This is Skeezix’s Brain on Gaming
Is Grand Theft Auto V still worth playing?
I have a confession to make: I had not, until approximately three weeks ago, played Rockstar’s mega-ultra-hit Grand Theft Auto V. I know, I know. Where was I, under a rock? The game took the world by storm seven years ago, scandalizing parents everywhere, and it hasn’t really climbed down from the top since. Last week, the game was sixth by playtime on Steam, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive; pretty impressive for a creation that’s older than this year’s first graders.
But if there’s one thing that can be said about human culture, it is this: What is popular is not necessarily good. In the early 60s, baby boomers unironically enjoyed music that beseeched them to “boogie.” Modern art — art that sells for millions of dollars — often consists of garbage stuck together with duct tape. And there are still, despite everything, girls with crushes on Justin Bieber. So the question remains to be answered: Is Grand Theft Auto V still worth playing?
I got the game for free on the Epic store a few months back. It was my duty, I felt, to experience something so influential, so controversial, so extraordinary. In middle school, despite not owning the game or even a device that could play it, I was a religious viewer of Xpertthief and Kwebbelkop on YouTube. Later, I moved on to Jerma985 and then Videogamedunkey, and while neither of them were focused on GTAV in particular, they made videos about the game; who didn’t? So, even though I’d never touched Rockstar’s creation, I knew quite a bit about it going in.
I think the best way to do a review is to go over presentation first, since that’s important but ultimately superficial, and then to move on to basic mechanics, to see whether the game functions properly and feels good to play. After that, I’ll be covering the game’s missions and world — its “structure” — before finally diving into its story and characters. Accordingly, the first part of this review will be spoiler-free, and I will provide a warning for those of you who haven’t picked up GTAV (you laugh, but I am living proof that those people exist) when we start to get into spoiler territory. There’s a lot to cover, so buckle up and get your vegan cheese balls ready; this is gonna be a long one.
As I said, I’d like to start with examining the game’s presentation. There’s nothing to complain about as far as graphics go; sure, the game may be seven years old, but it’s still impressive, and even though the developers were aiming for hyperrealism, which is a trap many games fall into, the look of the final product is just cartoony enough that it has aged better than many games from around the same time period. I played GTAV on a potato computer, and even still, I could enjoy San Andreas’ expansive views. The performance didn’t even suffer! I only got stuttering in the rain, but that’s a problem common with many games on my computer, so I think it would be silly to fault this one in particular for it.
The music is also decent. I think game soundtracks are often weaker when they incorporate a lot of licensed music (as GTAV’s does), since that deprives them of the chance to establish their own identity. There are a few original tracks from the game that I did enjoy, though, like the helicopter theme, which was very fitting for a night flight over the city. The licensed music mostly ended up being an irritation — I doubt anyone wants to jump into a car while being pursued by police and be assaulted by a blast of reggae — but in addition to eleven rap stations, the radio did have one good song, “Highwayman” by the Highwaymen, so I’ll give it a pass. Usually, I just ended up turning it off right away, but if I were to be roleplaying, as I know many players like to do, it would be a welcome addition. And it was always funny to pull people out of cars, get a look at them, and then hear what’d they’d been listening to — it gave you a hint as to these anonymous NPCs’ personalities. Overall, I think the presentation was top-notch, as befits a triple-A game from a well-established studio.
It’s now time to move on to the nuts and bolts of GTAV’s gameplay. The three things I think deserve a mention are driving, combat, and movement, since these activities take up a good ninety-five percent of a player’s time (at least). While they don’t define a classic by themselves, a game will fail miserably if it falls short in its basic mechanics. Luckily, in GTAV, players will find little to complain about.
The heart of GTAV is driving, and this is, mechanically, the best part of the game by far. The feeling of flooring the gas and roaring down the freeway, either slowing down time and weaving through traffic (as Franklin) or simply getting into horrible accidents (as Michael and Trevor), will never not be satisfying. While I’ve never been to Los Angeles, my impression is that Rockstar’s version is much more fun to get around than the real thing. The game takes advantage of this; every mission involves driving in some way, and the best ones all have visceral car chases, escapes from the police, high-speed races, and thrilling stunts. I have played racing games that have felt a little better, but then, who would want to play racing games (other than Mario Kart)? Driving in GTAV is much more fun.
