Like many of the millions of Americans who got Grand Theft Auto V on or soon after its Sept. 17 release, I spent much of that first weekend in Los Santos, the gameâs fictional mega-metropolis. Having bought, binged on, and beaten the game, I can mouth my own oohs and ahs.
Itâs bigger and better-looking than any of its predecessors. Itâs better-written, less tonally dissonant, and more engaging than Grand Theft Auto IV. And it does a bit more than the typical big-budget sequel to shake up the seriesâmoney-minting formula, primarily by giving the player the ability to switch between three characters. Youâd be hard-pressed to get more game out of any release that doesnât require a monthly subscription.
So it was confusing, at first, to discover that for all the enjoyable hours I spent on it, GTA V left me feeling unfulfilled. It was immersive enoughâwhen I took a walk outside to reacquaint myself with the weekday world, I was disappointed to find that I couldnât hijack the helicopter parked a few blocks from my building. But for me, at least, the experience was missing something. And eventually, I realized what it was.
I wanted it to be a little less forgiving.
Thatâs not a backdoor brag about how great I am at video games. At best, Iâm no better than the typical player who sank a considerable number of his adolescent hours into the franchiseâanyone who watched me crash my car into parked vehicles from one end of Los Santos to the other can testify to that. Over the course of the 30 hours it took to complete the main story, plus some side missions and excursions into the countryside, I was flattened by a semi-trailer truck as I wandered obliviously across a freeway, sliced to pieces by the rotor of a helicopter I had just jumped out of, and thrown through a windshield after colliding with one of the countless objects that got between where my car was and where I intended it to be. The game did a decent job of reminding me that I wasnât immortal.
So itâs not that I needed more bad guys or bullets. Itâs that I wanted some stakes. And itâs hard to have high stakes when failure has as few consequences as it does in GTA V
Balance is one of the toughest tasks of a video game designerâs toughest. Make a game too easy, and players will be bored by it or waltz through it without thinking. Make it too hard, and while you might attract some sadistic gamers in search of the next bullet-hell shoot-em-up ike Ikaruga, youâll risk driving off casual players who arenât into beating games for the bragging rights.
But there is a sweet spot where upping the challenge encourages the player to get more creative and, crucially, feel some suspense or emotional attachment. XCOM: Enemy Unknown, one of 2012âs top titles, allowed the player to customize and upgrade the abilities of each of the squad members under his or her command. When one of those squad members was killed, that death couldnât be undone (short of resetting the system). As Luke Plunkett put it in the Kotaku review, âThe feeling of loss once a veteran, beloved soldier goes down is crushing. In a good way. Not many games will take your best toys away from you so swiftly and so permanently, and so not many games really force you to look after them and appreciate them as well.â
GTA V will make you laugh (thanks particularly to Trevor, one of the seriesâ most compelling protagonists), and it will eat up as many hours as you have to offer it. But it wonât take your toys away. And since it wonât take them away, it canât make you miss them.
One of Grand Theft Auto Vâs most welcome qualities is that it doesnât insert speed bumps to ease you in. The early hours of previous GTA titles were a tease, tasking you with a series of mundane tasks, forcing you to make do with melee weapons and handguns, and limiting you to a relatively small section of the map until youâd done enough to unlock other areas. The scope of GTA Vâs missions expands quickly, and the gameâs entire territory is unlocked almost immediately.
But thereâs a downside to GTA Vâs willingness to take off the training wheels so soon: youâll never need money (or anything else, for that matter). Several hours into the game, you pull off the first of several elaborate heists, each of which provides a pretty big payday. After that point in my playthrough, I always felt flush.
Nor did frequent run-ins with the law detract from that sense of security. When youâre arrested in a Grand Theft Auto game, you lose your weapons. Thatâs a real nuisance; not only do you have to take a trip to the store to rearm, but depending on how large a stockpile youâve assembled, youâll have to pay a hefty price.
But based on my experience, itâs almost impossible to be busted in GTA V. In fact, I finished the game without having it happen once. The tactics of GTA Vâs police force escalate quickly; whereas the cops in earlier GTA games tried to bring you to justice unless youâd been really bad, theyâll now use lethal force for a minor offense. Either you elude them, or you end up dead.
