • moron4hire 4y ago
        screw around, race, jump cars, try to find all the hidden junk.
        • pas 4y ago
          > find all the hidden junk Hm, I loved doing that in platformers (most recently Ori and the Blind Forest), but wouldn't associate achievement hunting with GTA, but I'm clearly not familiar with recent GTA games.
          • TingPing 4y ago
            I think the hidden content is very boring in GTA V personally. It's an empty world outside of the main story. It's a real shame all additions were online only.
            • ajmurmann 4y ago
              +1 What's described here is what I loved in San Andreas, but it's been going down since.
      • DisjointedHunt 4y ago
        Some of my best memories are riding a bike around the environment with the radio on be it in San Andreas or in V, the gameplay and immersion are great for a real life simulation of no rules riding.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • brnt 4y ago
        Turn on an audiobook, podcasts, music, and drive. Usually begin by going rond the coast.
    • danpalmer 4y ago
      The least interesting part of the game? I've played through GTA V ~2.5 times now, I really enjoy the story missions and finding fun side quests to do. The sandbox side of the game is far less interesting to me as it's unstructured. Sure it's not the most immersive game, real RPGs are much more so, but it's fun. I'm looking forward to playing through another story, finding more funny side quests, etc.
      • moron4hire 4y ago
        I don't think I have ever finished any sandbox environment game. I've played several, hundreds of hours into each. Just... happy with just screwing around, bored with being told what to do.
        • danpalmer 4y ago
          It's interesting, I think this is pure opinion. I personally find sandbox games boring and have never put more than an hour or two into one. I feel like there's "nothing to do". This is obviously silly, the point is that there's so much to do, but I think the lack of structure means I have no goals and whenever I try to come up with my own they're often not conducive to fun gameplay. However, when I play a story driven game, or even when I play a sandbox game with good _direction_ (Satisfactory comes to mind), someone else has curated that goal for me in a way that encourages fun gameplay. This is not to downplay or invalidate the fun you get from sandbox games, they're clearly a very popular genre. I think they just appeal to a different sort of person. It's nice in a way that GTA has both.
    • rowanG077 4y ago
      I think the mission are the most interesting things in the game. The rest gets boring for me after 30 mins. Precisely because it's so shallow.
  • omnibrain 4y ago
    The "get to some location" part was better in GTA IV. Not only was the dialogue more interesting, there were two sets of dialogue for every mission, so if you falied and had to do the "get to location" part again, you got a whole different set of dialogues. But it seems noone ever noticed and there are almost no mentions of it on the internet.
    • pdntspa 4y ago
      That was observed in almost every review I read of it at the time. Doesn't GTA V do the multiple dialogs thing too? I could have sworn it did.
      • omnibrain 4y ago
        That's possible that it was discussed back then, but there are only few ressources (like youtube videos comparing the dialogues) nowadays event mentioning that. I don't think GTA V does that, driving to missions works differently, there is less dialogue on the way and the "check point" is closer to the actual mission and I even tried to provoke different dialogues by failing missions because I wanted to hear alternate dialogue.
        • pdntspa 4y ago
          Game journalism was in a vastly different place then than it is now, I would not use modern appearances as indicative of what people thought at the time For example, most reviews were written in text, not some awful tuber vid
  • ajmurmann 4y ago
    1. Get instruction to go to location X 2. Make sure to get my super fast car for the inevitable getaway 3. Drive towards location 4. Cutscene triggers 5. Car has been swapped for totally different junk car used by character
• fudgefactorfive 4y ago
  This is famously an issue with Rockstar style missions, they are so adherent to a script that even minor Playstyle variations lead to logical deadlocks. Red Dead 2 had the same issue, players finding paths to the door they know stuff is happening behind only for them to literally not function until an NPC points them out to you. I want a world where I can figure out what to do next and that still functions, not one where Character X has to tell me to move to the next room for the doors to work as doors.
  • estebank 4y ago
    You want the original Deus Ex.
    • ethbr0 4y ago
      Ah, Ion Storm Austin (Deus Ex). And Looking Glass Studios (Thief). We didn't know how far in the future we were living...
    • fudgefactorfive 4y ago
      Haven't played it, but admittedly I've seen the Hbomberguy video on it and was really interested. Might take another look.
  • prox 4y ago
    This is pretty much what happens to a ton of games. It seems open, but you can’t do any creative solutions because it isn’t part of the design. Not saying it isn’t tough, but a company like Rockstar should have the ability to pull it off. Just yesterday I learned that in Skyrim, there is a caretaker in the orphanage called Grelod the Kind, who is terrible to the children. So apparently if you are a pacifist, you can put a fear spell on her and she will run out the orphanage and she gets killed by a beggar there. That’s brilliant! It tells a story (beggar must have got her kid in) and it’s another way to solve the problem.
    • fudgefactorfive 4y ago
      Exactly, it's worlds that aren't a sequence of stories but a mesh of relationships that seem much more alive. I can obviously see how it's much harder to make a narrative state machine than a sequence of events with maybe a few branches, but still it's disappointing when huge budgets are spent on visuals alone with no good reason to examine them deeply. Cough Cyberpunk 2077 Cough.
