GTA V

[Cyrrex]

Trevor does some incredibly heinous shit in this game, and I'm not even at the second heist yet.

He does something unbelievable in pretty much the first minute of encountering him.  I was totally aghast and disgusted.  I mean, totally enjoyable within the context of what it was, but disgusting nonetheless.

[jakonovski]

You ain't seen nothing yet. I'm afraid of what happens if that goes for me too.

[Hoax]

Made me think of you guys:

One of GTA V's characters admits at the end of the game, "I'm getting too old for this nonsense." And you know what? I felt the same thing numerous times while playing GTA V, even though I continue to admire the hell out of much of what it accomplishes. So if I sound ambivalent, Niko, I think it's because I'm part of a generation of gamers who just realized we're no longer the intended audience of modern gaming's most iconic franchise. Three steps past that realization, of course, is anticipation of one's private, desperate hurtle into galactic heat death. I'm left wondering when I, or any of us, express a wish for GTA to grow up, what are we actually saying? What would it even mean for something like GTA to "grow up"? Our most satirically daring, adult-themed game is also our most defiantly puerile game. Maybe the biggest sin of the GTA games is the cheerful, spiteful way they rub our faces in what video games make us willing to do, in what video games are.

From here (Grantland)

[Malakili]

That was actually a pretty good read.

[Samwise]

Stop making me want to play this game and relive my youth, fuckers.

[Pezzle]

The author goes through a lot of effort to say he no longer enjoys that kind of game as much.  Lots of extra words in there. 

[Malakili]

The author goes through a lot of effort to say he no longer enjoys that kind of game as much.  Lots of extra words in there. 

 

[Pezzle]

 

[Mithas]

The author goes through a lot of effort to say he no longer enjoys that kind of game as much.  Lots of extra words in there. 

I think he needs to take a step back from video games and do something else for a while.

[Malakili]

The author goes through a lot of effort to say he no longer enjoys that kind of game as much.  Lots of extra words in there. 

I think he needs to take a step back from video games and do something else for a while.

Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't.  Write anything critical or thoughtful about video games and you're taking it too seriously.  Dismiss the hobby as a thing for kids, or a waste of time and you don't take gaming seriously enough.

[Mithas]

I don't think there is anything wrong with being critical or thoughtful. To me he just sounds tired.

[Velorath]

The author goes through a lot of effort to say he no longer enjoys that kind of game as much.  Lots of extra words in there. 

I think he needs to take a step back from video games and do something else for a while.

Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't.  Write anything critical or thoughtful about video games and you're taking it too seriously.  Dismiss the hobby as a thing for kids, or a waste of time and you don't take gaming seriously enough.

The article seemed to be more about himself than GTA. Also I find his view of the Niko as a character to be so drastically different from the one I have that the whole way his article is constructed kinda irritates me.

[Samwise]

It's not like Mario has "grown up," I don't know why it would be surprising that the GTA franchise is still more or less what it is.

[MisterNoisy]

That was actually a pretty good read.

I agree, but if I'm honest, I like the playable characters in V more than Niko, largely because they're better fleshed out.  Even Trevor has his motivations and moments, psycho that he is, while providing a narratively-appropriate avatar for players looking to just start shit and fuck with the game's systems.  It helps that he also gets the best lines/moments.  Trevor is the anti-Niko - you can go on a killing spree and do dumb shit as Trevor and it makes sense.

Also, Scooter Brother!

[Jeff Kelly]

I'm now nearly finished with GTA (had to continue playing after throwing $70 at this game).

Trevor keeps being a psychopath/sociopath. Kudos to the guy voicing him because he manages to make him a charming motherfucker. The author of GTA must know at least one pathological sociopath (maybe himself) because the portrait is pretty spot on. Charming, no morals, can fake empathy and is prone to violent outburst/psychotic breaks. I still don't want to play that character or spend any amount of time with him though. If my played time is any indication I've managed to only spend 30% of the time I've had on either Michael or Francis with Trevor and even that seems too much.

