Tag: rockstar games

#oneaday Day 747: Grand Theft Auto VI can eat my ass

To no-one's surprise, it has been revealed that Rockstar's upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI will be $80 on release for its regular version, and $100 for the "Ultimate" version, because of course there's an Ultimate version. Hilariously and/or tragically, the "Ultimate" version even goes so far as to lock you out of specific shops in the game unless you buy it — a decision that some poor Forbes writer in complete denial has tried to astroturf already. No, but honestly, it's fine — they're probably only going to put the Ultimate Edition-exclusive items in those stores, there will definitely be other stores you can use!

Oh, and on top of that, the "physical" release of the game is a code-in-a-box. Fuck off with that.

I can't think of many series that have managed to so very thoroughly turn me off as Grand Theft Auto. I absolutely loved the original one, from the moment my underage self bought the original big-box PC version from "First Compute" one lunchtime at sixth form. ("Ol' Richie", the guy who ran the shop, knew I was lying about my birthdate, but he didn't really care. My friends and I spent too much money in his shop for him to make a fuss.) I likewise adored Grand Theft Auto III (I never played the second one to this day) and quite liked Vice City, particularly its soundtrack, which I had the box set of CDs for.

The series started to lose me around San Andreas. There's no way of saying this that doesn't sound a bit racist, so I'm just going to say it, acknowledge that is what it sounds like, and attempt to explain myself: I found that game's focus on strongly black-coded urban culture to not only be difficult to engage with, but outright indecipherable at times. To put it another way, I had found Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City to be a lot more accessible, simply because I was more familiar with the tropes of "mafia-style" gangsterism that they both leaned heavily on; by contrast, San Andreas' central culture felt jarringly different to me the moment I started playing, largely because I was so unfamiliar with it. I had never watched any movies or TV shows that dealt with inner-city black urban culture — I hadn't even really listened to much in the way of contemporary black urban music at the time I played San Andreas — and thus being thrown into the deep end of it right from the start of San Andreas was… an adjustment.

There is, of course, a very strong argument to be made for using video games to immerse yourself in a culture that is different from your own — hell, I do it all the time with Japanese games — and in many respects we should look at San Andreas as quite admirable for unashamedly putting black culture front and centre at a time there was not nearly as much truly inclusive, representative media as there is now.

But two things. One, I'm not sure Grand Theft Auto as a series is the one to tackle this in the most respectful manner; I don't know enough about real-world urban culture, particularly from the 1990s, to know how "authentic" San Andreas was — or if it was, in fact, just riddled with stereotypes. And two, I, personally, a middle-class white dude, with everything that entails, just found San Andreas, at least in its early hours, to be so far outside of what I was familiar with, both in my life and in the media I had previously engaged with, that I found myself thinking about the game as a whole much less fondly than I had done towards Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, even though there are a lot of ways in which San Andreas is, in theory at least, a "better game". I'm sorry, that's just how it is; I can't change my own reaction to a creative work!

Anyway, the upshot of all that is that after San Andreas, I was a lot more lukewarm on the series as a whole than I had been previously. When Grand Theft Auto IV came out, I didn't pick it up right away, and when I did pick it up, I found that I wasn't enjoying it nearly as much as I had done III and Vice City. Part of that was down to the different cultural context in which I was playing it, I feel; both III and Vice City were games I played while I was at university, so I also associate them with drunken nights out with friends that ended with collapsing back to my place to play either of those games until ugly o'clock in the morning. This is probably another reason San Andreas didn't resonate as hard, thinking about it; by the time that game came out, we'd all finished university, and thus we were no longer spending several nights a week around one other's houses playing video games together.

I never finished Grand Theft Auto IV, and never even tried its DLC. I thought about trying it again on more than one occasion, but I could just never really muster up the motivation for it. I don't know what it was; it just… didn't click with me at all, for some reason.

