2451: GTA Online: Simultaneously Amazing and Shit

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There are few things in this world that are simultaneously quite as amazing and quite as shit as Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto Online.

Every few months, I boot it up to see what’s been added, and there’s always been some pretty significant new content bolted on for free since I last tried. I get excited to try it, maybe even actually get to try it… and then before long I remember why I’m not playing Grand Theft Auto Online all day every day.

The most recent additions to the game — or new to me, anyway — are the Stunt races and the Motorcycle Clubs. The former provides a series of TrackMania-esque building blocks for track designers to construct physically improbable/impossible tracks using the game world as a backdrop, while the latter offers a new means of progression for small groups of up to eight players.

I haven’t yet raised enough money to purchase a hideout for a Motorcycle Club yet, which is why I was doing the Stunt Races — conveniently, there’s a trigger point for one right outside my in-game apartment. And I’ve been having an absolute blast participating in these races, which make the best of Grand Theft Auto’s exaggerated vehicle physics with lots of jumps, switchbacks, corkscrews and all manner of other funtimes — plus, of course, the inevitable playing dirty that tends to come with the territory.

This was all absolutely great until the “host” of the session either went away from their keyboard or crashed, leaving their game logged in but not responding. Not only did this mean that we had to wait a long time between every event because the host wasn’t there to manually press the “start event” button, but it also meant that at the end of one session in particular, everyone was left stuck as the results screen with no means of leaving the event or quitting back to the free-roaming mode short of completely quitting the game altogether then logging back in again. And with Grand Theft Auto V’s astronomical initial load time, this is not a particularly appealing prospect.

I’ve run into this problem before, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been fixed. Actually, no I’m not, because Grand Theft Auto Online is still missing a variety of features that a lot of other online games have had for a very long time.

Chief among the missing features is a “party” system whereby you and other players can form a group that sticks together, regardless of whether you’re doing events or free-roam stuff. The game does keep people from the same event together if they vote to continue on to a new map, but if anyone chooses to exit to free-roam mode, they’re immediately separated from all of the people they were just playing with.

Couple this with the fact that setting up a “friends only” game is a faff and a half, involving booting up Grand Theft Auto V’s single-player game, then entering Grand Theft Auto Online from there — there’s no means of starting a “friends only” session once you’re already in Grand Theft Auto Online — and you have an online experience that is a real mess, particularly if you want to play with friends. And for those who think what I just described isn’t a particular faff, you obviously haven’t endured GTAV’s load times.

It’s kind of baffling how these features simply haven’t been added to the game since it was launched, because I can’t be the only one keenly feeling their absence. And it’s frustrating, because the activities on offer in Grand Theft Auto Online are many, varied and a whole lot of fun. It’s just such a monumental pain to get it working properly that I often give up out of sheer exasperation rather than wanting to stick with it.

GTA Online should be an absolute masterpiece. And it has the potential to be just that. But short of a fundamental revamp of how the whole online functionality works, it’s doomed to remain an admirably fun and varied, yet ultimately frustrating and irritating experience that, for my money at least, often ends up feeling like more trouble than it’s worth.

2251: GTA Online: More Fun Than I Originally Gave it Credit For

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Some friends and I have managed to spend most of today playing Grand Theft Auto Online, the sprawling multiplayer mode for Grand Theft Auto V on… well, everything, but we were playing on PC, because we all have excellent gaming rigs and like it looking lovely and running at 60+ frames per second.

Anyway. Regular readers will know that my reaction to Grand Theft Auto Online has been somewhat lukewarm in the past, but today we had a ton of genuine fun, both in the free-roaming mode and in the more structured activities. I think it’s finally won me over as something I want to play more of — I’m still unconvinced that I want to play it with strangers, as popular triple-A game multiplayer modes tend to attract the very worst kind of person, but I definitely want to do a lot more with friends.

It has problems, though; fairly significant ones for an online game. Mostly the issues relate to the overall clunkiness of setting up and managing online sessions. There’s no party system, for instance, which makes sticking together with the same group of players when moving from activity to activity a little troublesome at times, though the addition of the “Remain Host” option alleviates this somewhat by ensuring whoever initiates an activity remains in control of the session’s options after it’s over.