The worst part is that nothing they make Trevor do in the game has any story justification at all. They could have easily told nearly the same story without any of the 'controversial' stuff. He also doesn't serve as any kind of moral example or antagonist you're supposed to hate. They've given him too many wacky and funny bits for that. He's all over the place. One moment he's armchair philosopher lecturing others about morality and life, then he's tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, then he's channeling Urkel and funnily falling over or he changes into a Tarantino-esque bit-character that does doing wacky or brutal stuff. Oh and then he does something so despicably awful that you have to turn of the console while contemplating to call 911 on the writer's ass because he must clearly have issues.

I also don't get the direction and story telling in that game. They make you play a torture scene right out of the fantasy of a tea party member where you have to torture a guy of vaguely middle eastern descent because 'terrorism'. A scene that is not only utterly despicable but also very, very, very pointless. It serves no purpose whatsoever for the story except being 'out there' and isn't mentioned ever again. Oh and you only get Gold status on the mission when you use all of the different torture implements at least once without killing him in the process. It's not even that the guy has to be tortured because he is cartoonishly evil and refuses to tell you where the nuclear device is hidden in Los Santos (at least 24 had that kind of 'decency'), he is a normal guy that simply can't remember any details because he is frightened shitless by the CIA and FBI equivalents. All the torturing does is jogging his memory and the threat is literally something, something terrorism.

Yet by the time Trevor Philips has his fourth psychotic break and kills two people because they simply wanted him to leave their apartment (that's literally what happened) the game fades to black and 'spares' you to experience that. After killing half of San Andreas and having already seen countless despicable acts by the protagonists somehow a character psychotically killing two guys is too much for the player to see? Give me a fucking break.

The game also never ever gives you a choice. You HAVE to do that stuff, you have no alternative way or alternative story path where you could refuse to do that shit. You can't even switch to another character that is on the same mission so that the stuff you don't like happens off camera. The only other choice would be to turn off the game and not play it again. This is bad in a game that gives you so many choices if more superficial aspects are concerned (you can even choose how to answer your shrink)

So far Trevor has done the following:


Maybe I could live with that if the rest of the game was awesome.

It's a great achievement as far as the game design/level design/ world design is concerned. The world is huge and designed with great care, it looks great and it feels like a real state with lots of things going on. The designers obviously put a lot of work into building the world and the engine. It's a great technical achievement.

Apart from that it's just more of the same however. More cars, more boats, more planes, more clothes to buy, more activities to do, more missions, more side missions, more collectibles (175 items to collect/destroy), more car upgrades, more weapons, larger area, more characters to play more buildings to buy, a pretty pointless stock market etc.. It's basically GTA but lots more of it. With the exception of the three characters and the character switching though it never really goes beyond the GTA formula or adds anything new or exciting to it. It's also never as 'deep' or vast as for example Skyrim. The game also delivers its morals parody of american society and commentary on culture with a big blunt hammer and in a rather infantile way even more so than previous games did. Sublety is not the forte of GTA 5.

Worse, most of it doesn't feel like you're spending time in San Andreas instead it feels more like wasting time. As if Rockstar wanted to give the impression of the game being longer than it actually is. (You could easily play through the main story in ten to fifteen hours or spend two or three times that when you do all of the side stuff)

Yes you can play Golf or Tennis or race against the computer in cars, or in boats, you can parachute and run triathlons or play darts. But no minigame even approaches the depth of a Top Spin or Forza so you play a few times and then you move on. If you wanted the 100% completion achievement however you'd have to spent much time on each individual activity in order to beat all levels/opponents and this does feel like a chore and not like an achievement. I feel like the effort could have been spent on less stuff and instead they could have focused on making each individual thing better tan just throwing lots of stuff in there.

Finally the guy responsible for the plane and especially the helicopter controls should never be allowed anywhere near a game developer job ever again. Flying helicopters and planes  is the most frustrating part of the GTA 5.

[Bunk]

I admit the helicopter does seem to be remarkably wobbly.

I'm not very far through the storyline at this point because I do keep getting caught up in the side side stuff. As for how I'm playing it, I am surprised at how much more "civilized" I play in comparison to previous versions. I find myself intentionally avoiding pedestrians - perhaps its just the improved graphics? Feels a little too real. I actually felt shitty about shooting the damn coyotes for one of Trevor's early missions.

Still, sociopathic or not, I'm finding the game really fun. Even with as little as I've completed, its already obvious that they went out of the way to make sure you could be creative in how you get things done.

