The beginning of the end for GTA.
...was Vice City
Shenmue is the better life simulator with actual artistic value, but cattle being cattle GTA ended up being the popular cultural zeitgeist for 3 decades thanks to being able to kill NPCs with shitty controls
>>12901157Which was GTA IV and is awful. IV is NOT RETRO.
>>12901157Too much fucking bloat in this. Most side content not only isn't fun but gives basically worthless rewards. Take the courier missions in each city, they reward you with the asset giving you $2,000 max which fills over time. $2,000 is absolutely nothing. Most the assets in the game is like this. The home burglary missions add nothing to the game. You're so rich after finishing the story none of that matters. The collectables giving you weapons at the safe houses are kind of useful but again you're rich enough to just buy weapons. The collectables also have a timing trouble where they would have been more useful during the story but most players collect them all afterwards. Taxi/Firefighter/Pimp/Ambulance missions are all pretty much the same go from A to B shit with Firefighter being the only one that gives a decent reward. Ambulance gives you full health but you'd get that by just playing the game anyway. 37 SAFEHOUSES is way too much, but I assume this is because they couldn't implement a better way to save anywhere at the time. The girlfriends always annoyed me too. There is too many again. Should have just gave CJ 1 girlfriend and expanded her dialogue and actions. There's so much crap in this game I've been playing it since it came out and I only realized Duality was an arcade game like 3 years ago. Never seen that shit before then somehow.
>>12902249Yeah, I like San Andreas, but there's just way too much shit to do. I've never considered 100%-ing it despite having done so for 3 and VC multiple times.
>>12902249All that shit is optional, retard.
>>12902314He's not bitching about it being mandatory, he's bitching about the rewards for them being almost completely useless.
>being a contrarian makes me special. Right, mom?
>>12901170GTA isn't life sim
>>12901170Shenmue didn't let me run over niggers with a car and decapitate hookers with a katana.
>>12901170Shenmue's problem is that it's just not very fun to play, while GTA is fun.
>>12901157I liked it
>>12902369>>12902372Kek this. Turns out early 00s teenagers preferred playing as a badass criminal over life-simming as an autistic Japanese man working as a forklift operator.
>>12902314SA is also bloated in that it's overly tutorialized, the map is massive (and the latter half is markedly worse), and there is just too many boring, samey, easy missions. And those are not optional.
The biggest problem with GTA SA is that most missions are just you running and gunning around NPCs but the gunning isn't that greatNothing beats driving around though
>>12905840The strangest thing about the GTA franchise to me is just how persistent the bongjank continues to be despite the huge budgets. Like how have they still not figured out satisfying shooting mechanics?
>>12901157>The beginning of the end for GTA.I thought that was GTA V? Or more specifically, GTA Online.
>>12905845GTA is a stagnant IP. The games are just getting bigger, but not better. SA was the swansong to a now creatively dead franchise. Normies still love that because they have no taste and are fine with being fed the same thing again and again. (See cock in booty, Fifa, the 15th Skyrim and Witcher 3 port, etc) Typical consoomer cattle. 25 years after going 3D, rockstar never bothered developing the bones of their games. Mission structure, gameplay loop, coherence between the open world and the story. GTA online is the culmination of the sloppification of GTA. It's stripped down to the bones, only thing left is the turbomonetarised gameplay without the story.OP is absolutely right in saying that SA was the beginning of the end. It's the last game Rockstar tried to iterate on their formula somewhat, with gang wars, character customisation and the overambitious comparatively big open world.
GTA SA was all razzle dazzle. Had a bunch of novel shit which was mind blowing at the time, just in terms of novelty, but doesn't hold up without that context. 90% of the shit in that game is half-baked, useless bloat. The smaller scope was a disappointment at the time, but in hindsight I totally understand why GTA IV was so scaled down. I can go back to IV and have fun driving around and shooting people because the physics are that good, but going back to SA you really realize how mediocre the game is. These days, I also think that III is the best HD era game, just because it has the tightest design. R* kind of went the wrong direction with the series I think. They should have never chosen scale over substance, and instead focused on detail instead. Imagine San Andreas but contained to just Los Santos (and maybe some country side) but with actually good gameplay instead. And what's funny is that individually R* is quite capable of making mechanically solid games. The Warriors has a great combat system, Midnight Club has great driving, etc. Imagine if they actually put all of that into a GTA game, instead of the half-assed gameplay we got.
>>12905942IV had that "razzle-dazzle," too. Bowling, TV, darts, internet.But SA was the perfect drunk driving simulator for teenage me. It wasn't so much about the missions but about how freely I could play.Now that big, open-world games are common, it seems silly. But this was all relatively new then.Fallout 3 came out 4 years later and is still considered janky early open-world stuff.
>>12902318it's essentially infinite free money. the issue is you have to go around manually collecting all of it rather than it just depositing in your pocket or at least in one central location. I would've had it such that it all pools into one place in each city, like CJ's main base (Doherty Garage, Four Dragons, Johnson House). you only have to go to three places once a week.