The problems with the party system are further compounded by Rockstar’s insistence on using its own proprietary login system for online IDs — the Rockstar Social Club. I can understand why they’ve done this — there’s some nice detailed stat-tracking and suchlike on the Social Club website — but it’s a shame it doesn’t integrate with something like Steam. On consoles it integrates perfectly with Xbox Live and PlayStation Network, making it straightforward to find and invite people, whereas the addition of an extra layer of user IDs and accounts on the PC version makes it a bit of a faff to get set up to play with friends. Social Club is also a bit of a temperamental beast; we spent nearly an hour at the start of our session earlier with one of our friends steadfastly appearing offline despite him being logged in to GTA Online; turned out the solution was just to open the Social Club interface in game, and then he magically appeared online. Dumb. Broken.

Fortunately, once it works, it seems to stay working for the most part, and while there are a few aspects of the experience you miss out on when playing in small, private sessions rather than in large public games, we certainly didn’t feel like we were being deprived of anything to do. Pleasingly, there are a lot of activities tuned for 4 players, which is typically the number of people we manage to have available at any one time, so there were plenty of options for us.

Over time, Grand Theft Auto Online has expanded with a veritable fuckton of new game modes and ways to play, too; open-world activities in Free Mode might challenge you to capture and control an area on the map; “adversary” modes give you unconventional and sometimes asymmetrical ways to compete against each other; missions provide relatively freeform objectives for you to complete as a group. And then, of course, there are the Heists, which we are yet to see one through to its conclusion, but which promise to be a ton of fun.

Particular highlights for us today included the “Hasta la Vista” adversary mode, in which the four participants are split into two teams: two on pedal bicycles, two in big rig truck cabs. The players on the bikes have to reach the finish line. The players in the trucks have to stop them by flattening them. The huge difference in weight, size and manoeuvreability between the two teams makes for a really fun, silly experience that is much more interesting than a straightforward race.

We also had great fun with the air races. In our first race, which gave us free reign to choose our aircraft, I ill-advisedly attempted to fly a small passenger jet and failed miserably to complete the course. In the second, we all flew small, nimble aerobatic planes, and — particularly when played in first-person — it was thrilling and terrifying.

Even just straight deathmatches are fun. The realistic city environments in which the game takes place make for great places to play cat-and-mouse (with shotguns), and it’s immensely satisfying to battle your friends for ultimate supremacy, or at least bragging rights.

Grand Theft Auto Online feels like what Grand Theft Auto has always wanted to be: a realistic-looking but chaotic, silly, cartoonishly violent and darkly humorous playground for people to let loose in using a variety of methods: driving, flying, boating, skydiving, cycling, shooting, bombing, robbing, running, climbing, jumping… while I don’t think anyone will ever make the argument that it’s great art, it’s not trying to be; it’s a stark contrast from the single-player mode, which does tell a good story and tell it well. Rather, it’s a game where the stories are, for the most part, emergent; the stories are the things you reminisce about with the friends you’ve been playing with, and most of them start with “do you remember that time when…?”

So yeah. Grand Theft Auto Online, your interface sucks and you need to hire people who understand how multiplayer games work. But despite all that, you’ve won me over. I’m greatly looking forward to the next time I can flatten my friends in a dump truck and blow them up with a rocket launcher.

1918: GTA Online’s Identity Crisis

I’ve been playing a bunch of Grand Theft Auto Online recently. My local friends and I all acquired copies so we’d have something we all enjoyed playing and that we could all get something out of: past attempts to do this have led to one or more members of the group being dissatisfied with our choices for whatever reason, and ultimately our multiplayer gaming sessions falling by the wayside. We’re hoping, however, that Grand Theft Auto Online will provide some fun shenanigans for a little while yet.

And I think it might just do that, at least in part due to the game’s curious identity crisis that it has going on. It doesn’t feel like it really knows what it wants to be. In places it’s downright messy, and the “session-based” nature of getting people together is cumbersome, clunky, unintuitive and simply broken at times. But even with all that, it’s simply fun.

I talked a little about the basic structure of the game a few days ago, but having spent a few sessions actually playing it “properly” with at least one other friend now, I can see what it’s doing.

