toblix

GTA V

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Los Santooooos! From San Andreas. Does this mean the whole state or just the city and surrounding environment? We've seen the mountains, crop fields, and some desert from SA in the trailer. :tup:

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Well, it's GTA all right. LA looks great in the trailer. It's probably going to be the same as IV. I'll enjoy it. And maybe it'll surprise me once I hear some of the features.

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I'm guessing Dan Houser is still handling writing duties: I forgot I had muted my laptop when the trailer came on, and in my head I expected to hear a low, gravely voice talking wryly about "the city".

I restarted the video, unmuted and lo, if that wasn't exactly what I got. *sigh*

Looks stunning, though.

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Looks like this is the guy we're going to be playing as:

gta_5_main_character.jpg

Quite like the idea of playing an older Mafia-type guy rather than the young brutish grunt we normally get to be. :tup:

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i think that the vistas look much better than say IV, but im glad its a oldish dude you play as, seems like a good change :)

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Oh my god, colors confirmed! Looks pretty good. Hard to say anything else at this point.

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Here's what I get from it: It's GTAIV with a new city.

There's absolutely nothing about the video that suggests they've attempted to do anything new or different. The fact that the lead is older just means they've opted for a different stereotype this time: Mafia Boss. He doesn't even sound as interesting as Tony Soprano.

I can already hear his dialogue in my head, though. "Eh, Tony! What the fuck do you mean they're dead? Well get out there and find my fucking drugs! Here I am, so-called mafioso boss. Wanted by the FBI, CIA and Interpol. Biggest dick in the city. And I'm stuck working with fucking amateurs."

Actually, I suppose this time he's going to have more of a heart, given that it's implied he's retired and wants a family life. Except he can't escape his past... How original!

*sigh* *sigh* *moan* *moan*

Despite this one gripe, it visually looks fantastic and I actually can't wait to play it, given the fun I got from GTAIV. I just wish they could write something good!

I wonder if they'll use the cop system from GTAIV or Chinatown Wars?

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I was about to clap slowly for you TP, for not being caught up in this, but I am disappointed.

This is the only game in a while that I have had absolutely zero interest in. Hell, I'm still watching TOR from the sidelines, even if I don't intend to play it. Unless they make some major changes to the formulae, I'll be avoiding it for the same reasons I'm avoiding MW3.

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Sorry to disappoint you, Orv. As aggrieved as I am already, I'm sure it'll be a fun game to play... even if I'm frustrated by the characters and story.

Edited by ThunderPeel2001

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To be honest the story and characters sound fine, I've always wanted to play as someone a bit higher up in the hierarchy of arseholes (although Vice City kind of went there). The mafia has always been my favourite part of GTA's crime families so that's good too. The general premise is certainly a cliché, but the moment-to-moment writing in GTA games has often been pretty enjoyable and very entertaining. Same for Rockstar games in general, actually.

What's going to really make or break this for me is the gameplay, which is naturally not shown off at all. The only thing that has kept me into GTA has been the writing, because the gameplay has been incredibly repetitive since GTA3 — consisting primarily of 'go to X, get in some kind of altercation, escape to Y'.

GTA4 admittedly made things much more fun thanks to better cover/shooting mechanics, but it still got pretty fuckin' old by the third borough and I couldn't bear to complete the game. I want to see much more in the way of exciting mission set-ups and set pieces, more environmental variety like in San Andreas (looks like we're getting it), and of course more of the general breadth of gameplay that San Andreas had but was dutifully dropped for GTA4.

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Less than 2 minutes of footage.

Well, that's kind of underplaying it. It's not a random 2 minute sample of the game. It's a carefully crafted 2 minutes of footage designed to specifically to sell the scope, style, and feeling of the game. Each shot will have been agonized over. The dialogue tweaked, argued about. A hundred different music choices gone through. Tens of thousands of dollars spent.

This is the best possible way they can represent the game in 1 minute and 24 seconds... without explicitly showing gameplay.

Because of that, I think it's worth talking about. Also, we don't have anything else to go on...

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It's a carefully crafted 2 minutes of footage designed to specifically to sell the scope, style, and feeling of the game. Each shot will have been agonized over. The dialogue tweaked, argued about. A hundred different music choices gone through. Tens of thousands of dollars spent.

Yeah, GTA trailers are like that. I think the first IV trailer was much better, though.

I guess the trailer hints that there is some countryside around Los Santos to explore, but I doubt it'll have more than one city. Also, it'll be cool to see now how the city will differ from the previous 3D take. I never got the feel of the 2D cities in the first games and didn't associate the later 3D cities to them at all.

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Yeah, GTA trailers are like that. I think the first IV trailer was much better, though.
From what I remember, it had no voiceover and featured something from the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack. There is no better way to show a GTA game.

Here's a futile pastime: how would you freshen up the formula which sounds like it may be overstaying its welcome?

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Here's a futile pastime: How would you freshen up the formula which sounds like it may be overstaying its welcome?

I guess I'm in a bit of a minority... because I'm not tired of the game mechanics of the GTA series. It's probably because I'm a bit of a late comer. But I'm happy with a slight variation on what we got with GTAIV missions.

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Honestly, I'd rather have Houser-style dialogue, than a less cliched storyline.