By the time Grand Theft Auto V first came out — which, let's not forget, was thirteen fucking years ago — I felt I was ready to try again, though. The new three-protagonist structure sounded interesting, and the online mode sounded intriguing, too. I gave it a go. I finished the single-player story. I had what I would describe as a moderately good time with that PS3 version, but it didn't have that magic for me. It felt too self-consciously edgy, like it was trying desperately to be taken seriously, but also wanted to combine that with the over-the-top satire that the previous entries had incorporated, and it just didn't really work for me. And all the fluff in it was… cool, I guess, but most of it felt like it was just there for the sake of it, rather than in an attempt to make a better game.

Online was even worse. Aside from the fact it just flat-out didn't work for quite a long time on console after release, the few times I tried later it on PC (I bought the PC version on deep discount later to play with friends more easily, as they didn't have consoles) were such overwhelmingly negative experiences that I had absolutely zero desire to spend any more time in it than I "had" to. And I didn't "have" to spend any time in it whatsoever.

What was so bad? Flagrant cheating, with nothing being done about it. Behaviour that went beyond the simple antagonism the game is built around, into malicious attempts to spoil other people's fun. Load times that were approximately sixteen years long. The complete inability to form a "party" with your friends, making it near-impossible to stay together between individual "events". And, woven into the very fabric of the experience, pay-to-win microtransactions.

Don't get me wrong, I had a few good times in Grand Theft Auto V's online mode, but those only really happened when we had a private friends-only session and just pissed about a bit. I won't deny that doing things like impromptu bicycle races across mountainous countryside, with one of us driving an enormous truck instead, were very enjoyable. Stepping into a public game, however, provided some of the most miserable online experiences I think I've ever had.

And then, of course, Grand Theft Auto V just would not fucking go away. It came to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Then it came again to PlayStation 5 and Xbox XBOX or whatever they're called now. More and more guff kept being added to the online mode, all in the name of getting people to pony up the cash for those odious "Shark Cards", because playing the game normally in order to earn your way to rewards was, very obviously, a chump's game.

I got to the point where I actively resented the sight of Grand Theft Auto V. It felt like it had become everything the series had once satirised, and worse. I had no desire to play it ever again.

I tried a few other Rockstar games along the way, too, and the only one of them that clicked with me was Bully, a post-San Andreas game that switched gears by placing you in the role of a teenager at a school in a small town, rather than a hardened criminal in a huge conurbation. I didn't enjoy Red Dead Redemption at all — at least partly because I've never found Westerns to be appealing as a genre — and have felt no inclination whatsoever to really explore the company's broader output since. (Max Payne was good, mind, though I've never really thought of those as "Rockstar games")

Grand Theft Auto VI is frustrating to me because it's being hyped up as some great Second Coming of Christ, to such a degree that game developers and publishers putting out games that are not Grand Theft Auto competitors in the slightest are terrified of releasing even vaguely near it. This, to me, just seems counter-productive; while I'm sure a lot of people are going to buy and play Grand Theft Auto VI on release day, there are plenty of people out there, I'm sure, who feel just like I do — sick to death of this goddamn series, and not looking forward to the inevitable flood of nothing but GTA VI articles we're going to get on the two and a half remaining video game journalism websites for months after it releases. Those people are going to want to play literally anything else on November 19th!

I'm pissed because not only am I sick of the sight of Grand Theft Auto, I'm also furious at how they're clearly exploiting the public with the pricing, garbage not-actually-a-physical-release and bullshit like locking in-game stores behind a $20 more expensive premium edition. I'm furious because people are still going to buy it and reward this nonsense, and no-one will learn a goddamn thing from it. It is the absolute worst example of the excesses of the top end of today's video game industry, and it's going to get away with it because it's "the most-anticipated video game ever".

And this, of course, is to say nothing of Rockstar's union-busting activities that they're currently fighting a legal battle over. But I'll leave that for people who understand such things better to discuss.

I'm aware that me having a little rant here is going to change nothing, and this odious game is going to sell gangbusters when it comes out. But I feel a bit better having said my piece now. And, outside of the game doing anything even more egregious than the shit that has been announced today, this is probably the last time I will mention it, or even think about it — and I'm certainly not going to try and stop anyone who has actually been looking forward to it from enjoying it.

I might silently judge you a bit, though.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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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.