The core of the game’s identity crisis comes from the disconnect between typical Grand Theft Auto freeform open-world gameplay — in which up to 30 players can log in to the same session, run around anywhere on the map completely independently of one another and have fun doing whatever they see fit — and the “Jobs” that form the more structured activities in the game. This disconnect is nothing unusual for Grand Theft Auto in general, of course; ever since Grand Theft Auto III brought the series kicking and screaming into 3D it’s been like two games in one, and this contrast has only become more pronounced as the stories have got better and more ambitious over the years.

Open-world freeform multiplayer is great fun. You can effectively make up your own silly little games and challenges and take them on with friends. You won’t get much in the way of rewards for them, but if all you’re in it for is some silliness, it provides that in spades. What doesn’t quite work about the open-world stuff is that the moment someone activates an activity of some description — be it a race, a mission or even a game of darts — they are snatched out of the open-world session, temporarily unable to communicate with the people they were playing with, and put into a more traditional multiplayer lobby, from which they can invite people via several means: everyone from the open-world session, selected people from the open-world session, friends who are online or simply “anyone who is available”.

Once you’re into that lobby and with friends, you’re effectively in a “party” like you’d be in something with more traditionally structured multiplayer like Call of Duty or Halo. You do an activity, you all vote on what’s next, you do the next thing, repeat until someone gets bored or everyone votes to go back to Free Mode.

The activities are pretty fun too, and I understand why they’re “instanced” separately from the main chaos of the open-world gameplay — trying to complete a mission while up to 29 other people are careening around the map causing mischief sounds like a recipe for disaster. It’s the execution that is a little lacking: the absence of an MMO-style “party” system makes meeting up with specific people in public sessions tricky, and the way people are simply snatched out of the open world the moment they walk into a mission trigger is not explained at all well; if you don’t know that’s how it works, it’s entirely possible you’d be left thinking that your friends had simply left the game altogether.

As I say, these issues and the fundamental disconnect between the freeform gameplay of Free Mode and the structured activities of the Jobs don’t prevent Grand Theft Auto Online from being a good game. It’s a lot of fun, particularly when playing with friends you already know. (I don’t even want to contemplate how awful taking on the cooperative missions with random people might be.) There’s just an awful lot of things it could do a whole lot better, too.

Still, it’s enjoyable, and I’m confident it will provide some fun evenings of entertainment for my friends and I for a little while yet.

1917: Creative Spark

The concept of machinima — video clips, short films and even full-length movies made using a video game’s engine and assets as the basis — is something that’s fascinated me for a while, but I’ve never really gotten big into it.

In fact, as I alluded to in yesterday’s post, the last time I really did much with anything even remotely resembling machinima was back in the PS1 days, when the then-spectacular open-world driving game Driver came out and shipped with a cumbersome and clunky but hilarious video editor mode, allowing you to create custom replays from your last play session.

My friend Woody and I used to play nothing but “Survival” mode in Driver, which starts you in the midst of a challenging police chase in San Francisco, and tasks you with simply lasting as long as possible before the cops destroy you. More often than not, our attempts to survive were fairly short, but since the game pretty much went balls-to-the-wall crazy in this mode, even a ten-second clip could make for some hilarious footage. Particularly when, as often happened, the somewhat rudimentary physics engine that powered the game went a little awry, sending the player vehicle shooting inexplicably up into the sky and flying for miles before crashing to the ground and, if you were lucky, driving off relatively unscathed.

Some people over the years have done some amazing things with machinima. Shows like Red vs Blue showed that there was life in games like Halo well beyond simply playing them. Tools like Source Filmmaker have enabled people to create movies (and, uh, a frighteningly comprehensive amount of pornography) using beloved characters from games like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and BioShock.

But, for me, the most consistently entertaining thing about machinima — both making and watching it — is seeing things going horribly wrong in a variety of unexpected ways. It’s what Woody and I used to do with Driver, and it’s a proud tradition that numerous others have continued over the years. Here’s a great example from the Skate series of skateboarding games on console. I can’t take credit for this; it’s a popular (and, judging by the view count on YouTube, somewhat legendary) video by “HelixSnake”.

I mentioned yesterday that Grand Theft Auto V features a video editor mode, much like Driver did, and even shared my first attempt at a video. Since then, I’ve spent a little more time with the facility, and it looks set to provide a lot of fun times in the future.

