Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see what kind of innovations Rockstar is able to come up with for the next GTA, nothing stands out to me from these development leaks.

The problem with GTA is that it's a fairly shallow game, which limits what kind of immersion you can experience. Imagine if it included more realistic elements like economics and persistent characters. You could decide you have a vendetta against Bob and steal his cheese every time he goes out shopping for groceries. Heck, you could become the cheese kingpin and monopolize access to cheese. Although a more thematic approach would probably have to do with drugs, which doesn't seem like too far of a bridge to jump considering the game genre.

View on HN

GTA isn't where you go to for innovations -- its DNA is pretty set in stone, and judging from its economic success, it's DNA is great.

Presumably it's just going to be another (revisited) location, better graphics/animation/AI, stories are getting more complex, even bigger maps with even more side missions and discoveries, and probably another leap in terms in realism of NPC's -- much like RDR2 lets you have (elementary) conversations with virtually everyone, and NPC's follow much more realistic entire "paths" and activities during the day.

GTA has always been about unparalleled breadth, not depth. Deep and narrow is the DNA of other different types of games. And nobody has the resources to to deep and broad. GTA's breadth and shallowness is its defining feature, not its problem.

Perhaps people have been seeking a more generational leap but from the footage you are correct, they just iterated on top of what worked, and likely have thousands of hours of insight into what sells.

I was hoping that they would at least upgrade the graphic side of the things, it does seem like from this video, that it could easily be just another DLC.

Think after I saw that Matrix demo from Unreal Engine, that trend would carry on into city roaming sandbox games.

Still can't wait to pick up this game in 2 to 3 years when all the bugs are fixed and they have a discount.

With Moore's law over, I wouldn't expect huge leaps and bounds in graphics again any time soon. Expect incremental improvement, and honing in on the details that matter to immersion. I for one find graphics "good enough" for the most part, and I'd would rather the budget go into NPC AI, character movement, and storytelling.

Moore's law has been 'over' for ages, it hasn't stopped video games graphics improving substantially between console generations.

Ages? I think it was about 2016 when people started credibly saying it’s over. So, that’s 8 years ago, which is about how long i think it took for the high end to trickle down to affordable. The graphics difference between a ps4 and a ps5 are… noticeable, but not shocking, and they were released in 2013 and 2020 respectively.

Graphics between an end-of-life and a new next-gen console are a bad comparison. Late PS3 and early PS4 games also saw only small improvements. But compare early PS3 to late PS4 titles and the differences are staggering. The PS5 has about an order of magnitude more processing power than the base PS4 and Moore's law states that computing power doubles every two years, which means it gains an order of magnitude every 6 or 7 years - which is precisely the time frame between the PS4 and PS5 release. Moore's law definitely isn't dead and the new console generation proves it.

> The PS5 has about an order of magnitude more processing power than the base PS4 and Moore's law states that computing power doubles every two years, which means it gains an order of magnitude every 6 or 7 years

That's not what moore's law is. Moore's law says that TRANSISTOR COUNT will double every 2 years.

> Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Back to the ps4 and ps5:

> Each of the PS5’s CUs has roughly 60 percent more transistors

- https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ps4-vs-ps5/

From the same page, the original PS4 had 18 CUs, the PS5 has 36 CUs.

So if the PS4's transistor count is (n x 18), the PS5's transistor count is (n x 38 x 1/0.6) = (n x 63.3333) - which is only 3.5x

If moore's law had held you'd expect a multiple of 8 or 16, not 3.5.

Moore's law is dead, and the new console generation proves it.

First off, your calculation is wrong because these chips are not the same size. Secondly, if you actually go with the definition of Moore's law, my argument still holds - and it's trivial to prove. From your linked article:

>Moore's law [states] the number of transistors that could be housed in a dense integrated circuit [doubles every X]

(emphasis mine)

The PS4 GPU was a 28nm chip and PS5's is a 7nm one. A factor four reduction in length between transistor terminals equates to a factor of 16 increase in transistors that could be housed in one unit of area. That's precisely what you'd have expected from your definition of Moore's law. In reality there's a bit more to it, like efficiency and power consumption (Moore included that in his original estimate), which slightly lessen whole deal of increasing compute power. But as stated in my first comment, it still holds as an OOM increase when you look at raw FLOPs in the end, which is what we expected.

It's not only about calculation speed; the cost of building an AAA class game has exploded over the last 10 years. Maybe you can render 10x as much stuff on screen, but somebody has to actually draw and integrate that in the game. Also, the cost of the needed artwork seems to put game design on the back burner since taking risk is no longer an option. (just like modern Hollywood movies seem to be bland)

kenny living in 2024

lol, good point. 6 years.

