1350: Open-World Ridiculosity

As you’ll know if you’ve been reading recently, I finished Grand Theft Auto V the other day, and have approximately 75% on the completion-o-meter. Once I got back from Eurogamer Expo today, I thought I’d fire it up and specifically piss around in the open world rather than doing anything structured. (Okay, I cleaned up a couple of Strangers and Freaks missions, but aside from that… yeah.)

I’m pleased to confirm that Grand Theft Auto V’s open-world freeform silliness is possibly the best it’s ever been. In about an hour or two of play, I tripped over and rolled all the way down a mountain without dying; had a police shootout at a truck stop (where I did die, sadly); successfully landed on the roof of a car park at the airport by using a billboard as a jump ramp; successfully leapt onto a passing train (and then fell off while attempting to climb down and hijack it); inadvertently attracted the attention of the police and decided to run up the steepest face of a mountain, surviving quite a while and single-handedly taking down six helicopters before finally tripping over, rolling all the way down the mountain and failing to survive this time; cycled all the way from one end of the map to the other; and a few other things besides.

I’m happy that the idea of “I wonder if I can do that?” has survived intact from Grand Theft Auto III; many was the night back in university when drunken incarnations of me and my friend Sam would get home after a cheap night at Poundstretcher or Lennon’s and cause chaos in Liberty City until the small hours. It’s a concept that I haven’t felt nearly as strongly in the more recent Grand Theft Auto titles, though I don’t doubt it’s there.

And it’s a different feeling to Saints Row’s open-world mayhem. Saints Row is very much a map with Things to Do scattered across it, clearly signposted for your reference. Grand Theft Auto, meanwhile — particularly in V’s case — provides you with a map filled with cool and interesting stuff, but doesn’t signpost a significant amount of it. It’s not all “activities”, either, in GTA’s case; in some instances, it’s just breathtaking views, or impressively detailed locales, or the location of a hidden vehicle.

Both approaches very much have a place in modern gaming culture, but it should be evident that Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto are not the same game, and have not been for a very long time. In the case of Saints Row IV in particular, the two have diverged sufficiently to pretty much be different genres; Saints Row IV is now an open-world superhero game, while Grand Theft Auto V is a more realistic (albeit skewed) look at modern society. Saints Row is self-consciously kooky, silly and funny; Grand Theft Auto’s humour can be just as obvious, but it’s not pushed to the forefront of the experience in the same way as it is in Saints Row; it’s just part of the experience.

This isn’t to say that either approach is “wrong,” of course; I’ve played both games and really enjoyed them both. The difference is that after I finished Saints Row IV’s story I didn’t really feel the need to continue exploring the open world — over a thousand collectible items is just too many, yo — whereas this evening I was actually quite excited and interested to be able to zip around GTA V’s world without the pressure of story missions or other external influences getting in the way.

And then, of course, there’s all this, but that’s something to explore if and when I ever reach 100% completion…