The best thing about it is that it includes a feature called “Director Mode”, where you’re not tied to the normal rules of the game. You don’t have to play as one of the single-player protagonists or your Online characters. If you want to cause chaos without attracting the attention of the in-game police, for example, you can simply turn them off. You can adjust the time of day. You can make your bullets and even your melee attacks explosive. And you can turn down gravity.

Naturally, the first thing I did upon discovering all of these options was make full use of all of them to produce some sort of horrific monstrosity. And I proudly present the results of said attempts for you today: here is Unprovoked, a short film by me.

Part of the joy of doing something like this is simply trying things out and seeing what happens — a form of “improvisatory theatre”, in a way. In the case of this video, all I did was set the gravity to low and equip myself with explosive melee attacks, then walk up to the poor unsuspecting almost-naked gentleman in the video, kick him and take it from there. The addition of various “emotes” — which can be used in the online mode as a means of expression or simply messing around — makes for a surprising amount of flexibility, too.

Once the footage is recorded, it’s a case of editing it together using something that bears a strong resemblance to “proper” video-editing software, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. You can edit individual clips together into a longer movie with different scenes, and within a single clip you can set keyframes to change camera angles, apply effects and all manner of other things. It’s remarkably simple to use but very powerful, and I’m looking forward to getting to know it a bit better in the coming days and weeks.

Of course, we all know that the majority of the movies I — and, I’m sure, most of the other people who are fiddling with it — will make will involve people flying around in physics-defying, ridiculous situations. But I’m also quite interested to try some things like recording a race in the online mode, or a shootout, or something else “structured”; the level of detail in the graphics and animation in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V in particular makes for really good-looking movies, and I strongly believe, as I said yesterday, that the Rockstar Editor is going to be big for machinima — if only from a perspective of getting more people experimenting with it.

1911: Life in Los Santos

I grabbed the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V this week. Grand Theft Auto is one of the few games where I’ll happily suckle on the foul teat of triple-A gaming because, unlike a lot of other recent releases, for the most part the games tend to actually work and live up to their potential rather than just being flashy showcases. (Of course, in Grand Theft Auto V’s case, its online component was completely broken at its console launch, but the single player worked perfectly, at least.)

I picked up the PC version not to play through the single-player game again — I enjoyed it on PS3, but not enough to play it again — but instead to delve into Grand Theft Auto Online, which has been gradually evolving since its barely functional initial incarnation into something rather interesting over the months since its original release.

I’m not yet fully convinced that it quite realises the ambition it clearly has, but it’s certainly interesting to play and fun with friends. I had a bit of a tool around with my friend Tim earlier tonight, and hopefully a couple of our other friends will be joining us in short order.

GTA Online starts with a rather overly long tutorial in which you’re introduced to race events, shooty bang-bang events and missions. After that you’re pretty much flung into the game world and invited to do what you want, whether that’s causing the traditional chaos of a Grand Theft Auto game, taking on other players in competitive challenges ranging from races to team-based shooting events, or simply exploring the world. There’s arguably less incentive to explore in GTA Online as in the single-player, since the online mode lacks single-player’s collectibles, but there’s a certain amount of fun to be had from just trying to get to different places and admire the scenery — because by golly, does the game ever look lovely on PC.

The default way a GTA Online session works is that you log on and are put in a “session” with up to 30 or so other players. Each player is wandering around the game world doing their own thing; they might be stealing cars, holding up stores or causing chaos. The latter option — attacking innocent pedestrians and destroying property — causes your “mental state” meter to rise, indicating that you’re becoming increasingly unhinged and dangerous, and once it reaches a certain level you will be highlighted on the map for other players to hunt down and kill for rewards. You can also just kill other players and attempt to take money they have failed to bank, too, but this also has an impact on your mental state.

The meat of the game comes in the form of “jobs”, which are instanced activities scattered around the map. The majority of these are races (in cars, aircraft, boats and on bicycles) or variations on deathmatch (last man standing, last team standing, team deathmatch, capture the thingy) but there are also missions to take on that are a little more like the activities you’d normally be doing in single player — things like chasing down cars, stealing things without the cops noticing and that sort of thing. Once you advance to a certain rank, you can also take on full-blown Heists with a team of four people, but I haven’t had the opportunity to try those yet.