Oddly, the thing I've found that's bothering me the most so far - listening to a style of music that I've personally really never been exposed to. I've heard more utterances of the n word in five minutes of driving in this game than I had in the last several years of my life. It's weird. Maybe I'm just sheltered, but its disturbing.

[Jeff Kelly]

A quick heads up.

You won't have to pay any money for the garages and Trevor's Hangar and Helipad if you sign up to the Rockstar Social Club for GTA which will save you a couple of bucks

Don't bother to steal any high end cars and store them in those garages though. I don't know if it is a bug or if it's supposed to be that way but those cars will eventually just vanish. If the in game hint system is to be believed then you can store cars at those garages and use them and if the cars get lost you will be able to get it from the impound lot or it will reappear in your garage. At least that is what happens with stolen planes and helicopters.

As it stands I lost two completely tricked out cars already even though they have been stored at garages. I drove them to a mission and after the mission got finished they simply vanished. Also sometimes the car you drove will be replaced by the car you own, if the story needs it to be there instead. So I'd arrive in my tricked out $1,000,000 super car and it get's replaced with Trevor's old rust bucket after a cut scene.

The only major bug I encountered so far but since you can easily spend millions on cars and car upgrades you should be aware of that.

[Jeff Kelly]

I have now finished the game and most of my complaints still stand.

It's basically the only game purchase I regret to have made in the last few years with the exception of maybe Mass Effect 3 (but that at least was rather great up to the end) and I would have gotten a refund if that was at all possible.

I just have a few observations (I'll probably spend to long to talk about).

The heist idea is nice, the heists are pretty much the best part of the game and they also feel like the most work went into those missions. The 'leveling up' of goons is pointless though. Firstly because you won't earn any kind of real money for pretty much all of the heists except the first and the last one so the kind of cut they take is irrelevant. Secondly because by the time the final heist comes up you'll be swimming in money anyway. You have Lester's assassination missions plus one or two random encounters that give you guaranteed stock market events that each give you between a 50% to 100% payout. Getting a hundred million dollars per character just from those is easy if you play things right.

Lastly because all the mediocre or bad goons I took on heists died due to cut scenes or mission checkpoints you can't prevent. If you do for example exactly what Lester tells you to do for the Jewel Heist (subtle approach) and select the gun man with the lower cut (who is worse) then he will get killed and you will lose out on a third of the take. If you go with the bad hacker, you wont have enough time to get all of the jewels and the bad driver will select vehicles absolutely unsuitable for the job. The second time I took on a mediocre goon for a mission that 'shouldn't involve any opposition' he got killed by a cut scene explosion. Better team members on the other hand seem to survive such events. So I never managed to level up a bad goon, they either died or prevented me from taking a significant amount of money due to their incompetence.

GTA heavily relies on a trope and has for at least three games now that I learned to hate even more in GTA 5. 90% of the time the story finds a reason why you won't get paid for a mission. Either because your boss simply refuses to give you your pay, you need the money for a bigger heist or for some other convoluted story reason. I've basically done more unpaid work during the game than an intern at a big media company. The most ridiculous is probably the one where you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and several missions on a big heist and then the game makes you give the thing you stole back because 'story reasons'. It's either, 'I simply won't give you the agreed sum', 'you have to help me because we are friends/homies/ex lovers/family/I have dirt on you/we need to tie up loose ends', 'we need the money for a different thing' or 'sorry Michael the take is in another castle'.

The internal stock market should be a nice idea but it seems to be completely broken. You basically have two markets, an in game market that should respond to in game events and an 'online market' that should respond to things players do and is synched via the social club. For example ammu nation is a player influenced stock in the social club controlled market place so it should fluctuate as more people buy weapons and most other stores belong to the in game influenced markets so they should respond to in game events. The stock prices are updated every 30 seconds. So if you cause a lot of property damage or other types of damage the stock should go down and that of a rival company should go up. This doesn't seem to work at all right now. The internet is full of reports by players that don't seem to be able to influence the stock market at all while others apparently can.

