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.