I played the GTA5 campaign twice it was brilliant. RDR2 had a brilliant campaign.
I'm not giving up on Rockstar delivering a superlative campaign and multiplayer
I'm not giving up on Rockstar delivering a superlative campaign and multiplayer
However with some of the trends in the gaming industry, as well as the heavier focus on multiplayer and transactions that nickel-and-dime customers, I'd personally temper my expectations about any future titles to avoid disappointment.
It's very easy to imagine a bean counter saying "we hit our preorder target, let's cut back our development budget now, release it, and we've already basically maximized our profits on this.
The state of the game industry at large is pretty gross as a result of a lot of the money incentives not lining up around building great games.
Whereas in GTA IV, by the time you confront Dimitri on the island, I felt as if something was really accomplished and it was about revenge for what had taken place, over many years, not the just the handful of slights by a person whom the main characters got screwed by.
One more longterm succesfull open-source sim of that kind without online shop and half the industry is forever gone.
[1]: For example here: https://www.gtaboom.com/gta-online-update-dlc-history/
I will likely buy next GTA on launch if it launches at same time on PC as consoles.
Treat yourself to some GTA V radio shows (you'll find them on youtube), Rockstar plays the cultural meta game better than other company, they do legit art playing with the dominant political stereotypes. Rockstar are not in the market of appealing to cowards, their entire brand identity revolves around the exact opposite.
In the last game, a main character (Trevor) was introduced by stomping an npcs brain into the ground before finding rests of it on his shoe. There is nothing pc about GTA, it takes place in a cynic take on reality that doesn’t respect the common sentimental denominator of marketing departments in the real world.
I disagree, and I think this section from paul graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) captures the dynamic perfectly.
>Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
In the context of GTA, I think themes like drugs, violence, and sex is probably safe, but culture war topics like reproductive rights, race (eg. CRT or affirmative action), LGBT rights, or immigration are not.
those are exactly the topics GTA has previously touched on/which I recommended to check out the radio shows for, the anecdote wrt Trevor was probably misleading.
But suffice it to say, there's a difference between being a rebel and being an asshole. No one likes an anti hero who's insecure and goes around kicking people while they're down, they like conflicted characters who know what it's like to be rejected by society and who stands up for others in the same boat.