Flying and boating also feel fairly good. Helicopters are a joy to fly around in, once you get the hang of them, which can be hairy. I found planes to be fairly pointless, since the map only has three airstrips (two of which are right next to each other) and just handful of other large, flat spaces that could be used to land them. This means that their higher top speed is pretty much negated by the inconvenience factor. Once you get into one, though, even big, lumbering cargo planes are satisfying to maneuver around, and when you do pull off a landing — not always an easy feat — you feel like you’ve really achieved something. Boats can be a good time, mainly because they let you see areas of the coastline that you’d never otherwise pass, but San Andreas’ shape as a large, round island means that they’re never going to be the fastest way to get anywhere, unless you’re crossing the Alamo Sea. They’re also nearly impossible to use for escapes from the police. Combine this with the fact that, in the thirty-some hours of story missions that GTAV provides, there’s only two or three brief sections where you have to drive boats, and I didn’t find myself spending very much time out on the water — not that I really wish that I had.
The gunplay is quite satisfying. I played on a controller, so the experience was not quite as smooth as if I had been using keyboard controls, but even still I was able to give a good account of myself in the many, many gunfights the game offers. Shotguns are satisfying enough to use and have quite a bit of killing power, and, at the other end of the spectrum, sniper rifles are a little broken because enemies will realize you are shooting at them from far away, get into cover, and proceed to take ineffective potshots at you with underpowered firearms as you take them out one by one. I did find, though, that there was sort of a “donut” in between the extremes where things didn’t feel quite as good. The assault rifles are fairly weak unless you get headshots, which can be difficult without a scope, and this means that fights can take a very long time to win when they’re taking place in roughly the 10–50m range. Enemies also tend to fall down after getting hit the first time, often behind cover, so you have to wait for them to get back up before trying for another headshot, which adds to the frustration (SMGs are even worse when it comes to this because of their lower damage per bullet). It wasn’t that bad — it just made me wish that a shooter would come out one of these days which didn’t take the assault rifle as its default weapon. Melee combat is a little rigid, and fistfights can be won purely by mashing the right trigger, but it does the job, and you hardly need to do it very much.
When melee does get janky, the game’s movement system is largely to blame. Obviously, as a game that was trying to be “realistic”, GTAV could never have had the hyper-fluid movement system of a Mario title, but it could at least have done as well as a game like Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which aimed for the same semi-realistic movement (at least most of the time), but which felt much smoother and more responsive. One of the issues I encountered was navigating stairwells, particularly indoors; the janky camera and the player character’s wide turning radius while running often meant that I spent as much time running into walls as I did actually going up or down. Running is fine, although the stamina system feels a little pointless, since you never really run out when it matters, and climbing is tolerable enough. Movement just wasn’t a priority for Rockstar, and, unfortunately, it shows. Still, overall, GTAV feels pretty good to play, and I was rarely frustrated with the game’s basic mechanics. It’s always a relief when a triple-A title manages to nail the fundamentals like this.
Things go slightly downhill when it comes to what I’d refer to as the game’s “structure.” Its world and objectives are just not quite what I had expected them to be. Before you get the pitchforks, hear me out.
Firstly, the game’s mission structure is clearly something the developers took for granted. After all, every Rockstar game has missions; why change it up? For starters, because the mission system is ancient. Sure, some type of incremental objective system is mandatory for a game. You have levels in Mario, encounters in The Last of Us, Starites in Scribblenauts. But it just seems like we should be able to come up with…something better.
Why? Well, maybe it was just me, but the mission system made it feel at times like Rockstar didn’t want to be making an open-world game. You rarely interact with the world at all during the missions; the roadways of San Andreas are only there to let you drive to the mission. Often, you go to the mission and then immediately have to drive somewhere else. At one point, I started a mission at Trevor’s trailer that required me to go all the way to Michael’s house, come all the way back, get in a plane, fly across half the map, get in a gunfight, then fly back the same way I came, land at Trevor’s airstrip, and then drive all the way back to Michael’s house to start the next mission. I was on the go for probably twice as long as I spent shooting at enemies. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that GTAV wasn’t an open-world game; this particular mission would actually have been a far smoother experience. Sometimes, there are vaguely interesting activities that do integrate the open world, like a mission that has you finding a certain make and model of car based on aerial pictures, but mostly they’re just go to the location, then shoot your way out.