When you hop into a Job, you have the opportunity to invite people. You can invite friends, crew members, the people who were in your free-roaming session or simply cast a wide net to anyone who might be interested in playing that job. Those people who were invited get a text message sent to their in-game phone and can join the Job wherever they are on the map at the time; once everyone is together and everything is in order — whoever is “hosting” the Job gets control over various settings, including the enjoyable ability to lock the camera angle to the new (and very impressive) first-person mode added for the PC version.

Completing a Job rewards you with money and Reputation Points, or RP. RP allows you to increase in rank, with more activities and purchasable items becoming available as you progress. In this way, the game starts fairly simple and gradually expands over time; “rank” isn’t quite the same as “level” in an MMO in that it has no impact on your character’s abilities — these can all be levelled up independently of one another — but rather it simply increases the amount of available content on offer to those of higher rank.

So far it seems like fun, though when playing with random people I haven’t seen much incentive for people to interact or talk to one another. I’ve seen people get into random firefights with one another, but certainly in free-roam it doesn’t seem ideally set up for “cooperative” play — there doesn’t seem to be a way of making a “party”, for example, though it is possible to create a friends-only session to ensure you only play with people that you like or trust.

I think the issue with GTA Online is that it’s not quite sure what it wants to be. It has some rather MMO-esque ideas — advancing in rank; daily, weekly and monthly challenges; instanced content — but the execution is a little wanting in a few areas. Load times are fairly astronomical, for one thing, and there are a few bugs here and there. Being an online game, though, in theory both of these issues can be fixed in time, so hopefully things will improve.

I don’t wish this to sound negative, though, because so far my few hours in GTA Online have been rather fun. Whether or not I stick with it in the long term remains to be seen, but I’m hoping it will be a game that a number of my friends and I can enjoy together on a semi-regular basis for some time yet.

1354: GTA is More Fun with Friends

I’m not talking about Grand Theft Auto Online, either, which is, so far as I can make out, still a predictably shambolic mess after throwing its doors open to the public earlier this week. No, I’m talking about that peculiar joy you get from playing a game made for… well, play… with someone else.

To put this in some sort of context, allow me to explain. I played through Grand Theft Auto V and enjoyed it. I liked the characters, I found the story enjoyable and the gameplay entertaining enough to keep going after the credits rolled. Can’t ask for more, really.

Except this evening my good friend Sam came over and we played together. Sam and I used to play Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City together when we were at university, usually drunk. (We’d play Grand Theft Auto drunk, not we were usually drunk at university. Though we were drunk quite a lot at university.) Since going our separate ways and entering what careers advisors insist on calling “the world of work”, though, the only games we’ve really played together have been things specifically designed for group play with structured rules — things like board games and the like. I thought it would be interesting to see if GTAV would recapture the magic of the previous games, so I invited Sam over this evening primarily to play it, and if it didn’t, well, there’s a shelf full of board games to play instead.

Fortunately, GTAV very much has the old magic. In several hours of play, we didn’t do a single structured piece of content in the game — no missions, no races, no Flight School, nothing. Instead, we’d set largely improvised challenges and then attempt to complete them. First up, we wanted to get to the Los Santos airport and successfully steal a plane — something we’d regularly try to do in GTAIII — without getting shot to pieces by the police who were summoned the moment you step on the runway. Eventually we managed that, so we turned our attention to the enormous Mount Chiliad, the peak that dominates the north end of the map. First we tried to fly a plane over the top of it and parachute onto the summit. Having successfully accomplished that (once — never again after that) we discovered a pair of dirt bikes near the top, and a conveniently-placed jump ramp nearby.

After an unsuccessful attempt to make the jump that ended in the unfortunate demise of poor Trevor, we tried to get back on top of the mountain — firstly by parachuting again, then by driving and finally by walking. All of these attempts ended in failure — my parachuting concluded prematurely when I failed to realise that leaping out of a plane at a couple of hundred knots would cause you to go flying at a couple of hundred knots, too, and ended up plastering myself all over the site of the mountain; driving up the mountain was stymied by the fact that most vehicles can’t drive up near-vertical rock walls (though driving the front of a big rig past some very surprised hikers was enormously entertaining while it lasted); walking up the mountain concluded after several “trip-and-fall” incidents that saw Trevor rolling part of the way down the mountain, with the last fall being a big one that brought his life once again to a premature end.