There are very few writers who can pull off quick and punchy dialogue, while maintaining an interesting narrative, like the GTA series has excelled at. Apart from GTA, only the LucasArts adventure games have done this well.

People bring up Bioware/Mass Effect as a milestone in Video game storytelling, but I can't agree. I had to stop playing ME1 because I was frustrated out of my mind over the long periods of exposition and backstory.

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Honestly, I'd rather have Houser-style dialogue, than a less cliched storyline.

There are very few writers who can pull off quick and punchy dialogue, while maintaining an interesting narrative, like the GTA series has excelled at. Apart from GTA, only the LucasArts adventure games have done this well.

People bring up Bioware/Mass Effect as a milestone in Video game storytelling, but I can't agree. I had to stop playing ME1 because I was frustrated out of my mind over the long periods of exposition and backstory.

I agree, Houser is actually pretty good with dialogue. His characters do have distinctive "voices". A sign of bad writer is when you take a random line of dialogue out of context, and can't tell which character said it. Houser is good at that stuff. That said, there's no excuse why GTAV couldn't have a brilliant script. Funny, moving, profound.

Isn't it about time that a game's storyline gave me as much satisfaction as a great TV show? Madmen, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica. Whatever your favourite thing is. And that doesn't mean stopping every ten seconds for exposition, it just means a gripping story with interesting characters.

And if you think about it, the script is the cheapest part of the entire process: Take a bunch of writers, lock them in a room for a year, and out they come with a fantastic script, that's actually something you'd want to watch on TV or in the cinema.

Games tend to get a "pass" with this stuff because the quality of writing is generally so incredibly shitty. It's almost always a poor copy of a TV show or film... and GTA is no exception there.

I said this before with LA Noire, and I'll say it again: If the GTAV trailer was a trailer for a movie, I wouldn't go near it with a 10 foot pole. Would you?

Yes, it's a tricky balance with games, but I believe it's achievable. And I think Rockstar's GTA sandbox world would be a perfect place for it.

Edited by ThunderPeel2001

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First time I started up GTAIV, I was awe struck at the city's detail. The atmosphere. Oozing.

But now when I try to play it on my significantly-more-powerful-than-my-old-360 PC, I can't play it at all. The framerate is sub-20 at best. I can't stand it.

I no longer have a console on which to play this game. So I will probably, sadly, miss out. ):

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Hard to match profound writing and killing 1000 cops over 100 hours of gameplay.

Im personally a big fan of Rockstars dialog writing and GTAIV's premise and character arch was pretty fantastic. Lost and the Damned was another fantastic story that matched tv level of writing.

Not sold on the voice actor of 5, but interested, Im curious if interaction and dealing with his family is a good part of the game. I like the idea you're a father and husband within a heroic setting(or villainous one in this case) and how it would effect the relationships of a normal persons life rather then your super solider x with no attachments to anything and your actions have no consequences on the day to day lives of the character.

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And if you think about it, the script is the cheapest part of the entire process: Take a bunch of writers, lock them in a room for a year, and out they come with a fantastic script, that's actually something you'd want to watch on TV or in the cinema.

But it isn't that easy. It's not about locking a bunch of writers in a room, it's about the writing team working with everyone else in a natural/organic manner. "Bring in better writers" is exactly how we end up with "stopping every ten seconds for exposition".

But I agree with you in theory:

Games tend to get a "pass" with this stuff because the quality of writing is generally so incredibly shitty. It's almost always a poor copy of a TV show or film... and GTA is no exception there.

Like yeah, totally. And I think growing up with LucasArts spoiled me in this regard.

But back to GTA, I think the real difficulty with telling a deep story is in the pacing, both because of its sandbox nature and because the game is so damn long. I recall during the middle/late bits of GTA IV I couldn't even remember Niko's background story and why it was relevant.

You bring up TV shows, which sounds like a great format for GTA stories to work within. GTA V would, theoretically, be made up of 24 shorter stories which shared the same story arc. That might work.

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From what I remember, it had no voiceover and featured something from the Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack. There is no better way to show a GTA game.

I think it had a voice over, ending with "Maybe this time things will be different" (spoiler: they weren't)

[edit]

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Here's a futile pastime: how would you freshen up the formula which sounds like it may be overstaying its welcome?

I'm not saying I could design a game as large as GTA, but if I were to make some minimal change that I think would make it better:

* move stuff out of missions

* maybe still have heavily directed missions for a "main quest", but try to have other stuff more as "side quests", a lot of which would be available at the same time

This would potentially improve the storytelling too, opening up other possibilities than individual anecdotes activated by mission triggers. And of course they would have to add more gameplay variety to support that. Probably more things should be made persistent, maybe the player would even need an inventory.

And the side quests should probably be more local: you go to an area, do a bunch of stuff there, then go to another area, instead of having to constantly drive back and forth through the city. And they could do the same for missions: instead of the whole mission requiring going to A, then driving someone from A to B, maybe you would just previously agree to meet them at B to trigger the mission at B. (hm... but that would reduce the banter while driving)

What I think they will actually do: some side quest like things as in Red Dead, but completing those mainly resulted in getting some bonus items and the like, if I remember correctly. Still, hunting puma and bears was pretty awesome.

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