In GTA V, itâs usually better to die than to be arrested.
That sounds like it should make things more difficult. In practice, it has the opposite effect: in GTA, itâs usually better to die than to be arrested. When youâre âwastedâ while roaming around Los Santos, you donât lose your weapons, as you did in the games before GTA IVâthe cops are kind enough to pack your arsenal into the ambulance. Youâll lose a little money, but not so much that youâll notice after you have a heist under your belt. At worst, youâre out a few minutes of driving from the hospital to wherever you were before you bled out. Dying is merely a minor annoyance when you wake up with the same assault rifle, sniper rifle, and RPG you took to the grave.
The result is that thereâs never any real sense of urgency, no point where youâre crushing the controller out of need to see someone survive. Compounding this problem is that thereâs a smaller penalty than ever for failing a mission or dying during one. In previous games, failing a mission meant making your way back to the starting point and taking it from the top. In GTA V, even short missions have multiple checkpoints at which you can respawn and try, try again, brute forcing your way to success (you can also quick save at any time, and even skip missions after failing them a few times).
Checkpoints do take away some repetition and tedium, and thereâs so much to see in Los Santos that every second saved can be put to good use. But theyâre distributed so liberally that thereâs no incentive to treat characters as anything other than cannon fodder. And how closely can you identify with someone youâre so willing to sacrifice?
Another nitpick: GTA Vâs easy access to cash and low value on life do the titleâs incredible array of extracurricular activities and gameplay mechanics a disservice. Los Santos is full of non-essential side jobs, most of which are ways to make money. You can, say, speculate on the stock market or buy properties that yield weekly takes. But I wonder whether players would have been more drawn to those activitiesâand more driven to explore off the beaten pathâhad cash been harder to come by. As it is, itâs easy to get through the game without them. Thereâs more to do, and less reason to do it.
Similarly, each of the three central characters has his own assortment of attributes that can be upgraded as the game goes on; theoretically, at least, one is best suited for driving, another for flying, another for shooting, and so on. This wrinkle could have added an extra layer of strategy to the multiple-character missions, had more of them pushed the player to exploit any edge. But aside from a few special circumstancesâTrevor isnât much for triathlonsâyou probably wonât notice the difference. On many of my missions, the designated getaway driver rode shotgun, and I didnât die. Or if I did, I donât remember.
As large as Los Santos is, GTA V offers a series of mostly linear missions set inside an open-world game. You can take as much time as you want to explore the environment when youâre not advancing the story. But once the mission cutscene starts, youâre more or less locked in. On-screen text gives you a goal, glowing circles on the radar and on the ground tell you where the target is, and a glowing line tells you what path to take.
Oh, so thatâs what Iâm supposed to do with this vehicle that was designed to drill holes in things.
Occasionally, there are multiple ways to achieve an objective, but the game rarely encourages that kind of creativity. One mission, âThe Construction Site,â asks you to assassinate a target on top of a building. The HUD directs you to shoot your way past some thugs, take an elevator up, blow away more guards, and take another elevator to the top.
As I found out when I replayed it later, there are other options; you can, for instance, take a helicopter to the top, or even land on a nearby building and shoot the target from there. But thereâs no on-screen indication that youâre allowed to deviate from the script. Would it have been so bad if the instructions stopped at âAssassinate the targetâ and allowed the playerâby that point, an accomplished killerâto arrange the rest?
At its most pulse-pounding, GTA V made me forget these complaints. One of the gameâs most exciting missions, âCaida Libre,â involves a headlong dirtbike descent down a mountain in the wake of a crash-landing plane. Deep down, itâs as linear as any other missionâthe plane comes to a stop in at the same spot every timeâbut at least the lack of choice is well disguised. For once, thereâs no destination marker pointing you toward a particular place. Thereâs no road to follow. It feels like freedom.
