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Comment by syndacks | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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