GTA Online was a thing that made perfect sense, something that people understandably wanted, something just a bit more structured than GTA IV's. GTA IV had freeplay, which devolved to people killing cops together, picking up weapons, stealing cars, just the very base, simplistic things that make GTA fun. Killing things with different weapons you can pick up, driving cars you can steal. The fun comes in the hi-jinx that you and other players create, as well as enjoying the fun possible to create with the game's boundaries. What are the restrictions in playing? Well, you can't go bowling, but I can't honestly say that's a limit in the sense that mechanical pencils limit you to not sticking them into a pencil sharpener. What I'm saying is that the things it took from you weren't preventing you from doing what you would (most likely) want to do in such a game, just as a mechanical pencil lets you complete the desire of writing. Why do I say this?
If I were to describe GTAO, in a word, it would be restrictive. Or it would be grinding. What is grinding? Grinding is the padding of gameplay with useless, boring tasks to unlock abilities, or other fun things. Grinding is not fun. Nobody should really build a game around grinding. Then your game is a Skinner Box and people don't play it for fun, they play it to be told they accomplished something. Which they didn't. Because it's grinding. It's not hard, it's boring and tedious. Nobody's gonna be impressed if you cut down a tree with floss, no matter how much you brag about it.
Blasphemy! Heresy! How can such a thing be said!? I'll explain my position articulated with where I am in the game. I have quite some hours into GTAO and am level 28. I have a house, two motorcycles and a bicycle in my garage. I have a few guns, just small arms and an assault rifle, nothing big or flashy and at the same time, nothing FUN. No rocket launcher, no sniper rifle, no sticky bombs. Why, you ask? Well, some items are locked off until you reach a certain level, and others are just too bloody expensive to have to purchase and constantly refill ammo for. "Now Calvin," I hear you say, "you can get money AND experience for leveling up at the same time by doing jobs, races or other activities!" Yeah, and you know the problem with that? They all suck. Well, that's unfair, they don't all suck, but most of the ones I've played certainly do. To purchase upgrades for personal vehicles, you have to win races with those vehicles, so why do any other races when they don't help you get your wheels upgraded? I just have to do more races! And frankly, I don't play GTA to race, I play it to make pedestrians into the fillings of my vehicle and building sandwich. So down go the races as a fun alternative.
Yeeaah, I love riding on jet skis then getting gunned down. I'm having fun already.
Deathmatches are just hideous. Max Payne 3 is a shooter with shooter mechanics. GTAO is like trying to shoot moving ducks in a carnival while you're strafing on a segway. They just aren't fitting for a larger scale gunfight especially when you're constantly getting flanked, or being killed by bigger, better weapons because you couldn't make the money to purchase good weapons and ammo because you're stuck trying to get money through deathmatches and you can't because your weapons all suck and have no ammo and you can't get better ones because ARGH!
It's also important to mention the survival mode, which is 10 waves of horde-like gameplay. "If you make it to the end, you get $20,000!" the game says enthusiastically. Yeah, what does it require from me to make it to such a level? "Well, err... You're gonna have to play it safe near the later rounds to make sure nobody dies-" Wait, why is that? "Well, the higher the level, the more enemies there are and the harder they are to kill! And helicopters!" So yeah. Survival devolves to you and buddies hanging out in a spot waiting for the AI to path to you, which they usually won't. Then you'll walk out to find someone to kill and instantly die. They always have better aim than you AND more people than you. Playing it safe takes around 2 hours for $20,000. Does that sound good? Well, it shouldn't when a race can give like $5000 for 5 minutes AND the fast cars you want cost upwards to $650,000 with upgrades up to $25,000. Survival is a test in patience, waiting in tedium. Because that's what I want in my Grand Theft Auto game.
Finally, the jobs. Let's take a look at the jobs. Briefly. I've done some jobs, some missions. I have not done a single mission that didn't follow this format:
1. Go to a place
1. Go to a place
2. Kill people there
3. Pick up item
4. Return item to place
5. During drive back, people will drive towards you and try to kill you.
6. Kill some of them, return product.
EVERY SINGLE MISSION I'VE DONE followed this EXACT same format. And yeah, if some of the later ones deviate from the format, excellent, but I didn't get that far. And I don't want to. If my incentive to slog through shit is to have fun, why can't you just remove the shit? Why can't you just have a fun game, huh? It's necessary to start with awful, boring things that people hate? You shouldn't have to bank on the silliness of your friends to make the jobs fun.
Now, I forgot to talk about the character creation, which needs only brief mention.
This is EASILY the stupidest way to create a character. How many times have you created a character and thought, "I want to do this less directly. How about instead if directly picking faces, body type, size, and the basic body things AS WELL AS picking clothes for your character, I'd much rather do this more indirectly by picking 4 grandparents, then adjusting resemblances." Probably zero times because you're sensible. And then you can allocate time per day in doing activities which does something, I have no idea what. Thanks for the direction game. Now I know.
Seriously, can anyone tells me what this does?
Now with all of this, it's very easy to make the wild assumption that I hate this completely and prefer GTA IV over it in every way. That's just not true. I do enjoy it, just terribly disappointed with how Rockstar had arranged this. Why close off the fun things? Why make people grind for fun weapons and vehicles ESPECIALLY when other players can kill you over and OVER AND OVER.
This is not how you make a fun game. I understand the need for progression, as a multiplayer mode that gives you everything (see: Just Cause 2) can get boring and lose its fun after some point. But at the same time, the fun in multiplayer ESPECIALLY in sandbox games is creating fun with friends or other people and then destroying shit together. Give us some freedom, Rockstar. How about this, let us create a private game (which is already annoying as it is because you have to create it from story mode), then let us set a bunch of options, give us money, give us the option to buy whatever, let us mess with cops. Restricting us in a GTA game makes us not want to continue on especially when we get our shit pushed in by random players. We don't want to get to that level to exact revenge, we'll just quit and play a more fun game.
Bottom line, this could have been great. As it is, it's annoying. I can still have fun, because friends can make things fun, and given vehicles and high places, fun things can be formed. But it could be so much more. Making money annoying to get and having to grind for levels is bad. And it's obvious, they want us to circumvent the annoyance of that by buying money with real money, but that's dirty, Rockstar. And hey, where are the heists?
4/10
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