Agreed. I like that they removed the grind for weapons, but that means the only motivators to keep you playing after finishing all the heists are more cars and bigger numbers, which are completely irrelevant for online's actual content.
Grand Theft Auto V
- Thread starter vadermath
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There are some vestiges of that still left, most notably the grenade launcher and the minigun, which have no equivalents among the update weapons. The grenade launcher in particular is hugely useful since it's the only rapid(ish)-fire explosive weapon in the game. There's also the AP Pistol, which is a straight upgrade to the Micro UZI as a drive-by weapon. But yeah, other than that there's basically no reward for leveling up.hirovard said:
Well they're not completely irrelevant. The armored Kuruma in particular is a hugely useful vehicle due to being (almost) immune to gunfire, and figuring out how to break the scripting in order to keep the armored car past the point where the mission tries to separate you from it is an interesting learning experience. But that's about it, and there aren't that many missions in which you can do this anyway. And it's unintended sequence breaking, so I'm not giving R* credit for it.Orion said:
I mean... there's this mission where you have to go onto a cargo ship and get a car from one of the containers on the very top, then drive it across the map while being chased by gangsters and potentially cops, right? And fair enough, there are multiple ways you can approach this. You can shoot your way through the guys on the ship and choose from several paths leading to the car, or you can climb a crane and parachute straight to the car, bypassing the bulk of the enemies. That's actually really good! That's one of the very few instances where the mission isn't a corridor shooter and where being high level and therefore having access to special equipment enables you to do the mission more efficiently. But I was still disappointed that you can't take it even further than that. See, there's a cargo helicopter in the game, which has a hook that enables it to carry cars. You'd think you could buy this helicopter, then use it in the mission to just airlift the car to the destination, right? I mean, how cool would that be! But no, you can't do that. The helicopter isn't purchasable, and even if it were you'd have to use your phone to call a delivery company, Pegasus, to make it spawn at a nearby airfield. And, you guessed it, the delivery company doesn't pick up the phone while you're on missions.
The same is true of any vehicle with a gun on it, which you can't store in your garage and therefore can't take with you into missions. It would be hugely useful in a lot of missions to be able to bring even just the basic pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on the back, but since it's a Pegasus vehicle you can't select it as you vehicle at the start of the mission, and Pegasus doesn't make deliveries during missions. Owning these vehicles is completely pointless, the only thing they can be used for is derping around in free roam.
And don't even get me started on the sad case of the special heist equipment. The parachute is basically the only piece of equipment that can be used in an interesting and creative way, and that only in one mission (mentioned above). There's other equipment too, though. Rebreather for diving, night vision goggles? These are only useful in a single mission, and the mission provides them to you. They're of no use anywhere else at all. Yeah, you can buy them and pointlessly derp around with them in free roam for a few minutes until you get bored of them, but that's about it. Why are there no opportunities to use this equipment in other missions? Why isn't there other interesting equipment granting special abilities, like grappling hooks, gas masks, riot shields, binoculars, jetpacks, laser target designators? We can own flipping tanks and VTOL jet fighters, for ****'s sake! Why can't I bring my jet fighter into a mission and have a teammate guide my rockets with a laser target designator?
Because the MP experience is crafted directly off the SP one: strongly scripted missions supported by a sandbox open world. What Rockstar fails to see is that strongly scripted missions don't fit into MP as well as SP, because there is no real story to MP and the number of missions is abysmal.
MP should have simply taken advantage of the massive open world and provided players with the tools to do whatever they want. For example, breaking into and out of the military base with a jet fighter or tank is not only a challenging affair, it is fun. There should've been many many more of these types of facilities that allow players to ad hoc heists for fun, not for XP and not for money.
MP should have simply taken advantage of the massive open world and provided players with the tools to do whatever they want. For example, breaking into and out of the military base with a jet fighter or tank is not only a challenging affair, it is fun. There should've been many many more of these types of facilities that allow players to ad hoc heists for fun, not for XP and not for money.