But compare even âCaida Libreâ to a mission like âArms Shortageâ from GTA III. Itâs a simple setup: go to Philâs Army Surplus, and defend it from the Colombian Cartel. The specifics, though, were left to the player, and there were any number of ways to prepare. Rocket launchers were prohibitively expensive, but if you didnât come up with some strategyâbarricade the entrance, use a car to climb on to the boxes, etc.âyou probably wouldnât make it out alive. And if you died, you had some driving (and shopping) to do, which gave you the opportunity and desire to do something different instead of recycling the same approach until you beat it by attrition.
At the risk of sounding regressive, a GTA V mission like âBlitz Playâ might have benefited from an injection of GTA IIIâs pioneer spirit. In theory, itâs an exciting armored car heist, but in practice, itâs such a play-by-numbers exercise in following Rockstarâs instructions that I half-expected Fi to pop out and tell me my odds of success. Steal a garbage truck. Park it in a particular location (âAcross both lanes, remember.â). Watch a cutscene triggered only by positioning the truck perfectly, then ram the armored car with another vehicle that you canât even control aside from pressing the accelerator. You feel more like a passive observer than an active participant, and the ensuing score comes without any sense of accomplishment.
The downside of GTA IIIâs open-ended instructions was, once in a while, not knowing what to do. But in a sandbox game, especially, occasional confusion is better than constant certainty. Pair the technical brilliance of the GTA V engine with an âArms Shortageâ-esque chance to make your own memorable momentsâinstead of laying everything out in pursuit of the spectacular setpieceâand youâd have something special.
Much has been made of the planning that takes place prior to heists like âBlitz Play,â but little of it is left to the player. You get a choice between two predetermined routesâguns-blazing or stealthyâand can select some of the non-player characters who accompany you. The choice of NPCs comes down to their cuts of the loot, and since you never need money, thereâs no reason not to recruit the best available option. Some missions are memorable because of the exciting setupâstealing a train, hijacking a jet, robbing a bank, etc.âbut most leave little room for improvisation, and the high-concept scenarios arenât worth the price of player agency. You wonât want to tell your friends how you went about beating them. Theyâll all have the same story.
While fleeing the scene of the crime in one of GTA Vâs climactic missions, I drove off a bridge with police in pursuit. For a moment, the speed of the chase gave way to a serendipitous, slow-motion tumble through a stunt jump, and then a clean getaway.
It was one of those signature GTA moments that arises organically when the action intensifies and the outcome of a mission hangs in the balance. Under those circumstances, pressure should mount, and success should mean more. But in this case, it didnât much matter how the cop cars came down. In case of a bad bounce, the game had made me a handy checkpoint a minute before.
Although itâs doing just fine financially, the GTA user experience suffers somewhat from the franchiseâs success, and the success of the clones and homages itâs inspired. Today, thereâs no thrill in taking taxi fares, which felt fresh when GTA III jumpstarted the sandbox gaming craze 12 years ago. The satire is still clever, but its objects are the same, and other series have since surpassed its shock value. In many ways, GTA V is better than its predecessors, but barring a boundary-pushing reinventionâand why mess with a profitable thing?âno GTA sequel feels as special as your first.
GTA Vâs ease makes it more accessible to the masses of people playing it. But that accessibility comes at a cost. The serieshas so far stuck to a one-size-all difficulty setting; maybe itâs time to consider a tiered system, with options for stiffer punishments for failure, fewer financial windfalls, less hand-holding, and free aim by default. (The current default auto-aim system makes downing enemy choppers a cinch and turns every firefight into a formulaic affair.) Or maybe a mission failure could make an impact on the plot.
My desire for consequences doesnât stem from nostalgia or electronic elitism: gamers have grown up, and many of them donât have time to beat their heads against Battletoads. Games getting easier doesnât have to be bad. Itâs just that sometimes, erecting obstacles makes an outcome more earned.
People donât play Grand Theft Auto for the realism. So it might seem counterintuitive to suggest that a game based on offering the player unlimited license to create chaos could benefit from a few roadblocks and a little more left brain. But if making mayhem in Los Santos came at an increased cost, it might produce a deeper connection.
Ben Lindbergh is the editor-in-chief of Baseball Prospectus, a contributor to Grantland, and the co-host of a daily podcast about baseball, a sport that would be better with robots. You can tell him on Twitter why whatever he wrote was wrong.