The stocks don't even respond to basic market stimuli. I once spent all of the money I had on all three characters (more than 200 million dollars) and the amount of invested money didn't cause any price change at all. Most of the time the trend graphs displayed that should give you an idea how the stock behaved over the course of an in game week show an entirely different stock price and stock price history than what the game actually shows you when you check the actual price. Since you simply won't get all of the money you need to buy all the in game real estate just by doing missions (except if you exploit an in game mechanic that is) this is bad. You need more than $200,000,000 to buy everything. If you don't use exploits and min/max everything (when to take the missions that give you a guaranteed stock market event for example) you'll probably have less than $40,000,000 per character which won't even get you to buy everything except the $120,000,000 golf course and will exclude you from a number of side missions connected to those buildings.

[Jeff Kelly]

One of the last lines of the game is one of the characters talking about the bad effects of off shoring and outsourcing and a diatribe about how that 'ruins the US economy' and then the end credits spend minutes on telling you just exactly how many developers from China and India have worked on GTA. Without even the decency to list the actual work done or function instead just putting them all under 'additional work'.

A game that otherwise lists probably every person that has ever worked at Rockstar or Take 2 with his/her job title.

I assume that this is not the least bit hypocritical.

[Sky]

I'm now nearly finished with GTA (had to continue playing after throwing $70 at this game).

Trevor keeps being a psychopath/sociopath. Kudos to the guy voicing him because he manages to make him a charming motherfucker. The author of GTA must know at least one pathological sociopath (maybe himself) because the portrait is pretty spot on. Charming, no morals, can fake empathy and is prone to violent outburst/psychotic breaks. I still don't want to play that character or spend any amount of time with him though. If my played time is any indication I've managed to only spend 30% of the time I've had on either Michael or Francis with Trevor and even that seems too much.

The worst part is that nothing they make Trevor do in the game has any story justification at all. They could have easily told nearly the same story without any of the 'controversial' stuff. He also doesn't serve as any kind of moral example or antagonist you're supposed to hate. They've given him too many wacky and funny bits for that. He's all over the place. One moment he's armchair philosopher lecturing others about morality and life, then he's tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, then he's channeling Urkel and funnily falling over or he changes into a Tarantino-esque bit-character that does doing wacky or brutal stuff. Oh and then he does something so despicably awful that you have to turn of the console while contemplating to call 911 on the writer's ass because he must clearly have issues.

I also don't get the direction and story telling in that game. They make you play a torture scene right out of the fantasy of a tea party member where you have to torture a guy of vaguely middle eastern descent because 'terrorism'. A scene that is not only utterly despicable but also very, very, very pointless. It serves no purpose whatsoever for the story except being 'out there' and isn't mentioned ever again. Oh and you only get Gold status on the mission when you use all of the different torture implements at least once without killing him in the process. It's not even that the guy has to be tortured because he is cartoonishly evil and refuses to tell you where the nuclear device is hidden in Los Santos (at least 24 had that kind of 'decency'), he is a normal guy that simply can't remember any details because he is frightened shitless by the CIA and FBI equivalents. All the torturing does is jogging his memory and the threat is literally something, something terrorism.

Yet by the time Trevor Philips has his fourth psychotic break and kills two people because they simply wanted him to leave their apartment (that's literally what happened) the game fades to black and 'spares' you to experience that. After killing half of San Andreas and having already seen countless despicable acts by the protagonists somehow a character psychotically killing two guys is too much for the player to see? Give me a fucking break.

The game also never ever gives you a choice. You HAVE to do that stuff, you have no alternative way or alternative story path where you could refuse to do that shit. You can't even switch to another character that is on the same mission so that the stuff you don't like happens off camera. The only other choice would be to turn off the game and not play it again. This is bad in a game that gives you so many choices if more superficial aspects are concerned (you can even choose how to answer your shrink)

So far Trevor has done the following:


Maybe I could live with that if the rest of the game was awesome.

It's a great achievement as far as the game design/level design/ world design is concerned. The world is huge and designed with great care, it looks great and it feels like a real state with lots of things going on. The designers obviously put a lot of work into building the world and the engine. It's a great technical achievement.