Splintert said:
I'd say tightly scripted missions aren't much fun in SP either, but yeah, you're absolutely right the MP part of the game should have been much, much more free-form. Take the last heist, in which you rob a bank, for instance. To start with you need to jack a post van to get a transponder from it. Why does that have to be a mission? Why can't these vans just spawn during the normal course of the game so I can grab one whenever? Same with the convoy that has the thermal charges. Why can't that just spawn once in a while in free roam? Why does the heist insist that we use motorcycles as our getaway vehicles, complete with another scripted mission to obtain them? Why do I have to shoot a dozen Lost MC bikers to get these ****ty bikes when I could just jack a much better Bati or Akuma off the street instead? Why can't I just use whatever damn vehicle I want? Have several 'vehicle stash' locations around the bank, let me choose one and put any vehicle I want into it, then let me use that when running from the bank. And let me proceed with the mission even if I don't have a getaway vehicle prepared. It should be my own damn choice. Similarly don't just have one location on the whole damn map where you lose the cops and finish the mission. Have several, and let me choose where I go and what path I take to get there. Let my team decide whether to stick together and help each other along the way or split up to go to different getaway locations and reduce the number of cops each of us has to face. Don't automatically provide me with the equipment that's necessary for the mission and hold my hand throughout the whole damn thing. Let me bring whatever equipment I deem appropriate and let me see if I can find a way to finish the mission with it.
Or to put it more generally: Don't have a bazillion little checkpoints that I have to go through in order. Give me a goal and let me get to it any damn way I want. Surely that's the whole point of open-world game design, isn't it?
The way I was hoping heists would be was similar to the singleplayer in that there were multiple approaches, then got to grab the getaway vehicles and all that stuff in the free-roam. But the unique "necessities" like specific vans with transponders or whatever would need to be grabbed with a mission like we have currently.
So basically the heist itself and the key parts would still need to be done in missions, at least the ones that would make sense to have a "plan" to complete. While the more mundane fetch quests (getaway cars and similar stuff) would be done in freeroam.
So basically the heist itself and the key parts would still need to be done in missions, at least the ones that would make sense to have a "plan" to complete. While the more mundane fetch quests (getaway cars and similar stuff) would be done in freeroam.
This.K-64 said:
It's especially jarring when they make you go through ages of preparation missions and then it's one huge shoot-out anyway. See Prison Break.
First time doing that we were completely dumbfounded by the fact that we can't actually do it in a sneaky way.
Or the Humane Heist, with all the sneaky gear you get and the sneaking in to check the location (even though sneaking in means just shooting everyone...) and then?
Then it's an attack chopper that kills hundreds of humans and destroys dozens of pieces of military-grade equipment while two other folks hurry through some tunnel.
K-64 said:
Well yeah, in my imagined version of the game the heist is still a mission. But it doesn't have a definite plan and a series of checkpoints that you have to follow, rather just a goal along the lines of "get here". How you accomplish that should be left up to you, and you should be able to bring any damn vehicles you want. I mean, why exactly does the entire team have to go into the bank? There's no reason to have all four people in the bank, you could easily do the entire indoor part with three or even just two. Why can't one person wait outside in an armored car, then drive up to the bank once the others get out, let them get into the vehicle, and drive off? Isn't that how getaway drivers are supposed to work? Even the very first mission in story mode works that way. But no, instead you have to shoot your way through a billion cops to get to your ****ty little getaway bikes.
But the most tragic part of all this is that there is an alternative way of doing things, but it's clearly unintended. See, instead of fighting through the alley, you can hop over two walls and bypass the vast bulk of the cops. But if you do that, you have to take a pointless little detour to pick up a waypoint on the other side of a wall. If you don't make the detour and instead take the logical path to the bikes, the mission fails because you "left the mission area". Same with the bikes themselves. You don't have to go on them. You just need to get on them to make the mission script update and give you the next waypoint, then you get off again, go into a garage that's right around the corner, take a car of your choice that you'd previously stashed in there (which, I can guarantee, will be an armored Kuruma), and use that instead. But you have to get on the bikes first, otherwise the mission will likewise fail. If only lots and lots of alternative routes and options like these were intentionally included in the mission design, the game would be incredible. Sadly it isn't like that, it's strictly linear and these interesting moments are merely sporadic design faults that you can exploit to break the linear mission scripting in ways that the developers obviously didn't foresee or intend. Le sigh, R*. Le sigh.