Speaking of shooting, the main story missions seemed like they often couldn’t decide how intense they were supposed to be. Sometimes, you have a mission where you have to steal a vehicle, and you’d maybe have to kill one or two people, then drive away scot-free. Other times, you get one where you’re doing essentially the same thing, except now it’s part of a heist, so instead of one or two people, you have to kill one or two hundred. There was a mission which really challenged my suspension of disbelief when it required me to steal something from an armored truck and then, with the help of two AI companions, to hold off a literal army of cops. In free play, I’d learned that taking that kind of fight is rarely a good idea, so I failed the mission the first time when I simply snuck into a cop car and drove away. After a longish gunfight, one of my companions declared that it was safe to go because they were “thinning out.” What? Cops never “thin out” in free play; the game was breaking the rules that it had established for me. Sure, if, in real life, three men somehow managed to kill two hundred cops, law enforcement might well begin to “thin out” while the National Guard got called up or whatever — but three men would never manage to do that in real life. It all felt incredibly arbitrary.
Also, many missions feel tacked-on. This is especially true of the Strangers and Freaks side missions: the “Pulling a Favor” tow truck missions are an especially low point, requiring you to drive a tow truck — slowly — to random parkings lots around Los Santos while Franklin bickers with his irritating ex-hookup from high school. But even some of the main story missions feel pointless, particularly the heist setup missions, which often require stealing a vehicle from an unguarded lot and driving it across the city. Another setup mission involves stacking cargo containers, which is boring and achieves nothing as far as making the heist happen goes. Rockstar seems to be under the impression that they can make any mundane activity interesting by slapping “Mission Passed” on the screen afterwards, but oh, they are sorely mistaken.
What about the open world itself? Well, as I said before, missions rarely interact with the open-world aspect of the game, and even those that do don’t take advantage of most of the space available. The world is richly detailed and beautiful, and I wanted to get to see every corner of it, but a good quarter of my map was still blank when the credits rolled. Sure, the parts I hadn’t visited were mostly barren hillsides, but why would you put barren hillsides in a game if you didn’t intend to use them for something? Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild features a smaller map than GTAV, but, until a quick Google search a few minutes ago, I believed that the opposite was true; content makes an area feel more expansive than it really is, and GTAV’s world just isn’t densely-packed enough to feel fleshed-out. Of the interesting areas on the map, some, like the state prison, the wind farm, and the hippie commune in the north, are never used for anything meaningful during the game’s story missions. What was the point of adding them?
Adding to the feeling of disconnect, you have no way of interacting with the open world. In Breath of the Wild, you were constantly foraging for ingredients, having impromptu monster battles, climbing to high ground to see what was ahead, marking shrines — in GTAV, you can only shoot people, steal cars, and escape the police. If you’re not doing a mission, there is nothing meaningful to do with your time. The activities that are on offer, like stealing from armored trucks and robbing convenience stores, are pointless when the take is so much lower than the cost in medical bills if you happen to get wasted. Sure, you can try to climb Mount Chiliad (yet another thing you never do as part of a story mission), but why would you, when all there is at the top is a view (admittedly a nice one) and maybe $40 worth of pedestrians’ money? There are letter scraps and stunt jumps scattered around the map, but the scraps help you solve a murder, which feels very dissonant given the number of people you kill over the course of the game, and the marked stunt jumps are often no better than the unmarked ones that you create yourself as you try to escape police. Overall, GTAV’s structure is solid, but not particularly impressive. I understand why people went bananas over it when it came out, but in 2020…eh.
GTAV is old now as far as video games go, so it makes sense that maybe the world and missions aren’t quite up to modern standards, but one thing that never ages is a game’s story and characters. I’ll tell you right now: this was by far the worst part of the experience for me. For all my kvetching about the missions and the structure of San Andreas, I was having fun most of the time as I completed objectives and navigated the map. The only time I really felt turned off was during cutscenes, when the people who I was playing as were cast in sharp relief. A warning — THERE WILL BE SPOILERS AFTER THIS POINT.
I think the game’s real problems begin with its protagonists. The fact that there are three of them shows an admirable ambition from Rockstar, but it’s not clear that them all being playable really helps the game much.