Why would you think Moore's law is over?

Because people in the know have been saying it’s dead for a while. E.g.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-la...

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/moores-law-is-dead-nvidi...

GTA V at launch did have stock exchanges you could trade on, and I'd gotten the impression these were going to be a bigger game mechanic in future updates to the game, but then I never heard more. https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Liberty_City_National_Exchange#C...

The GTA San Andreas gang turfs, with the aggro rival gang members who'd start trouble when you were minding your own business, were one of my favorite parts of the game.

They abandoned basically most single-player content if only because GTA:Online was their cash cow.

Yes, even large parts of the map went unused in single player.

And the heists mechanic was seriously underused. Just when you got the hang of it, it was the last heist in the story. I would have paid money for a DLC bringing more heists.

> even large parts of the map went unused in single player.

They intentionally wanted to leave space for the player to explore in that release.

> I would have paid money for a DLC bringing more heists.

They had promised this Half-Life 3 style for years....dirtbags!

The free money didn't hurt but I don't think GTAV's stagnation was that cynical.

Two or three top people behind GTA left RockStar, and the first heist was delayed by years presumably by technical difficulties.

The lack of updates/progress, for years, implies internal disruption more than anything, and GTA6 development likely started up a couple years ago.

Billions of dollars can't be wrong, it was obviously the better game experience! /s

They broke the game by themselves, because Franklin was intended to be broke, like you expect someone with his background to be, but for some reason (preorder bonus or somehing similar) you immediately receive a huge amount of ingame money after the game starts. Totally breaks the beginning.

That was way better in GTAIV where you constantly struggled for money and only after the big bank job became somewhat flush.

As in real life, players could make far more money on the stock exchanges than by street crime. Stocks responded strongly to events in the game world after they occurred, so as soon as you knew something was going down, making the proper investment was a pretty sure win. That broke the game balance.

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

What?

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.

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.

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.

You want the original Deus Ex.

Ah, Ion Storm Austin (Deus Ex). And Looking Glass Studios (Thief).

We didn't know how far in the future we were living...

Haven't played it, but admittedly I've seen the Hbomberguy video on it and was really interested. Might take another look.

This wasn't always the case. Missions in GTA 3 - GTA SA were much more goal-focused, less scripted. You could approach them as you wanted to.

Have you ever played Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines?

I haven't actually but I've heard great things. I admit the setting isn't one I usually pursue, but I'll get over myself and take a look.

I think it's pretty much all open world games. As wide as the ocean but as deep as a puddle. Outside of the pre-scripted story you have basically no impact on the world as the player.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Turn on an audiobook, podcasts, music, and drive. Usually begin by going rond the coast.

screw around, race, jump cars, try to find all the hidden junk.

> 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.

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.

+1 What's described here is what I loved in San Andreas, but it's been going down since.

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.

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.

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.

Eve Online sort of cheats by being a corporate backstabbing and trade game, the set of actions that the characters might want to take can literally be performed by the players. This seems more like a LARP (just, LARPing as a person using a computer), rather than a conventional videogame where you control an avatar and make it do things. And LARPs are typically a more immersive way of roleplaying.

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”

>Roleplay servers require a lot of human moderation, else it won't be roleplay and it will be trollish

Lets not forget the regular online is just 3 people chasing you around the map on their hover bikes with rocket launchers no matter what server you end up on.

I am curious if roleplay servers would self-moderate better if all characters were hardcore. i.e., lose everything and your character if you die, although not if you're arrested.

I wonder if this would even be possible in GTA.

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

Thank you for posting this. I had the same frustrations as him, but couldn't quite articulate why until this video.

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

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.

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)

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.

When was that „PC-first era”?

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.

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.

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.

Honestly such an odd take. The games are all plenty immersive

> It'll be interesting to see what kind of innovations Rockstar is able to come up with for the next GTA, nothing stands out to me from these development leaks.

I just saw the video quickly, without viewing it all. But the added interaction menu (multiple choices, one was "Rob") seems like it'll add a lot of interactivity to the world. AI seems to have much more complex behavior as well, which would add even more "life-like" feel to the game and again, more interactivity.

But, this is a early development build, those could just be prototypes that won't make it into the final game. Certainly a lot of new features are also not shown in the video.

Don't think Rockstar would work and release a GTA that is just a minor improvement on the previous version, they always make leaps when it comes to quality of GTA releases.

You could rob places in every game since San Andreas. It was never interesting.

Yeah, by pointing the gun at them. If you look at the videos again, it seems like looking at a person brings up multiple alternatives, one of them being to rob them, but seemingly there will be other options as well.