Well yeah, but on the other hand, don't forget that the mission is orchestrated by an obvious undercover cop who is shown imagining the air combat over the prison prior to the start of the mission. He knows the plane will be red-flagged by air traffic control, and he most likely knows SWAT teams will be called in. I'm not sure what he's playing at, maybe he's hoping the NPC will die in the breakout attempt or something.Wellenbrecher said:
Similarly the stupidity of the final bank heist plan is explained in-universe. Yeah, the whole idea of using four ****ty motorcycles as getaway vehicles is stupid, but don't forget that the whole plan was concocted by Lester, who's repeatedly shown to be high as **** on pills. I find it very strange that R* is apparently conscious of the ****ty mission design, but rather than make the missions better they choose to draw attention to it and justify it in-universe. I just don't understand R*'s reasoning behind that.
Yep, corridor shooter. Literally. It's also the only mission in the entire game that requires you to swim underwater. Does all that lung capacity training finally pay off? No, the mission just provides a rebreather. FFS, R*...
To be fair the lung capacity thing was tried before in San Andreas as a mission requirement, and in that case it just represented an unnecessary grind purely for the purpose of progressing the story. I'd rather they just provide a rebreather for that sort of thing when it's not optional.
I don't mean it should be a requirement, but if you have it you should be able to use it to do a mission more efficiently. At one point I actually thought I found a mission like that. I don't remember what it's called, but you're basically required to get a boat located at the end of a long pier. The pier is full of gangsters and convenient chest-high boxes to hide behind, and the mission obviously expects you to fight through them all. I took one look at that and though, a-ha, I bet I can use my maxed out lung capacity to just swim underwater, sneakily steal the boat, and bypass the whole thing! Which almost worked, except that the mission designer decided to put one enemy right at the end of the pier, overlooking the boat. As soon as you surface, he sees you and kills you with his assault rifle. You can't take the boat sneakily while he's there, and you can't snipe him because that will alert the rest of the enemies, and once they're alerted to your presence they will keep track of you and shoot you even if you swim underwater. I mean, this mission just screams "stealth approach!", but sadly the stupid enemy placement completely kills any viability of that.
Because the potential and long-term investment for heists would increase ten-fold. And given that they're trying to sell us in-game money for real money I had figured they wanted to keep folks interested.
What better way than to add alternative routes?
What better way than to add alternative routes?
Because it's good game design? I love watching Extra Credits, which is a show that discusses various aspects of game design from the point of view of an actual game designer, and in one of their episodes, the name of which I don't remember right now, they made a point that really stuck in my mind. They said that a good game offers you multiple different paths to victory that require different degrees of skill. Basically there should be a standard path/method/strategy, but there should also be an expert one, and it should be much more efficient than the standard one but also more risky and requiring much more skill to pull off successfully.
The parachute-onto-the-ship thing is a perfect example. Yeah, you can take the standard path and shoot your way through. It's not difficult, it's just a standard cover shooter bit, but it's a little tedious. Or you can climb a crane and parachute right to the objective, bypassing the whole thing. This is much quicker but it requires that you know how to parachute because the crane isn't very tall and you don't have much time to open your chute and guide your guy to land in the correct spot. You can very easily kill yourself on the parachute if you don't know what you're doing.
I find it very disappointing that that's one of only very few missions that allow such alternative approaches. IMO this design philosophy should be applied especially in open-world games like GTA where the whole point of the game is player freedom.
The parachute-onto-the-ship thing is a perfect example. Yeah, you can take the standard path and shoot your way through. It's not difficult, it's just a standard cover shooter bit, but it's a little tedious. Or you can climb a crane and parachute right to the objective, bypassing the whole thing. This is much quicker but it requires that you know how to parachute because the crane isn't very tall and you don't have much time to open your chute and guide your guy to land in the correct spot. You can very easily kill yourself on the parachute if you don't know what you're doing.
