> The problem with GTA is that it's a fairly shallow game, which limits what kind of immersion you can experience.
What?
What?
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.
We didn't know how far in the future we were living...
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.
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.
EDIT: Also, your description of the "mission structure" is so vague it could apply to any mission-based game, anywhere.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't GTA V do the multiple dialogs thing too? I could have sworn it did.
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.
For example, most reviews were written in text, not some awful tuber vid
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
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.
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.
You’re just abstracting “the rules” into “game design”
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 wonder if this would even be possible in GTA.
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
They are some of the blockbusters of gaming, so I'm not surprised they've gotten a little cautious.
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)
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.
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.
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.
I think for our age group, game mechanics and open world are not enough - we want to be told/discover an interesting story.