Apart from that it's just more of the same however. More cars, more boats, more planes, more clothes to buy, more activities to do, more missions, more side missions, more collectibles (175 items to collect/destroy), more car upgrades, more weapons, larger area, more characters to play more buildings to buy, a pretty pointless stock market etc.. It's basically GTA but lots more of it. With the exception of the three characters and the character switching though it never really goes beyond the GTA formula or adds anything new or exciting to it. It's also never as 'deep' or vast as for example Skyrim. The game also delivers its morals parody of american society and commentary on culture with a big blunt hammer and in a rather infantile way even more so than previous games did. Sublety is not the forte of GTA 5.

Worse, most of it doesn't feel like you're spending time in San Andreas instead it feels more like wasting time. As if Rockstar wanted to give the impression of the game being longer than it actually is. (You could easily play through the main story in ten to fifteen hours or spend two or three times that when you do all of the side stuff)

Yes you can play Golf or Tennis or race against the computer in cars, or in boats, you can parachute and run triathlons or play darts. But no minigame even approaches the depth of a Top Spin or Forza so you play a few times and then you move on. If you wanted the 100% completion achievement however you'd have to spent much time on each individual activity in order to beat all levels/opponents and this does feel like a chore and not like an achievement. I feel like the effort could have been spent on less stuff and instead they could have focused on making each individual thing better tan just throwing lots of stuff in there.

Finally the guy responsible for the plane and especially the helicopter controls should never be allowed anywhere near a game developer job ever again. Flying helicopters and planes  is the most frustrating part of the GTA 5.

A quick heads up.

You won't have to pay any money for the garages and Trevor's Hangar and Helipad if you sign up to the Rockstar Social Club for GTA which will save you a couple of bucks

Don't bother to steal any high end cars and store them in those garages though. I don't know if it is a bug or if it's supposed to be that way but those cars will eventually just vanish. If the in game hint system is to be believed then you can store cars at those garages and use them and if the cars get lost you will be able to get it from the impound lot or it will reappear in your garage. At least that is what happens with stolen planes and helicopters.

As it stands I lost two completely tricked out cars already even though they have been stored at garages. I drove them to a mission and after the mission got finished they simply vanished. Also sometimes the car you drove will be replaced by the car you own, if the story needs it to be there instead. So I'd arrive in my tricked out $1,000,000 super car and it get's replaced with Trevor's old rust bucket after a cut scene.

The only major bug I encountered so far but since you can easily spend millions on cars and car upgrades you should be aware of that.

I have now finished the game and most of my complaints still stand.

It's basically the only game purchase I regret to have made in the last few years with the exception of maybe Mass Effect 3 (but that at least was rather great up to the end) and I would have gotten a refund if that was at all possible.

I just have a few observations (I'll probably spend to long to talk about).

The heist idea is nice, the heists are pretty much the best part of the game and they also feel like the most work went into those missions. The 'leveling up' of goons is pointless though. Firstly because you won't earn any kind of real money for pretty much all of the heists except the first and the last one so the kind of cut they take is irrelevant. Secondly because by the time the final heist comes up you'll be swimming in money anyway. You have Lester's assassination missions plus one or two random encounters that give you guaranteed stock market events that each give you between a 50% to 100% payout. Getting a hundred million dollars per character just from those is easy if you play things right.

Lastly because all the mediocre or bad goons I took on heists died due to cut scenes or mission checkpoints you can't prevent. If you do for example exactly what Lester tells you to do for the Jewel Heist (subtle approach) and select the gun man with the lower cut (who is worse) then he will get killed and you will lose out on a third of the take. If you go with the bad hacker, you wont have enough time to get all of the jewels and the bad driver will select vehicles absolutely unsuitable for the job. The second time I took on a mediocre goon for a mission that 'shouldn't involve any opposition' he got killed by a cut scene explosion. Better team members on the other hand seem to survive such events. So I never managed to level up a bad goon, they either died or prevented me from taking a significant amount of money due to their incompetence.

GTA heavily relies on a trope and has for at least three games now that I learned to hate even more in GTA 5. 90% of the time the story finds a reason why you won't get paid for a mission. Either because your boss simply refuses to give you your pay, you need the money for a bigger heist or for some other convoluted story reason. I've basically done more unpaid work during the game than an intern at a big media company. The most ridiculous is probably the one where you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and several missions on a big heist and then the game makes you give the thing you stole back because 'story reasons'. It's either, 'I simply won't give you the agreed sum', 'you have to help me because we are friends/homies/ex lovers/family/I have dirt on you/we need to tie up loose ends', 'we need the money for a different thing' or 'sorry Michael the take is in another castle'.

