toblix

GTA V

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Saying that, they managed a good balance with Red Dead Redemption, I thought... and I do think there's massive room for improvement, given how their model provides so much space to tell a truly gripping story.

Rockstar: Get a decent screenwriter to come in and do a great job, instead of giving it all to Dan Houser and that awful DJ.

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There was still some strong tension between storytelling and mechanics in RDR. Most notably, the dueling mechanics allows you to end duels non-violently by disarming the enemy (and shooting off his hat for style points). However, this feature is arbitrarily disabled without informing the player for several story-related duels. Similarly, you can lasso and hogtie enemies to dispatch of them nonviolently, but not all story-related enemies can be hogtied (

At least one of your old gang could be, which was awesome, but not the norm

), and I think there were a few sections which wouldn't let the player continue without explicitly killing all enemies. Out of the blue in a cutscene, Marston also kills

three Mexican rabble-rousers for trying to extort money out of him

, which was quite dissonant with the way I was attempting to play. Still, the presence of non-violent means makes this dissonance loads better than the GTA games.

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The story was good, as were the characters. The fact that you become a murdering bastard in the missions themselves is a problem with the game itself. I'd prefer to have a well-rounded character, than having a homicidal maniac just so he stayed "in character" during missions.

It was not a case of ludo-narrative dissonance. The cutscenes were quite resonant with the gameplay.

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It was not a case of ludo-narrative dissonance. The cutscenes were quite resonant with the gameplay.

But not with the character's journey, which appears to be your primary complaint.

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But not with the character's journey, which appears to be your primary complaint.

Hmm, I might give you that point, don't remember it that well. Still, I'll stick to my opinion that the story wasn't very good. Parts of it may have been good, but not when taken as a whole.

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Word on the street is this is a casting announcement for GTA V. The descriptions sound very GTA-like.

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Word on the street is this is a casting announcement for GTA V. The descriptions sound very GTA-like.
Eddie:

47 – Weed evangelist, guy who started smoking at 30, and is now a leading proponent of marijuana's fantastic properties. White, awkward.

"Cousin, it is your cousin! Let's evangelize weed!"

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Clyde:

23 Moronic, almost inbred and creepy white trash hillbilly. Very naïve but in a creepy its only incest sort of way.

Annnnnnnd there goes any hope for GTA V's story redemption. Have fun, thread, we shant see each other again!

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[quote name=ThunderPeel2001;166599

Rockstar: Get a decent screenwriter to come in and do a great job' date=' instead of giving it all to Dan Houser and that awful DJ.[/quote]

Huh? GTA has some of the best, natural flowing dialog in games... actually probably THE best. Its the stories that suck and a lot of that may be due to the size/length of their games... what they need is a novelist. :)

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Huh? GTA has some of the best, natural flowing dialog in games... actually probably THE best. Its the stories that suck and a lot of that may be due to the size/length of their games... what they need is a novelist. :)

It could still be improved though. The dialogue is good... but the characters they come up with are hackneyed, and the plots are predictable (especially when they try to be shocking).

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Yeah, I get what you mean, but I think as far as dialog goes, no other company does it any better so to say it could be better should be applied to every other company first, hehe.

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I kindof like Lazlow, he was the high point of GTA III if you ask me. He was the straight man in the craziness of Liberty City, the person that you somehow, oddly, mostly related to, as you went along your business shooting things in the face. It was also the game with the most manageable collection of radio stations, and it was easy to listen through to all the music on all the stations, and all the music was weird (little, unknown acts that made it after the music came out, or old forgotten reggae songs, or all the songs from Scarface). It made for a really nice package altogether.

Anyway, I have not played GTA VI long enough to get the sense of the quality of the story, but I want to express an entirely different way in which Niko is an obnoxious character: he is supposed to be from a nondescript pseudo-Balkan country that could pass for any random eastern European country where that particular strata of urbanized thuggish peasantry can be recognized by their track suit, leather jacket, and bling uniform. I get that. I am cool with it. What I am not cool is that his accent when he's speaking that weird Eastern-European-cum-English creole thing he does, is that of a man who has never even tried to pronounce anything in a Slavic language. In Vice City they went to great lengths to get proper Haitian dialects and what not—that got them burned, I guess, so they mishmashed together something vague enough to provide plausible deniability—but they could've at least gotten a native speaker, not someone whose sum-total experience with a slavic language is imitating Rade Šerbedžija

Boris the Blade, costume salesman in Eyes Wide Shut, professional cameo performer

. Another reason why The Last Express is awesome—all the characters are voiced by native speakers.

I hope they Wire up the series in the next installment. Following many different stories through the city, even intermittently—one chapter you are a small fry mope, next you're an upstart cop, then you're a medium level soldier in a specific crime family, then back to this guy, then that, and so on. That would really allow for some more complicated storytelling.

Edit: cleaning a bizarre asterisk, my keyboard at home does weird things.

Edited by Kingzjester

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I want to express an entirely different way in which Niko is an obnoxious character: he is supposed to be from a nondescript pseudo-Balkan country that could pass for any random eastern European country where that particular strata of urbanized thuggish peasantry can be recognized by their track suit, leather jacket,*and bling uniform.

Huh, for some reason I got it into my head that Niko and Roman are Serbian.

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Maybe he did! But he did a middling to piss poor job. No one Serbian or tangentially related was consulted, except maybe in the wardrobe department. Niko and Roman are weird obscure impossible names if they're supposed to be Serbian. It would've been Nikola—and nicknames of Nikola would be Nidža (Nidzha) or Johnny (oddly enough). I am not too bothered by Niko, tho, since that means "Nobody" so that is kindof neat. But Bellic is really weird. They keep pronouncing it as Bell-LICK when it ought to be BEH-lich (with a soft ch, if it even is Belić they're going after, loosely translates as "Whitey"), and that stupid double L (there is no such thing).

I would prolly have more to say if I played more of the game.

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Like you say, they touched upon some potentially very sensitive topics in that game (the history of violence in Niko's home country), so I'm sure they were keen deliberately NOT to make him from one specific country...

I can understand, as I'd much prefer they didn't wade into offensive material (as in, actually offensive material, not satire) for the sake of mock-realism... It is a fictional universe, after all. But yeah, we Brits hate it when US films get the UK and UK accents wrong... so I appreciate the annoyance.

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Waitaminute, all Brits are villains and schemers, right?

Also drive old cars and have cats.

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Reactions on release day:

Fuck Yes

FTW

10/10!!!!!

More of the same then? Ace

GOTY

ONLY 8/10 OMG ALL OTHER SITES ARE 10/10 THIS GAME ROCKS CANT WAIT TO PLAY IT WHEN IT COMES OUT ROLL ON SEPTEMBER 13!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Reactions after the hype has died a bit:

Not bad, gets boring after a while.

I didn't do the story missions.

Vice City was better/

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