I find it very disappointing that that's one of only very few missions that allow such alternative approaches. IMO this design philosophy should be applied especially in open-world games like GTA where the whole point of the game is player freedom.
Austupaio
Duke
Sounds like you both want different games from Grand Theft Auto. This is a game for tweenies to blow up lots of stuff with RPGs and giggle at picking up hookers, not really an in-depth tactical shooter based on armed robberies. Might I suggest Pay Day 2 or Battlefield: Hardline? If you want open world RPGs that offer alternative routes and player freedom, Far Cry is probably more up your alley.
My point is that you're essentially complaining because the racing is simplistic and not as hardcore as Forza.
Edit; and what I meant by expect was not why would you want it, I can certainly understand the desire, I just don't see why you would think Rockstar of all companies would be the ones to give you that.
My point is that you're essentially complaining because the racing is simplistic and not as hardcore as Forza.
Edit; and what I meant by expect was not why would you want it, I can certainly understand the desire, I just don't see why you would think Rockstar of all companies would be the ones to give you that.
Based on SP I was expecting basic choices for MP heists as well. That was all.
Shooting and blowing stuff up is just fine and as expected, but the heists are incredibly lacklustre and simplistic.
Shooting and blowing stuff up is just fine and as expected, but the heists are incredibly lacklustre and simplistic.
In the SP heists you usually have some basic choices how to go about things. As in go in guns blazing or use knock-out gas first. That sorta thing.
MP pretends you have similar choices by talking on and on about how to do it right and not to **** it up but then the only and normal way is to technically **** it up. Which also means all the nearly every single preparation mission is completely useless filler. Yay, wasted effort and time.
MP pretends you have similar choices by talking on and on about how to do it right and not to **** it up but then the only and normal way is to technically **** it up. Which also means all the nearly every single preparation mission is completely useless filler. Yay, wasted effort and time.
I'm sorry, I don't accept that at all. "This is GTA, it should be dumb and pointless and linear" is just a stupid, short-sighted thing to say. Hell, it's a stupid thing to say regardless of what game you're talking about. That's like saying "it's just a children's cartoon, it shouldn't have good writing or interesting characters". That's only true if you want to make a ****ty children's cartoon. There's absolutely no reason why GTA couldn't or shouldn't offer a bit more depth. I mean, if that guy at the end of the pier who ruins any possibility of doing that mission stealthily wasn't there, would that somehow make it impossible to blow stuff up with rocket launchers and giggle at picking up hookers? No, it ****ing wouldn't. It would make the game better with no downside whatsoever.
Not that GTA5 is for "tweenies" in the first place. ESBR rated it 17+ and PEGI rated it 18+. It's not a game for kids, pure and simple.
Not that GTA5 is for "tweenies" in the first place. ESBR rated it 17+ and PEGI rated it 18+. It's not a game for kids, pure and simple.
Austupaio
Duke
Uh... didn't you guys just confirm with this discussion that it is dumb, pointless and linear with your complaints? Sounds like an astute thing to say, which is why I didn't buy this one.
But they do want to make it a ****ty children's cartoon... because 90% of players do not care and it's more conducive to their production times to make this stuff simpler. Which is why they do.
That's ****ing hilarious that you think the ESRB/PEGI rating means anything. Not only do even huge retailers like Gamestop shamelessly fail to check ID, most of the casual players have the mentality of teenagers anyway, which is why Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and Grand Theft Auto are the best-selling games.
Just because you don't "accept" that GTA is a mindless romp doesn't mean that it isn't, nor that it won't continue to be in the future. That's what the game series is, and will always be, because that is what the majority of consumers want. I don't fit that demographic, so I don't buy the game. It's that easy.
Again, I'm not saying that it should be a brain-dead game with brain-dead heists, I'm just saying that's no reason to expect anything different.
