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