I haven’t laughed so much at a game for ages. GTAV still has the magic.

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…

1345: A Grand Old Time

I’ll probably write something in more depth over on USgamer tomorrow, but I wanted to give some immediate reactions to having just finished Grand Theft Auto V.

Short version: I was extremely impressed. I was expecting to just duck into it for a little while in order to be able to write about it during its launch week, but I found myself hooked in various ways: the story, the world, the characters. The whole thing is put together in such a marvellously coherent way that it just works really well — and I barely even touched all the largely irrelevant side stuff.

GTA V has drawn a bunch of flak for various reasons, but from what I can tell, it’s business as usual in GTA-land. In fact, GTA V nails the balance between biting satire and straight-up drama better than any previous installment in the series — there’s always been a certain dissonance between the fact that you can freely whip out a rocket launcher and start blowing shit up and the actual linear story that Rockstar is trying to tell.

The interesting thing about GTA V is that a lot of its most “offensive” stuff is down to the player. The notorious “shag a prostitute then run her over to get your money back” thing that people always fixate on? That was emergent player behaviour that people discovered in Grand Theft Auto III. Murderous rampages? You’re free to commit them any time you see fit, but there will be consequences — some people will shoot back, other times, you’ll attract the attention of the police. The story and all the bad things you commit in the name of the ongoing narrative? It’s always your choice to proceed down that path; if you’d rather play the game as a “city living” simulator, you can do. If you’d rather play the game in an attempt to steal the most heavily-guarded vehicles as possible, you can do. If you want to ignore the structured content, you can do — and there’s very little “unlocking” of things to do, unlike earlier installments, so you have pretty much free roam of the enormous map from the get-go.

I was surprised that GTA V’s plot actually hooked me, though. I enjoyed spending time with Michael, Trevor and Franklin, each of whom are interesting, well-realised characters and all distinctive in their own right. None of them — not even Trevor, whom a lot of critics have fixated on — are one-dimensional characters, and each have their own personal story arcs to follow amid the overall plot. The story itself has a good blend of dark humour and serious(ish) crime drama, and there’s some fantastic setpieces. There’s potential for different playthroughs to unfold slightly differently thanks to some (admittedly limited) choices — but the game caters to and copes with these differences with unique dialogue.

Outside of the main story components, the missions are well-designed, too; one of the strengths of the open-world structure is that it provides the scope for you to tackle situations as you see fit, and the game embraces this philosophy wholeheartedly on a number of occasions. There are assassination missions where you need to figure out the best way to approach a target, for example; and later in the game, you have to steal some cars based on limited photographic information. This latter one really impressed me, actually; I found myself walking rather than driving around the city, looking carefully for the landmarks I was supposed to be seeking out, and it wasn’t a frustrating experience at all — it felt like walking around a real city looking for something.

GTA V has its elements that will make people uncomfortable or turn them off, sure, but there’s little denying it’s a great game and a fantastic technical achievement. I’m glad I actually took the time to play it through — I was all set to pass it by after getting frustrated with all the frankly ridiculous hype, which I still think was completely overboard — and would recommend that if you’ve been on the fence about it, you should give it a go.

1341: Life in Los Santos

I’m very impressed with Grand Theft Auto V. Much, much more than I was expecting to be — most notably for the fact that it’s actually the story keeping me interested.

Grand Theft Auto has undergone a gradual evolutionary process since its first installment. The first Grand Theft Auto was a fast-action arcade game — you had a score, lives, crazy bonuses and the fact you were driving around being an asshole was largely incidental. Grand Theft Auto II introduced a few additional mechanics, but was still largely a “game” rather than an immersive world and story.

Grand Theft Auto III is where things started to change. Transplanting the action from the top-down maps of earlier installments into a fully three-dimensional city, it was many folks’ first encounter with a “sandbox” game, in which you could do as you pleased. That “freedom” was something of an illusion, though; Grand Theft Auto III still had a very “game-like” progression whereby you couldn’t make it to the next “level” — the next of Liberty City’s three islands — until you had progressed far enough in the structured content. It worked well, though; by the time you finished a region, you knew it really well. That said, if you were booting up the game for the first time on, say, someone else’s console and you just wanted to get the great sports cars and cause havoc, there were arbitrary limitations in place.