>>12905845there aren't any good shooters on the PS2, and both 4 and 5 were solid third person shooters for the 7th gen systems. 5 was only weak on 8th gen because it was seriously outdated by that point.
>>12901167slash thread, though being rushed as fuck made it less tedious to replay from time to time
>>12905942>it's actually better to get less gameTypical IVfag. You're a big reason why the series and Rockstar games in general is dog shit now.
>>12906701By the end of the game, you already essentially have infinite money. If not, you can just gamble at the Four Dragons and savescum if you lose all your shit on roulette.I guess the idea was that the player would do these side missions in between story missions in a given location, but there's just no incentive to do so. Maybe the story missions give out too much money? I don't know, but almost none of the side content was very well thought out.
>>12905925>SA was the swansong to a now creatively dead franchiseI'd say GTA4 fits that a little better. It was a great upgrade from the previous in just about every way and had good story lines throughout. Downhill since and I expect GTA6 to be truly horrible given it has female designers and writers driving it.
>>12906718Retard.It's funny actually playing SA and seeing how delusional and nostalgia-blinded you retards are.If anything, SA is the casualization of classic GTA. Missions are much easier, much more railroaded, much more cinematic, the game constantly tutorializes and holds your hand, the RPG stat mechanics are basically pure fluff, the map is oversized and full of wasted space, and the game is full of bugs and jank.I can see if you like III and VC just due to their arcadey nature, but IV and V are basically a straight across the board improvement from SAIV just mogs the shit out of SA. GTA IV has>better story>better writing>better characters>better controls >better gunplay>better physics >better graphics/animations>much better draw distance/pop-in>better attention to detail>better driving and car handling>better car damage and deformation>much more intuitive driving controls (R2/L2 instead of X and O)>better police/wanted system >better radio>better side activities >much better dating system>better atmosphere>better world design and immersion>can fast travel with taxis instead of having to constantly drive from one end of the map to the other>can instantly restart missions via the phone>interiors can actually be entered in real-time instead of being segmented zones with loading screens>no RPG stat grinding bloat crap
>>12906738IV is not retro, but I honestly don't understand why it gets shat on so much. It's a really good game and really one of Rockstar North's best works. They put so much work into the details almost nobody noticed that they did away with that for GTA V. They poured their hearts and souls into it and almost nobody gave a shit.
>>12902318so unlock the stuff early when it's useful then. tuff like this in games enables you to do custom game runs and alternative playthrus
>>12906753I suppose there's creedance to that. Most players are still going to skip all of that shit, though.
>>12906729>it doesn't matter because you can just savescumearly in the game it matters if you haven't looked up where gun spawns are and you like customising cars.
>>12906772>gun spawnsyou have access to emmet in the early game who gives you weapons good enough for getting thru the first los santos chapter>customizing carsa completely useless mechanic outside of installing hydraulics for the first cesar missioni get it, SA had a lot of neat mechanics tacked on, but almost none of them serve any purpose outside of a handful of missions.
>>12906791>useless mechanicso is Emmet, and the gang clothes mechanic, and probably like 85% of the shit in the game in regards to just beating the story. why do you even play games, if you don't enjoy engaging with their mechanics?
ive always felt like less was more. 3 was the perfect size really. so much of the game was the wonder of the whole open world thing. after having my mind blown by 3 and spending so much time with it, i started to see it more as the individual gameplay systems, and i wasnt wowed by vice city and felt like a lot of things just felt and looked worse. i lost interest in sa around the second "island" or whatever and never finished it. im pretty much checked out of gta at this point although i will replay 3 again some time
>>12906804I didn't say that I didn't enjoy the mechanics, I only said that the vast majority of them are completely useless for the story (optional). They're fun and I'm glad they're in the game, but they could've been implemented in a much more thoughtful way. They threw so many things in without expanding upon them that all of the extra content felt rushed as hell.
>>12906812>less was moreThis is why 3 is my favorite of the trilogy. It's snappy and loose. Missions are open-ended and the story doesn't ever take the front seat over whatever the player decides to do. I also like the fact that you can beat it over the course of a day or two if you're dedicated enough. It's the perfect example of an open-world game that wastes absolutely none of your time if you don't want it to.
>>129068123 is a very fun game. I'm hoping someone puts the time in to make a deluxe version now that good tools exist for doing that in a big way. The core of the game works great so just use that but you can add all sorts of functionality. And fix the shooting mechanic.
>>12906738No.
>>12906729I actually did gamble away all of CJ's money by Las Venturas, just to see how my experience plays out differently by having to earn money for safehouses.The thing about GTA, to me in particular, is that it's kind of a roleplay game. Sure you can speedrun the missions, but I've already done that millions of times. Driving around is enough to tickle my fun when I've turned off the radar and blips.
>>12906745>honestly don't understand why it gets shat on so muchBecause it's so boring and Nico is so unlikeable
>>12906815and? imagine saying the side quests in an RPG are "useless for the story", or any non-meta car in a racing game is a waste of time to use. why are you only applying this standard to San Andreas?
>>12906738>better driving and car handlingMost unfun dogshit handling in any driving game. Thank God real cars handle nothing like IV's. They feel like boats more than cars.