Even if GTAV is supposed to have three main characters, it only has one main-main character, and that’s Michael Townley/de Santa. Everything in the storyline revolves around him: his support of Franklin, his troubled relationship with Trevor caused by the events at North Yankton, his entanglement with the FIB — all of the plot events in the game come back to him. And yet…it’s not really clear that Rockstar made the right decision in focusing on Michael. He’s hardly very sympathetic, with his “oh-no-I’m-rich-and-sad” act, and he causes all his own problems. It’s hard to believe, in retrospect, but all of the game’s events were set in motion by his decision to try to get revenge on his wife’s tennis coach. Trevor is supposedly the impulsive one, but Michael is actually just as bad, just as violent, unstable, and reckless. His special ability is also the worst of the three, if that’s at all relevant.
Speaking of Trevor…wow. It may be a legitimate decision for a work of fiction to feature a completely irredeemable, atrocious scumbag as one of its characters, but Trevor is really hard to stomach, even in a game about stealing cars and killing people. He murders randomly, behaves creepily towards women, and just generally seems to be incapable of existing in human society. I guess my issue with Trevor isn’t so much the character himself — as I said, his inclusion is legitimate — it’s that he never had to answer for his actions. The entire second half of the game revolved around Trevor learning of Michael’s betrayal in North Yankton. Fair enough; that was a pretty scummy thing for Michael to have done. But, even if I said that Michael was as bad as Trevor, I don’t believe he was worse. Trevor does various things over the course of the game — torturing that one guy, killing Floyd and his girlfriend, killing Wade’s friends, perpetrating multiple mass shootings — that are actually far, far more evil than anything Michael did in Ludendorff, yet he never faced consequences for his actions. Maybe if Patricia Madrazo had broken up with him because he was too inhumanly evil, taking him out of himself for a moment and making him reconsider his life decisions, then his representation would feel fairer to me? But hey, I’m just spitballing here. As it is, he just seems like another version of the Joker effect, an objectively evil man getting a pass for his evil deeds because he is “troubled” — and white. I agreed to a certain amount of scarring, over-the-top, offensive content when I picked up the controller to play GTAV, but I feel like Trevor crossed a line. I felt ill when I had to play as him.
How did Rockstar try to redeem themselves? Oh, with a Black protagonist, of course! Unfortunately, Franklin just reinforced the bad taste in my mouth that I got from Trevor. He started out strong, as the “good” protagonist who constantly pulls the other two back from the brink of physical violence, but as the game goes on, he gets fewer and fewer lines. Eventually, he becomes a cardboard cutout whose only contribution to the story is saying “I got you, dog,” whenever Michael tells him to do something. He has no agency. Obviously, the final decision you make, about which ending you want, is made when playing as Franklin, but you make that choice, not him. He does have a dry sense of humor that I appreciated, but besides that, it feels like he doesn’t need to be there. No, just think about it: What if the game were just Trevor and Michael? Nothing that happens would go down in a fundamentally different way. All the pivotal story beats — the North Yankton incident, the jewel store job, the work for and against the FIB, the other North Yankton incident, and the final assassinations — would happen exactly the same way if Franklin Clinton were to simply drop off the face of the earth. The game is about Trevor and Michael; that’s who Rockstar cared about, and that’s who they focused on.
Also, while the choice to increase the diversity of the cast was admirable, it seems like maybe it would also have been good to add a writer of color (and maybe even a woman, too) to the team of white male writers. Why? Well, nothing that happens in Franklin’s life would really be out of place in a Top 40 rap single. Except for his aunt, who is delightfully weird, he felt like a walking stereotype, stealing cars, selling drugs, and popping anyone who got in his way. I’m not Black, so I feel like it would be wrong of me to comment at length on this, but I don’t believe that the writing team as it was was any better qualified to flesh him out as a character than I am to comment on their work. At one point, the three protagonists are talking, and Trevor is going over the merits of their partnership. Pointing at Franklin, he says, “hey, we got diversity,” and that feels like it was the writers’ attitude as well.