Vice City took the basic structure of Grand Theft Auto III and removed those restrictions for the most part. The Miami-inspired setting was split between two islands that you could drive back and forth between at will, and there were plenty of things for you to do besides the story missions — though the story itself was interesting in a Scarface sort of way. This was taken to an extreme in San Andreas, which offered three cities and a whole host of countryside in between, with plenty of side things to do along the way, although the early part of the game did reinstate the arbitrary game-like restrictions on where you were “allowed” to go.

Grand Theft Auto IV was another turning point for the series. Although III onwards had had an actual narrative with a beginning, middle and end, IV placed the emphasis on the story rather than freeform chaos. You still had a lot of choice and freedom in how you went about beating the game, but real efforts had clearly been made to make the protagonist an interesting character. For some, however, this went against the grain of what they felt Grand Theft Auto “should” be about — particularly when you started getting regularly harassed on the phone by virtual in-game girlfriends and friends to go and hang out. I personally quite liked it — though not enough, I might add, to ever actually finish it.

And now we have Grand Theft Auto V, a game which is attracting as much cynicism as it is popularity and commercial success. And I’m a bit sad about the cynicism part, because Grand Theft Auto V is doing some clever things, is written well and is a remarkably effective piece of fiction — both from the perspective of its scripted narrative and in the building of its world that presents a skewed, twisted but eerily accurate view of our own society in 2013. At the same time, the open world chaos is still very much present and correct — it just doesn’t feel as “gamey” as it once did. And that’s good — it shows the series has evolved over time rather than stagnating, because it has.

Grand Theft Auto V has the most seamless transitions between freeform wandering around and scripted narrative that I’ve ever seen. There’s no loading breaks, no fade-outs with mission titles, no “letterboxing” — just one moment you’ll be walking around, the next you come across a couple of people talking, you walk up to them and you’re seamlessly into a cutscene.

Then there’s “the torture scene,” a scene that has caused a considerable amount of hand-wringing from people across the industry. (Spoilers ahead, obviously.)

In “the torture mission,” two of the game’s three protagonists become embroiled in a plot involving the in-game equivalent of the FBI. Having “rescued” a hostage from the CIA-equivalent, said hostage is then kidnapped by the FIB (sic) and dragged to an abandoned warehouse for interrogation. Michael, one of the protagonists, is sent out to find a person — supposedly a threat to national security — based on the information the hostage gives. Trevor, another of the protagonists, stays behind to administer torture and get the hostage to talk.

For the mission, your control flips back and forth between Trevor and Michael several times. As Michael, you have to use the information Trevor finds to locate and assassinate the right person; as Trevor, you have the option of using several different implements to administer torture to the hostage, and you have to actively participate in said torture by following on-screen prompts.

The scene is graphic, horrible, disturbing and unpleasant. Taken out of context, you’d be forgiven for thinking Rockstar had finally gone too far with this scene. Take it in context, meanwhile, and it’s entirely appropriate for this scene to be there. It makes sense, and it has something to say. The hostage starts talking almost immediately after the prospect of torture is on the table, and yet as the player we’re still forced to administer torture four times in total, reflecting the fact that both Trevor and Michael are very much under the control of the FIB at this point. Trevor, being a psychopath, takes a certain degree of pleasure from administering the torture but is still aware that not performing it would be worse for both him and the hostage. And when it’s all over and the FIB agents leave Trevor alone with the hostage to “deal with” him, Trevor instead cuts the hostage’s bonds, loads him into his car and drives him to the airport, telling him that his old life is over now and he needs to get as far away from Los Santos as possible.

“Torture is for the torturer,” Trevor says to the hostage on the drive. “And for the person giving orders to the torturer. Sometimes it’s for the torturee, but only if they’re paying well enough. It’s a terrible means of getting information.”

I had no idea of the latter part of the scene’s context from the articles that emerged shortly after the game’s release, and it’s important. It gives it meaning and a message — whether or not you think it’s succeeding in delivering that message is a matter of opinion, of course, but I think it was remarkably effective. One thing I am certain of, though; it’s certainly not in there just to court controversy. Like so many other things in Grand Theft Auto V, it’s a brutal and biting attack on some of the things about modern culture that we might not want to acknowledge or admit.