The internal stock market should be a nice idea but it seems to be completely broken. You basically have two markets, an in game market that should respond to in game events and an 'online market' that should respond to things players do and is synched via the social club. For example ammu nation is a player influenced stock in the social club controlled market place so it should fluctuate as more people buy weapons and most other stores belong to the in game influenced markets so they should respond to in game events. The stock prices are updated every 30 seconds. So if you cause a lot of property damage or other types of damage the stock should go down and that of a rival company should go up. This doesn't seem to work at all right now. The internet is full of reports by players that don't seem to be able to influence the stock market at all while others apparently can.

The stocks don't even respond to basic market stimuli. I once spent all of the money I had on all three characters (more than 200 million dollars) and the amount of invested money didn't cause any price change at all. Most of the time the trend graphs displayed that should give you an idea how the stock behaved over the course of an in game week show an entirely different stock price and stock price history than what the game actually shows you when you check the actual price. Since you simply won't get all of the money you need to buy all the in game real estate just by doing missions (except if you exploit an in game mechanic that is) this is bad. You need more than $200,000,000 to buy everything. If you don't use exploits and min/max everything (when to take the missions that give you a guaranteed stock market event for example) you'll probably have less than $40,000,000 per character which won't even get you to buy everything except the $120,000,000 golf course and will exclude you from a number of side missions connected to those buildings.

One of the last lines of the game is one of the characters talking about the bad effects of off shoring and outsourcing and a diatribe about how that 'ruins the US economy' and then the end credits spend minutes on telling you just exactly how many developers from China and India have worked on GTA. Without even the decency to list the actual work done or function instead just putting them all under 'additional work'.

A game that otherwise lists probably every person that has ever worked at Rockstar or Take 2 with his/her job title.

I assume that this is not the least bit hypocritical.

Psycho.

[Azazel]

Trevor does some incredibly heinous shit in this game, and I'm not even at the second heist yet.

He does something unbelievable in pretty much the first minute of encountering him.  I was totally aghast and disgusted.  I mean, totally enjoyable within the context of what it was, but disgusting nonetheless.

That was a real WTF scene for me as well.

Then again, I agree that Trev is a psychopath with few redeeming qualities in terms of stability - then again, he's the "free pass" character in the game. And yeah, Franklin is a bit of a dumbass, but then again, it's not like Michael is any kind of paragon of virtue, either. He has no problems gunning down anyone in his way who are just doing their jobs. It's a sense of false moral equivalency that people try to give themselves when playing a GTA or GTA-alike game like Saints Row. You're the bad guy. Period. That you can relate a bit better to Mike than to Frank or Trev is really of little consequence when you get up to what you get up to in the game. But then again, you and we all should know what we're getting into when we play a game called Grand Theft Auto in 2013.

Story justification? He's a psycho and a sociopath. He acts impulsively and doesn't give a fuck. There's people like that out there. Call 911 on the writer's arse? Really? ow many thousands of people have you personally brutally murdered or killed in cold or hot blood in your videogaming lifetime? Every one of those mooks in Call of WolfenBattlefield theoretically has a backstory. Hell, you're German! You know how National Service works, and indeed, worked in 1943.

Point being, that GTA is not a nice game for nice people who want to be nice to other people while doing nice things. You knew that coming in. I don't have any interest in American Football, so I don't buy Madden.

Anyway, regarding more legit (in my eyes) complaints - first some background:

I played GTA3, VC and SA on PC, so I had M+KB controls through all of the "last-gen" GTA games. I finished 3 and VC, and almost finished SA, except it was essentially too big, and I may or may not have been unable to pass one of the stupid airfield missions in outside the third (Las Vegas) city. I can't even recall if it was an optional mission. Either way, I put the game down for a long time, and then the PC I was playing it on died, so a restart wasn't an option, especially with other games like WoW in rotation.  I played less than an hour in total of GTA4 complete on 360, but didn't like the controls, and it was a bit dull. I mostly watched Bas Rutten on the TV for that time, anyway. I have played a shitton of Saints Row 1-3 on 360, however. (Haven't played SR4 yet - I'm pissed off about the nerfing to the Aussie content that means I can't play online with my homebros like Sky).

