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.

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.

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.

#oneaday Day 689: Noire Patterns

I’ve been playing L.A. Noire recently. I haven’t finished it yet — I’m partway through the Vice cases at present — but I feel it’s worth sharing some thoughts. I didn’t play the game when it first came out for various reasons, and always fully intended to grab the PC version, especially once it was rumoured to come with all the additional DLC which had been released for the console editions.

The first thing is that that facial animation tech is absolutely gobsmacking. I’ve never seen character faces that look quite so natural. Sure, the bodies are sometimes a bit wooden, and occasional non-motion captured animations make themselves glaringly obvious, but the nuances in the facial expressions make it a sight to behold. So kudos for that.

Next up, there is waaaaay too much driving. I looked at my stats in the options menu and found that I’d spent well over 2 hours driving from place to place. Sure, you can skip over these sequences, but then you miss out on some of the conversations between protagonist Cole and his partner, which help with characterisation.

This leads on to the whole question of whether or not this needed to be an open-world game. It’s cool to be able to drive around L.A. and see the sights, sure, but I tend to find myself ignoring the scenery and just trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible. I don’t know L.A., either, so I don’t have the benefit of being able to go “Ahhh, I recognise that!” along the way.

Further to the “open world” thing, there really doesn’t need to be all the extra achievement-whoring crap. I have precisely zero desire to drive around looking for film reels, police badges and hidden vehicles because it’s plainly obvious that is not what the game is about. It’s a police drama, about solving crimes. And it does that job pretty well — so why is all the other nonsense in there other than for padding? Who knows.

In terms of the game structure outside of this nonsense, it’s very good. I really like the idea of a game being structured as a set of “short stories” like L.A. Noire is. Each case stands by itself as a standalone story, but also fits into a bigger picture. In many ways, it’s kind of like a TV series, with each of the “desks” Cole works on being like a season on a show. There’s clearly some sort of overarching plot, too, though that hasn’t made itself hugely obvious as yet, except through the newspapers you occasionally find around the place. At least, I’m assuming all that becomes relevant at some point.

The investigation and interrogation gameplay is all right, but there’s a few flaws, particularly when it comes to the interrogation side of things. Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you have an idea that a piece of evidence in your inventory would prove a suspect is lying, but upon pressing the “lie” button, Cole proceeds to make a completely different accusation. This is mildly annoying, but doesn’t seem to impact things too much.

Then there’s the glaring plot holes that come about if you do things in the wrong order. Trouble is, sometimes it’s not clear what order you should do things in. I ended one case with a one-star rating and I’m not sure how I could have done things differently to provide a different outcome. And yet in another case, the villain wound up dead and my “review” screen said that there was no evidence or witness testimony. Bizarre.

Despite these flaws, though, I’m enjoying the game. The story is interesting enough to keep me playing and while the characters aren’t necessarily what I’d call likeable, they’re certainly interesting. It is a little jarring to continually hear characters refer to Cole’s family and yet we never see them, however. Or perhaps that’s a plot point — I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out as I get towards the end.

So far as evolution of the adventure genre goes, I’m not sure L.A. Noire presents quite the right way to do it. It certainly does a lot of things right — I’d love to see that animation tech used in a more traditional adventure, for example — but there’s all this useless fluff in the middle. And stealth sequences are never fun, unless you’re playing Metal Gear Solid or Thief — games specifically designed around the mechanic. Everyone knows that. At least L.A. Noire has the good grace to allow you to skip them if you fail them three times — a nice throwback to the days of the awful arcade sequences in Dynamix’s adventure games such as Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China.

So I’ll play it through to its conclusion, for sure. Game of the Year? No way. But it’s certainly a solid offering that will be of interest if you enjoy adventure gaming or crime dramas.

#oneaday Day 547: Bully Boy

After the recent Steam sale, I’ve started playing Bully again. Or specifically, I’m playing the PC version of the Scholarship Edition for the first time — I originally played the game on PS2.

Bully remains my favourite Rockstar game. There are plenty of reasons for this, not least of which is the fact that I like things that are set in schools. I’m not sure why this is, but so far as settings go, high schools are one of my favourites. It’s why I enjoy Persona, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and any number of terrible teen coming of age movies. (Mean Girls represent.)

But there’s plenty of other reasons to like Bully, too, chief among which for me is the fact that there are no guns anywhere to be seen. The Grand Theft Auto series is great, for sure, but we all get tired of guns once in a while. Bully’s arsenal — made as it is of boxes of eggs, firecrackers, stink bombs and a slingshot — captures the slightly absurd nature of high school conflicts and pranks nicely while still fulfilling the necessary “weaponry” function in the game.

Then there’s the fact that amidst all the drama and silliness of the storyline, you’re still a schoolkid and are expected to not get into trouble and to attend class. You can break both of those rules, of course — this is a Rockstar game, after all — but it’s actually to your advantage to attend the classes in the school, as they unlock various special abilities through fun little mini-games. They also provide a means to get to know the characters of the teachers, who actually play a relatively minor role in the story but are still there in the background — discovering the art teacher’s insistence on painting her in increasingly slutty poses, for example, is an entertaining moment.

My absolute favourite thing about Bully, though, is the scale of it. It’s not that it’s huge — it really isn’t. It’s probably smaller than Grand Theft Auto III. But in that scaling down, you get a lot more density. There’s a lot more to do in a much smaller area, meaning you’re rarely left wandering aimlessly in the desert like in Red Dead Redemption (a game which really didn’t resonate with me for some reason — perhaps I’ll give it another shot if it ever gets a PC release) unless you specifically choose to wander aimlessly in pursuit of the inevitable hidden goodies.

Bully found itself on the receiving end of controversy from People Who Didn’t Understand It when it was originally released. Such was the fuss kicked up by people judging it purely by its name that the UK version ended up being renamed Canis Canem Edit (“Dog Eat Dog”) — later, thankfully, renamed back to Bully for the Scholarship Edition. Yes, it’s quite violent considering schoolkids are involved — but there are consequences for your actions, even if it’s just “you have to run away and hide in a bin for a bit.” And you’re punished more severely for hitting little kids or girls — not to mention the fact that indulging in acts of random violence really doesn’t achieve anything, unlike in Grand Theft Auto, where it can sometimes net you cash or other goodies. There’s no blood in Bully, either — all combat is of the “playground brawl” variety, usually ending with one party or the other suffering a wedgie or a palmful of spit to the face rather than, you know, death. Really, there’s nothing in the game that you wouldn’t see if you dared to walk through the gates of any comprehensive school in the UK.

Having only intended to boot it up to see what the Scholarship Edition was all about, I find myself wanting to replay the whole thing in depth. So I’m going to do just that, and I’m off to do so right now.