Yes. I videotaped a "wholesome" celebrity last night getting fucked up her asshole and couldn't stop laughing at her dialogue while getting her pooper reamed out, and that was only the second strangest thing I witnessed in my all too brief three hours with it last night.
Nope, i was just going to post the same thing. I haven't finished a GTA in a while. I buy it because i think i should, start playing it for a bit, then think to myself "This is the same shit as before, wtf am I wasting my time?" and quit and dont look back.
The thing they needed to do, which it sounds like they did, is start the game off fast. The last two games keep starting you off with nothing and the climb is slow and described best by Littlefinger in GOT. GTA IV starts at a snails pace and you literally make friends and kill a few people for the first 6-8 hours.
Man Im am super pumped for it but I have no fucking time anymore for video games. I haven't finished any of the 6 or so Ive wanted to in the past year and a half. I got about an hour an a half into the last God of War and it's collecting dust. I started GTA SA and just made it out of Los Santos into the next part outside of the city and haven't played it in weeks. I hear it's the fucking tithes but god damn it is going to take a lot of time immersed in it to get through it.
The game is spectacularly beautiful. The ability to switch between characters is a great feature. The shooting is nicely done and more realistic in that even when you aren't a very powerful person, getting shot is getting shot and you get good kills regardless of level. What I am waiting for is the new multiplayer coming in October. It will supposedly have a saints row style of play with missions and custom character development.
GTA V is the best game I've played in years. It's already on the shortlist of titles I would take with me if I couldn't ever buy another game, alongside Ninja Gaiden, Ocarina of Time, and Skyrim. For those people who aren't excited, I get that. I loved San Andreas and Vice City, and I strongly associate certain formative periods of my life with those games. GTA IV, whether because of the the Eastern-European character perspective or something else, just didn't do it for me. GTA V isn't like GTA IV or even GTA III in some key ways. It's San Andreas gameplay with two iterations of polish added to every single fucking mechanic, a vastly superior story, and incredible graphics. Here is 2 minutes of gameplay from yesterday. I was sailing my 400k sailboat around in the water next to Los Santos (just for fun, because shit like that is fun in this game) when I saw a man and his wife in a small fishing boat off the coast. I sailed past them and tried to create some wake to upend or rock them or scare the fish away, because I am a rich asshole in this game. The man swore at me and gave me the finger, then started up his motor and started driving away while his wife was screaming. I caught up to them with my motor, rammed them, shot the dude in the head with my pistol then leapt 10 feet onto the deck of his boat and beat his wife to death with my bare hands. Then I climbed back on board my sailboat and sank their shitty boat with a time-delayed explosive before sailing off (literally) into the sunset. Why? Because fuck him. This is the ultimate adolescent power fantasy, and if you can't enjoy that on some level, even as a grown ass man, I think some good and worthy part of you has died. And here's what makes this game different. Even if you don't understand why the paragraph above is fun, 95% of the game is still available to you. I spent an hour playing golf yesterday because I was having so much with it. Golf is a throwaway minigame in a very small part of the town that they probably spent very few design resources on, but it is pure and well-implemented and when one of my party hooks his shot he shouts "FUCK THAT SHIT" and that has happened to me in real life. I can wax poetic on this type of shit, but this game is a promise of what games could be and mean to people as the genre moves forward. Since I was a kid, I have dreamed about games like this, where your actions have logical (if unexpected) consequences, where the game's design principles and systems are so internally consistent that the player develops an intuition about how life works in Los Santos. In most games, the obvious disparities between the game world and real life are so huge as to make comparison between them useless. I don't even spend time thinking about those disparities in Vice City. If you fall in the water, you instantly die, for fuck's sake. But if Fable promised it, and Skyrim got it mostly right, then GTA V nailed it. The disparities are still there, but they are mostly there intentionally, to satirize America's excesses. TL;DR - I've been playing video games for twenty years, since I was 5. This game is among the best I've ever seen or even imagined. A more-than-worthy swan song for the last generation of consoles.
Graphics wise, GTA5 is a big improvement on its predecessor. The wet pavement looks so real, I would swear it was an actual picture if I didn't know better. That being said, Rockstar downgraded the frame rate this time around and when you're driving it's ugly. Horizontal lines come and go as well. Other than that, I have no complaints. The 3 person dynamic works surprisingly well and I love how missions now load seamlessly (no mission load screens!). 9.5/10
It didn't die. It grew up. But then I've been playing games for 30 years, long time since I had any adolescent power fantasies that needed fulfilling.
I hate how people think if you're a "gamer" then you have to care about it. As if the title "gamer" means anything. It's the equivalent of a summer blockbuster, if you're a movie buff then it doesn't automatically mean that you have to care about every superhero/Michael Bay film that comes out.
I'd agree that the title "gamer" and anything that it implies is dumb, but I think the game is a bit meatier and more important than a mindless blockbuster. I'm not a huge movie guy, so I'm struggling to find a good comparison, but its more like an older Spielberg film or something. A hugely popular film or franchise, but yet with cinematic importance and something innovative. Not only is it superficially fun and easy to get drawn into, but like PS mentioned, its incredibly impressive and intricate and refined in its development. Its a hell of a game. My own example? I remember in GTA3 and Vice City, if you shot someone driving a car, it would stop dead (no pun intended) and the driver would fall out. San Andreas, i think, added them slumped over the steering wheel, sometimes veering off course. I was playing last night, shot the driver, and the passenger reached over and grabbed the steering wheel and mildly correcting its steering before it crashed. That's crazy.
I'd be surprised if this were true. Do you ever play any games where your avatar has abilities in the game beyond what you can do in real life? Do you enjoy that aspect of the game?
Come back and make that comparison in four or five months. You're in the honeymoon stage of the game and still wow'ed by the new shiny thing. I watched my roommate play it for about 2 hours yesterday. It is a good game, and I legitimately understand why people like it, but it will be remembered simply as an above average GTA sequel. A good movie comparison would be Star Trek: Into Darkness. Saying it's as good as Skyrim (let's use Star Wars as its movie counterpart) is nonsense.