You could point a gun at a person (on street, clerk, etc), and it would trigger a fear response of running, or shitting out some algorithmically decided amount of money.

What you describe is what I've wanted ever since San Andreas which to me was the high point in open gameplay for GTA. Ever since I played that in college while working on a thesis on machine learning I've been fantasizing about building a fully autonomous NPC system that leads to fully emergent behavior from individual to societal level, including the NPCs shaping the world to their needs by constructing dwellings, fields etc. Every character would have skills that adjust based on their behavior, basic maslov needs and would act based on that and utilizer the environment to fill the needs. Between characters relationship values would exist and they can exchange information and have something like gossip. Being dropped into a world with these dynamics as a player would to me be the most fun game imaginable. I always shied away from actually building this because I felt that the route to profit is longer and riskier than your average web app side project and I wanted to use my very limited side project motivation and energy on something serious. Maybe that was a mistake since I'm really passionate about this idea and probably would have put way more time in for this than anything else...

That side, I think GTA has been moving further away from this vision since San Andreas. San Andreas had a ton of stuff to do outside the main missions. GTA IV frustrated me because it kept feeling like player choice was secondary to telling their story. I was so upset when I lost my original apartment when buying a new one. In SA collecting all the houses was a driving motivator for me. And V just got rid of so much in single player to prioritize online which I couldn't care less about.

> And V just got rid of so much in single player to prioritize online

I couldn't really play V post completing the game, I'm actually convinced it was completely broken and I'm surprised more don't talk about it.

Whenever you respawned the cars that are driving around you would always be the same no matter really where you were and it felt like once they were spawned it struggled to have memory slots to spawn in any others so really all that was available were that 4x4 and a few others. I had a theory that the car spawning seed was derived from the mission state somehow so it was always using the same seed in the post-game and because Online was the priority they never bothered fixing it or noticing.

If you drove around for 15 minutes you started getting more cars in the pool but the cops were so aggressive and psychic the game just wasn't much fun anyway.

>* And V just got rid of so much in single player to prioritize online which I couldn't care less about. *

This! I thought GTA V's single player was way too short. I love online gaming, but I never enjoyed the multiplayer GTA - the whole point of GTA to me was exploring a massive map and finding tons of little easter eggs the developers left....well, that and seeing how long I could go with 5 wanted stars and unlimited ammo.

A map as large as GTA: SA, GTA IV or GTA V is much more fun when explored individually, not with 100 other people simultaneously (especially when some of those 100 people are there to troll everyone else and do stupid things that ruin the experience for everyone else).

Shame Rockstar made so much money with GTA Online, to the point where developing it out for over a decade was more worth it to them than building the next GTA. I think the PS4/XBONE console generation was the first generation to not have a GTA title built for it. It's literally just a slight graphical improvement over the PS3/X360 release. Same goes for the PS5/XSX release. Nothing new added.

I hope its like RDR2, but in a modern city.

For me, RDR2 remains the benchmark for what kind of immersive experience a game can create. Nothing has topped it so far.

I started out thinking RDR2 was immersive, but the theme park ride on rails main plot missions absolutely killed it, and diminished all the cool world stuff they did.

I think they overdid it and it did not serve gameplay well.

I played a lot of GTA V but in RDR 2 the character is so slow that moving or interacting with anything is a chore. I stopped playing after 5ish hours and that was the only reason.

Gameplay is more important than immersion.

Echo the same about RDR2. The controls were wonky and the character very slow. Not to mention all the times I accidentally did something to piss off the townspeople.

I hope it's not. I had to stop playing RDR2 after about 4 hours when I realized what a slog it was to do anything in that game. Even walking was clunky in the name of "realism". Please no more of that.

Agree. RDR2 might be the most boring game I’ve ever played.

For me the witcher3. Story telling and immersivity is just great.

They will add that stuff, i.e. more than they did with RDR2 - it's inevitable.

Unisoft have done it a fair bit with Watch Dogs, don't think anyone cares that much about it really.

The thing that rockstar are really good at is the world-building - Los Santos just feels so authentic, even if an obvious parody: Even the radio voice actors are so well casted that the voice of non stop pop (Cara Delevingne) is allegedly a cokehead in real life too!

One of my favorite things to do in Watchdogs 2 is just walk around calling in arrests and assassinations on opposing factions and watching how ridiculous the fireworks get.