When asked in an interview why GTAV didn’t feature a female protagonist, one of the game’s writers, Dan Houser, explained that “that just wasn’t the story they wanted to tell” and that “being masculine was so key to this story.” I think it is fruitful to examine the game’s side characters with this in mind. Who comes up frequently? Well, there’s Lamar, Molly, Franklin’s aunt, and Michael’s family, but while these characters are important to various side plots, they rarely affect the flow of the game’s main events. As far as the ones that are go, you have Lester Crest, Dave Norton, Steve Haines, Devin Weston, Floyd, Solomon Richards…notice a pattern here? All of the characters with big-time speaking roles, except Franklin, are middle-aged white men. It’s almost as if the writers were also middle-aged white men. Really, what Mr. Houser should have said in his interview was this: “being white, middle-aged, and masculine was so key to this story.” The worst part about all this is that being masculine, let alone white and middle-aged, wasn’t all that relevant to the story. If I were to read the game’s script and couldn’t see the characters’ names, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell that they were men at all. Sure, there’s some machista chest-thumping and sex talk, but beyond that, the game doesn’t discuss masculinity in any meaningful way.
In fact, it doesn’t discuss anything in any meaningful way. Everything in GTAV’s game world, from oversexualized billboards to overmilitarized police, is a caricature of a problem that exists in real-life American society, but it doesn’t use any of that brilliant world-building to make a point. The game feels like a long, florid sentence without a verb at the end to create a coherent thought. There were a million directions the writers could have gone. They could have made a statement about police brutality, showing how the harsh way the LSPD, the FIB, and Merryweather treat citizens makes problems worse and not better. They could have made a statement about crime, showing how it can often be a symptom of other issues in society even as it also constitutes one itself. They could even, as they claimed to want to do, have made a statement about masculinity, showing how American men often behave in self-destructive ways for stupid reasons. They chose not to do any of that. The reason you make a provocative, uncomfortable work of fiction like GTAV is to take players out of their comfort zone and force them to look at something in the real world more critically, but the game falls far short of doing that.
The worldview that the game does present is also deeply objectionable. There’s no moral of the story, no lesson to be learned. Instead, players come away with a general attitude of deep cynicism. GTAV is so cynical that sometimes it even turned me off, despite the fact that I’m one of the most cynical people I know. And if it does make a statement, it’s a bizarrely Baby Boomerish one, a tirade against governmental waste, fraud, and abuse. Characters are constantly joking about how their “tax dollars are being put to work” in stupid ways, as if that was at all the most pressing concern for people living in the world of GTA, and not, you know, being gunned down in the street by a madman in a golf cart? If that kind of incongruous, head-scratching, irrelevant cliché is the best that Rockstar could do, I’d rather they didn’t do anything at all.
The problem with GTAV is this: No one at Rockstar seemed to be quite sure what they wanted the game to be. Was it going to be revolutionary? Well, yes, in some ways, but they had to make sure that it was traditional, too, hence the decision to make it a basic shooter with the same mission structure as ever, and not integrate stealth elements, or squad-based strategy, or anything else that could help to flesh out a game about heists. Was it going to have interesting and flawed protagonists? Yes, but they also had to make sure not to interrogate those flaws, which would have led to uncomfortable questions about the diversity of the Rockstar workplace. Was it going to be funny? Well, there would be some funny parts, but it had to be a serious game with serious (i.e. white male) characters too. Was it going to tell a story that had never been told before? Well, in a way, but any kernel of originality was going to have to be so couched in trope and stereotype that it would be hard to detect at all. Compromises were made on almost everything, and in doing so, I feel like Rockstar compromised their game’s soul as well.
I have to admit something: The answer to my initial question was never going to be no. If you play video games, if you have the cash and a platform to play it on, you should play Grand Theft Auto V. It has flaws, yes, flaws sometimes so compromising that they’re hard to forgive, but isn’t that exactly the same as American society in general? We live in a nation of screwups. Time after time, we’ve tried to confront the problems that threaten the very core of who we are, come up with solutions — and then screwed it all up. Rockstar might have screwed up GTAV, but the fact that they did makes it all the more perfect of a mirror for players to hold up to real-life American culture. Remember how I said I was cynical? Yeah.
If you can look past the clichéd storyline, the stereotyped characters, and the outdated world design and mission structure, there’s some nuggets of gold in GTAV. Rockstar got the basics right, and even if I wasn’t the biggest fan by the end, I happily played through the whole game.
I give Grand Theft Auto V three instances of gratuitous sexual innuendo out of five.
Originally published at http://skeezixblogs.wordpress.com on September 11, 2020.