• detaro 4y ago
  I get where they are coming from. It's incredibly easy to break through the facade of the surface polish that is there to suggest "this is a real living city!". In some ways, I found that worse in 5 vs earlier games because the surface polish is so nice. But then you still can't interact with a lot of it, or the interaction is always the same. Most of it is just pretty set-dressing which falls over once you slightly push it. Which given the scale is not surprising, but it still breaks the immersion if you poke it even lightly. You notice the the AI being somewhat shallow, NPCs having nearly no interactions, ... And even in the fleshed-out parts, the NPCs relevant for missions, that's all very linear and basically only interacted with for missions. To slightly exaggerate, it's a good interactive action movie, and a very nice sandbox to do stupid shit with vehicles in. (Don't get me wrong, that's a totally fine thing to be! But it leads to tradeoffs that make other parts shallow)
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    It feels like anything targeted at consoles (so, all AAA) must sacrifice simulation to performance. In the PC-first era, "Your machine just isn't fast enough" was a viable position for a developer. But with fixed console specs, there's no "more" to encourage players to upgrade to.
    • tumdum_ 4y ago
      When was that „PC-first era”?
      • ethbr0 4y ago
        Pre ~2001, when the XBox and GameCube mostly converged on PC-alike hardware, as opposed to bizarrely-different console architectures. After that, it felt like multiplatform releases on console were "easy enough" that AAA began always targeting them in game design. Prior to that, AAA PC titles didn't really give a damn about consoles, which only maybe received a some-features-included reimplementation if the game was a hit.
• petepete 4y ago
  While it won't be to everyone's taste, NakeyJakey has a rather in-depth video about Rockstar's game design and how it falls short in some ways. I loved RDR2 but the missions were definitely the weakest part. Exploring the world was the best bit by a mile. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvJPKOLDSos&t=1932s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvJPKOLDSos&t=1932s
  • V__ 4y ago
    Thank you for posting this. I had the same frustrations as him, but couldn't quite articulate why until this video.
• kinnth 4y ago
  Yeah i'd agree here that GTA is not a shallow game, it's got multiple levels of openworld interactions that you can chose to interact with or not. What it doesn't have is strict or difficult obstacles that give a perceived difficulty. The game's difficulty hits a plateau quite early on and then it's really an exploration and narrative experience. Which most people prefer. GTA online is a different beast and probably where this one will focus. More live ops and changing / persistent world, more like fortnite's map would be my guess.
  • koheripbal 4y ago
    By "shallow", they mean that there is no interesting story line. I think for our age group, game mechanics and open world are not enough - we want to be told/discover an interesting story.
• _fat_santa 4y ago
  GTA can be such a wildly different experience based on how you play. You have regular "Online" that's hosted by Rockstar but you also have FiveM which are a bunch of modded servers mostly meant for roleplay. I hope that Rockstar took a cue from FiveM and incorporates role play into GTA 6 online. I've played on some FiveM servers and it's pretty incredible, there are full servers doing cops and robbers, with mods for everything from writing tickets to police radio only the ones playing the cops have access to. Compared to GTA Online, it's a wildly different experience. And I hope Rockstar includes something like that in GTA 6, it would honestly help them not have to make so much content so often, make the game robust enough where players can create their own fun. We know it's possible because FiveM did it, and if those guys can do it, Rockstar should have no trouble.
  • whatyesaid 4y ago
    Roleplay servers require a lot of human moderation, else it won't be roleplay and it will be trollish and simply like an advanced Cops and Robbers mode. The development isn't the problem. They could make a server listing and make 'FiveM' or 'RageMP' part of the default experience. Although a lot of these servers ask for donations so they may not want to redirect players away from the stuff they sell. RP goes way back than 5, as a matter of fact there are still active servers for GTA San Andreas Roleplay (SAMP) and of course Arma was popular in the past.
    • Stevvo 4y ago
      No, no, no. Roleplay servers do not require human moderation. What all these servers seem to miss is that you should enforce your design objectives through game design rather than moderation and rules. Eve Online is the best example of this; it's what every role-play server aspires to be. Moderation is minimal; the game takes care of all issues that arise long before human moderation has to get involved.
      • behaveEc0n00 4y ago
        Constraints on software create human reaction constraints; I can’t react to behavior that never happens You’re just abstracting “the rules” into “game design”
• wongarsu 4y ago
  GTA has incredible breadth. There are lots of things to do in a big open world. But everything is also incredibly shallow. That's more or less what you expect. Resources are finite, and unless you're Tarn Adams you generally chose to make a couple very complex things, or a lot of fairly simple ones. Sometimes you get depth from the interaction of simple things, but GTA rarely does
  • ehnto 4y ago
    GTA definitely stands to gain a lot from more systemic gameplay. But I would argue that this is already their tactic, they just haven't got as many systems, and they've culled the possible interactions to make sure they're deliverable gameplay loops are tight, fun and expected. They are some of the blockbusters of gaming, so I'm not surprised they've gotten a little cautious.
• mrstone 4y ago
  Honestly such an odd take. The games are all plenty immersive