Should we have been able to skip it? Should it have come with warnings? Those are questions I can’t answer, I’m afraid, but for me, some of the impact of that particular part of the story would have been lost if that scene was not present.

And I’ll be honest, I never expected to be sitting here talking about the impact a Grand Theft Auto’s story had on me, which is just one of many signs of how far the series has come.

1339: Obligatory GTA Post

So I’ve been playing Grand Theft Auto V and, as often happens with overly-hyped games that I’ve started to feel sick of the sight of before they already came out, I’ve found myself genuinely surprised to be enjoying it.

This doesn’t make the “hype” problem any less of a problem, though. I get that people are excited about it and that it’s a relatively “important” game from the perspective of it costing a fucking fortune to make and also being one of the last great “big” games of this hardware generation, but the sheer level of hype is actually having something of a negative impact.

You might think that’s a contradiction — any publicity is good publicity, after all — but in GTA’s case the sheer pressure there is to write something — anything — about this fucking game is leading to what I can’t help but feel is a bit of an unrealistic picture.

The cynicism surrounding the game’s characters, writing and story is probably the worst thing. Going in to GTA V relatively “blind” having deliberately avoided as much of the hype as I possibly could, I’ve been surprised at quite how well-written it is. Michael is a sympathetic character prone to bouts of extravagant rage — often manifesting in some of the game’s more spectacular setpieces — while Franklin is a character who is clearly much too smart for the life he’s been living up until this point.

Trevor, meanwhile, whose missions I finally unlocked this evening, is a genuinely loathsome character, but not in the sense that he stops me wanting to play. On the contrary, his loathsomeness is horrifyingly compelling — particularly as he’s not just a blindly raging psychopath and is instead clearly something of a complex character prone to violent mood swings. He’s cracking genuinely amusing witticisms one moment; screaming bloody murder (literally) the next. He’s certainly memorable.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the game’s overall sense of morality, and I do think that it’s the most graphic, violent GTA we’ve ever seen. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, though; if a story told in a medium known for desensitising people to virtual violence still has the capacity to shock and make you feel uncomfortable, it’s doing its job right. Is it necessary? Perhaps not, but this is the story the writers have chosen to tell and the characters they have chosen to create, and in a game so focused on its unfolding plot — and yes, regardless of all the open-world chaos there is on offer, this is very much a game about its plot and characters — I have to respect the writers’ decisions. Also, we are talking about a series called Grand Theft Auto — a series which has long been known for its strong focus on deliberately being a tosser.

Interestingly, one thing I’ve found with GTA is that I want to “method act” the characters. When I’m playing as Michael, I want to play things straight — drive properly and respectfully, not start fights or cause chaos. When I’m Franklin, it’s similar — it feels particularly right, as Franklin, to stop for the people who’ve had their bag snatched, chase down the criminal and then return it to the person who lost it rather than walking off with it. When I’m Trevor, meanwhile, everything goes out of the window; it doesn’t feel “wrong” to take the most direct route possible to a destination, even if that means flattening every fence and lamppost along the way; it doesn’t feel “wrong” to wander down the street punching random pedestrians in the face.

I had my suspicions before I unlocked him, but now I’m all but completely certain that Trevor is in the game primarily for one reason: to address the most common criticism of GTA IV, which was that the story the game was trying to tell and the freedom to cause carnage were at odds with one another. Using the “method acting” analogy again, it simply didn’t feel right to play Niko as a psychopath who randomly attacked people and stood in the middle of the road with a rocket launcher. The simple presence of Trevor in GTA V — plus the ability to give him a massive beard and a ridiculous scraggy mullet just to make him look even more disheveled than he already is — ably addresses this concern while still allowing the rest of the game to unfold its narrative in peace. Well, as much peace as can be expected from a GTA narrative, anyway.

Is GTA V perfect? No, of course not. Does it have issues that could do with resolving? Perhaps, though I’d perhaps argue not to the degree some people are making out. Is it good, though? Absolutely, and if you’ve been debating whether or not to get it… you should at least give it a look. If it does something that turns you off, fair enough; but it’s certainly well worth a look.