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Comment by toomanybeersies | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed GTA V because it was so hilariously over the top.

It didn't try to be realistic. The whole point is that the police response is always massively disproportionate to the crime.

It's a pastiche of society, everything is exaggerated: they have a legalize medicinal cocaine campaign, you can buy supercars online, rocket launchers and machine guns at your local gun shop, you can launch your car at 100 miles an hour of the edge of the highway and survive.

They even reference the outrageousness of it in a scene where Michael goes to the therapist and comments that he may have even killed someone on the way there.

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I think it tried to be super realistic in many ways and deserves some credit for it. Its like they made a realistic world simulation, and then tweaked a few parameters so it would be funner to play as a game.

Like obviously no real person would be able to survive the injuries my character gets every 10 seconds. But if I was dying all the time it wouldn't be fun to play.

The one thing that really bothers me, as far as realism goes, is lack of persistence. Leave a car somewhere, walk 10 feet away, turn around, and it vanishes. Cars and NPCs vanish when you aren't looking. Damage you do gets quickly reset as if it never happens. And a number of small details like this. It's not just that it's unrealistic, it really limits what you can do with an otherwise awesome sandbox.

Still, I think the game that deserves most credit for realism is dwarf fortress. It will be a long long time before AIs master that.

You have to consider the technical limitations as well. It was designed to play on the PS3 and Xbox 360. I imagine the next generation GTA will offer more of what you are looking for.

The accretion of player driven changes in an open world in an interesting thing I'd never thought about from a storage perspective.

If the game randomly JIT generates all local phenomena while keeping just enough coherent higher level data to suspend your disbelief, that's only the storage size of the high level information.

However, when a player begins to specifically perturb that generated phenomena at the detail level, how do you prevent leaving an ever-storage-requirement-increasing trail back through the player's space-timeline? Reconvergence to normal over a reasonable timespan?

I assume this is a thought about problem, so links greatly appreciated!

Most video games do stuff like that. It is necessary to some extent for the reasons you say. My issue with GTA is they do it excessively. A car that I just parked, 30 feet away, should not disappear when I turn around. If it disappeared after an hour, or after travelling a mile away, that would be much less restrictive.

I'm pretty sure the reason why they prune the memory tree so aggressively is that the storage requirement is proportional to the "memory radius in spacetime" cubed (or worse).

Skyrim does it better in my opinion. It resets a block after 2 game days (144 minutes playtime, and waiting, sleeping and faster travelling make time pass faster). So you can leave the loot that you can't carry in the dungeon, and after you get back to it, it would still be there. So it feels more "realistic".

As far as I remember, Mercenaries 2[1] maintains your world destruction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercenaries_2:_World_in_Flames

One of the limitations of GTA that I've found most frustrating is that the game is seemingly programmed to prefer red lights in the streets, I think this is to force you to slow down a bit and let the loading occur more seamlessly, but it's still annoying to just run into traffic jam after traffic jam.

You adhere to the traffic regulations in GTA? :)

No but the NPC cars do, creating little hard-to-pass blobs of traffic

"seemingly"

Look into confirmation bias

Men in suits also correct damage in Westworld. Sorry, I am obsessed by this new series! :D

When they killed Mark Zuckerberg was also interesting. Reality is GTA is a parody of American Culture. The developers aren't even American, at least not originally. They were all from Europe, that's why Vice City is basically a Scarface spoof. Then you got San Andreas which looked and felt like I was watching Boyz N Da Hood / Friday, and other movies.

This might be getting way off topic, but I noticed that one of the corrupt government official at one point in the game said "I'm glad I don't pay tax", which is something an American would never say, we say "pay taxes".

I think a lot of time outside observers are better at parodying something than someone who is inside of it. They just nail the ridiculous culture in the US. I remember GTAIV had a television you could watch, and "Republic Space Rangers" was one of the funniest shows I've seen anywhere.

I agree. I interpreted GTA V as a bitter satire of American society and culture, set in a technologically marvelous video game (which is pretty 'meta').

>it was so hilariously over the top

Every animal in GTA V will call the cops on you if they witness you doing a crime -_-

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