So anyway -
Shooting while driving is indeed arse. Really bad. SR3 did it a lot better.
Shooting/combat on-foot controls aren't very good either. SR3 did it a lot better.
There's a known bug around fixing up cars, including your own car. Making the whole automotive sub-game a waste of time. SR3 did it a lot better.

Those are my main problems. Everything else so far is decent, and I'm enjoying the story and messing around. I almost-unconsciously role-play the way I act depending on the character I'm playing. Franklin spends a lot of time driving over jumps and in the strip club (boo to only 1 small club!), Mike drives a bit more conservatively but is pretty much all "business" and Trevor runs over pedestrians if they're in (or near) his way and murders people who come after him for a fender-bender. The city is indeed huge and hand-crafted, but since you can't interact with most of it, despite traffic and pedestrians being everywhere, it seems very empty in a way that reminds me of RDR. I'm not worried about non-payment for missions and so forth since it's a sandbox game with a story attached. I may as well get upset when 3/4 of my way through a FPS they strip me of all my uber weapons for a level or two when I get captured.

I'm enjoying it so far, and looking forward to the online component in a couple of days.

[jakonovski]

Oh man, I'm loving the crap out of GTAV, so I can't read any of the stuff you guys are writing yet. But it sure looks interesting. Must play more so I can comment.

[Yegolev]

But it sure looks interesting.

It's totally not.

[Surlyboi]

Played online for roughly 10 minutes before someone that I had been auto grouped with for a heist intentionally ran me over with the getaway car.

I predict this devolving quickly.

[Samwise]

That sounds about right.

[Paelos]

Played online for roughly 10 minutes before someone that I had been auto grouped with for a heist intentionally ran me over with the getaway car.

I predict this devolving quickly.

I smell a radicalthon...

[CmdrSlack]

If anyone on 360 wants to attempt online play, then I will figure out how to make my headset work with the 360. The one that came with the console fell prey to cats and a small child moments after unboxing.

[Surlyboi]

If you need one, I've got a spare.

[Azazel]

I'm in. Well, once it stops being unplayable.

I can't even get the first race to launch so far. Shame they went with a fucking mandatory tutorial mission rather then just splitting us off to roam the open world.

[Surlyboi]

I lost that first race. Underestimated a turn at speed, jumped the divider and ended up on the 405. Fuckin' Los Angeles Santos

[Trouble]

Public enemy No. 1
Despite the increasing controversy surrounding the series,GTA V’s launch on Sept. 17 was the most successful of any entertainment property in history, passing $1 billion of sales in just three days.

Seriously?

[Paelos]

Good thing I own stock in TTWO. 

Possibly time to sell.

[Bunk]

Eventually figured out that if you enter the game in Story mode and then switch to Online, you get can do the initial race "solo" just against Lamar.
After that I was able to run around town for a while with other people. Managed to buy clothes and a gun. Went in to a store to rob it - and was quickly gunned down by another player for the money. So very MMOish.

I'll be up for some XBox MP once they get the servers to stabilize a bit.

[MisterNoisy]

Took about 8 or so tries to get past the matchmaking for that first race - making that a mandatory matchmaking event instead of just you vs Lamar and then dropping you into a random free-roam was a huge fuckup - once I got past that first blue halo, everything was great.  The random group I had was pretty low-key all things considered - even had some guy just sit in the car patiently while I crept around alleys with the headlights off to drop a wanted level after a liquor store holdup.  After a bit of playing in that free-roam, I set up an invite only lobby and wandered around solo for a while and did the odd holdup or five for some cash and sold a car to LSC (ownership not necessary, but there's a cooldown on it to keep you from just doing that all day).

You can move money from cash to the bank using your phone, and if what I've read is correct, you can't lose that to someone ganking you (not so sure about the hospital bills, though).

I'd be game for playing on 360 if anyone else is on (and the servers aren't crapping themselves) - mebbe set up an F13 crew (that lasts a week  )?.

[Surlyboi]

Some other asshole saw fit to run me over while I was running a mission. So, I stole a moving truck, T-boned him against a wall preventing him from getting out and then shot him in the face.