> (Cara Delevingne) is allegedly a cokehead

can't believe she doesn't like pepsi. smh

-4 downvotes lol. the joke is that the Grand Theft Auto video game series is itself absurdism/satire. so my point is that coca cola is made with the same substance as cocaine. in other words: it's a consumer-friendly version of cocaine.

and the fact that you are commenting anonymously on the habits and/or appearance of someone you've never met (Cara Delevingne is a model and actor).

both/and

>Imagine if it included more realistic elements like economics and persistent characters. You could decide you have a vendetta against Bob and steal his cheese every time he goes out shopping for groceries. Heck, you could become the cheese kingpin and monopolize access to cheese. Although a more thematic approach would probably have to do with drugs, which doesn't seem like too far of a bridge to jump considering the game genre.

The fun thing about playing video games is how easy it is to imagine yourself a video game designer who could easily criticize any other game's design and implementation while easily designing and implementing an even more fun more beautiful easier to play game that everyone would want to easily play so much they would easily spend more than enough money on it to easily pay you to quickly and easily implement on time and on budget.

I found that added systems, like survival stats, to Red Dead 2 distracted from the incredible story. I think I just want a mature, emotionally deep story from Rockstar games. GTA5 got a bit close, but RDR2 proved they’re fully capable of making a masterpiece story.

GTA always been "kind of serious but mostly comedy and sarcasm/parody" and RDR always been "This is deadly serious" so the stories will reflect that. I wouldn't assume GTA will have as serious story as RDR2 had.

That’s a good point. Perhaps I’m just opining that I wish for a deadly serious game in modern times. Not post apocalypse. Not historical.

I'd play that game too. It'd be dark, controversial, and a political minefield, but I think a story-driven FPS set in a civil warring 2030 America would be awesome. The usual stories in CoD or Battlefield of USA military vs insurgents who are vaguely slavic or vaguely middle eastern have gotten stale for me - I'd love to see what game designers think all-American militia battles in NYC or Miami could feel like.

Again, it'd be super controversial and will probably never get made, but I'd play a game like that.

If you haven’t tried it yet, I think Far Cry 5 fits your desired description somewhat. I only played it for the first time recently despite it coming out several years ago and it was a little “too real” at times.

It has over the top moments (like GTA) but I think the story is compelling and it’s not hard to see the parallels to modern day groups and events.

I haven't really played a Far Cry game since #3 and knew almost nothing about #5. Just did some reading about it and sounds almost exactly like what I was describing up there, hahah. Given I'll be spending at least a few months off work from an injury, playing #5 sounds like the perfect way to spend some winter afternoons. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll definitely give it a shot!

RDR2 didn't have survival stats, you could eat and stuff but it didn't matter and just buffed you.

Personally I'd have preferred it if i I had to eat and had to set up camp for the night. That level of roleplaying really helps the world feel tangible for me.

The food system in Valheim was the best I've ever seen. It isn't really survival, you don't have to eat to stay alive, but it gives you significant enough buffs that it is basically required for anything past the easiest fights. But your character is basically functional without food (you can walk around your base and do stuff; you won't, like, slowly die).

Too many "realistic" food systems feel like a tedious system to be engaged with just to avoid punishment. This somehow feels more like a reward.

You've described exactly what I don't want from GTA.

GTA 4 and 5 were my favorite games. There's enough depth from the story and gameplay for me to have sunk so many hours of my life into them.

I just want better graphics, more pedestrians/NPCs, way more vehicle traffic, and cheat codes to disable the police when I get bored and want to blow stuff up.

GTA is fairly shallow? IMO it seems like one of the richest experience games I’ve played. It’s shallow in its blatant materialism, but that’s part of the point of the game.

Compared to San Andreas, GTA V's single player RPG elements were about as deep as a puddle. I've heard RDR2 was much better in this regard though, so maybe there is hope for GTA VI.

They mean "shallow" as in there is no interesting story line.

I interpreted it more about its game design – GTA is about a giant sprawling city come to life as an interactive playground, one way you can think of it is most genres of games are represented within it. (Story game, single player, online semi MMO, anarchy sandbox simulator, life sim, racing, deathmatch shooter, gambling game, sports game, Crazy Taxi, flying, etc.) But that also means fans of those individual genres looking mainly for that specific experience within it will be disappointed by the lack of depth or richness compared to games that focus purely on that one genre vs all at once. That said this is probably the most expensive game ever made, so they are also able to invest surprising depth into each of these 'genres' despite it all. And I guess that is one reason why GTA V (previous in the series) has sold something like 150 million copies – it's a very different game to many groups of these customers but still satisfying.

GTAV had an interesting story. At least as far as video games are concerned.

Right? It was literally lauded for it's sp story line. Like I wonder if these guys type for the sake of typing...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com