The Burden Of Realism In 'Grand Theft Auto 5' | Hacker News Reader

The Burden Of Realism In 'Grand Theft Auto 5'

forbes.com

14 pointsgeorgecmu10 comments

The author asked:

"In what way is any of this fun? If I die in a horrific car crash as the thrilling end to a five star police chase, what’s the harm in respawning me for free in the hospital with my car shiny and new in the parking lot"

The author answered his own question without apparently realizing it:

"but in a game like GTA Online where the most fun you can have is behaving dangerously, I don’t think the same rules apply"

There is no behaving dangerously, if there are no consequences to behavior to make it "dangerous."

I would put it simpler. Open world games are fun because the mechanics they expose let players create and experience their own stories. GTA is fun because the mechanics they expose let you easily create action movie scenes. Lack of consequences leads to less interesting stories.

I would imagine it is to create a cost of dying, so you try to avoid it, just as in real life.

So someone can't just be amazed at the attention they paid to detail but has to bitch that it's not as entirely ridiculous as Saints Row? Saints Row lost me because they couldn't take themselves seriously at all whereas GTA still tries to keep some things tethered to reality--thats exactly why it still works in my opinion.

I thought being ridiculously over-the-top was the whole point of Saints Row. If that's not the kind of game you enjoy, fine. But that doesn't mean that Saints Row doesn't work.

No, I understand. That works for some people. I was merely looking at it from the other side. That dose of reality is what makes GTA work for me.

I don't think the point was to bitch about not being Saints Row. I think the point was that the realism in many cases isn't fun:

"But there’s also a “death tax” as it were, where whenever your player dies, you have to pay your hospital bills of about 5% of your total cash, banked or otherwise. In a game where the fun is about rampaging around, attracting police and killing other players, the game is offering you a disincentive to play this way for fear of death and subsequent monetary penalties."

"You have to buy insurance, you have to pay deductibles if your car is wrecked, you have to buy or steal it back from an impound lot if you leave it somewhere or die in a police chase. In what way is any of this fun? If I die in a horrific car crash as the thrilling end to a five star police chase, what’s the harm in respawning me for free in the hospital with my car shiny and new in the parking lot? Why make me lose money, file an auto insurance claim or drag my car’s mangled corpse out of the impound?"

"It’s a game where the hardest single player mission is not robbing the federal reserve in broad daylight, it’s using a crane to load boxes onto a truck for twenty minutes."

I guess I should clarify that the bigger point here is that I largely disagree with much of what he said.

These mechanisms are likely there to turn away griefers. Online play relies on people working together for a large portion of the missions.

My question would be what fun is that? Being given everything? No penalty? That's hardly a game. How do you lose?

"It’s a game where the hardest single player mission is not robbing the federal reserve in broad daylight, it’s using a crane to load boxes onto a truck for twenty minutes."

For anyone that has played the game you would probably immediately say he is wrong here because that mission took about 5 minutes. Yeah, it was boring but I'd rather have some mini-games thrown in than constantly hold the trigger down for the entire game.

I played a fair amount of GTA IV online, and IMO, GTA V is a vast improvement. Most people who played IV online were just there to team up with someone and try to kill other players. Someone would inevitably get a Buzzard and ground all the other choppers, so it was just a one-sided kill fest until someone got a lucky RPG shot on the Buzzard.

It got boring very, very quickly. Yes, there were other game modes, but they were very simplistic, and there was no overarching benefit to progressing in the online world (except score? meh). In GTA V, you have incentives on every side of the table. I don't think they've got it 100% right yet, but in this iteration, I actually care about what happens when I play online. That's a significant step forward.

There's a relative uncanny valley in everything. I love Starship Troopers... utterly insane in many details, but can have a hard time watching Avatar because of the plot and reality holes. Conquered intersteller space travel and the ability to remote control an organic being but still use helicopters and machine guns and can't figure out a way of mining responsibly? But Starship Troopers isn't concerned with making you believe anything... it's busy being totally ridiculous.

Probably a mediocre example of what I'm talking about (I have a good example of this that I can't remember), but I think you get the point.

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