Am I in backwardsville?
THis better than GTA4?
S
M
H
In GTA I can: Watch TV, drive through block upon block of painstakingly rendered yet ultimately soulless neighborhoods, plow my way through hordes of brain-dead enemies, and perform nearly identical missions.
Or
In SR2 I can: Fly an airplane, hijack a sewage truck, rob a liquor store disguised as a cop, drive a monster truck in a demo derby, throw a person in front of a train, join an underground fight club, and utilize a gunplay mechanic that actually works.
No which one sounds better?
I'll probably get SR 2 and won't hesitate to admit if its better than GTA IV, but I'm not going to jerk off to it before its even out.
But really listing all this side stuff is stupid. The story is the real backbone of a sandbox game, and whether you think GTA IV's story was stupid or not is irrelevant, it actually had a lengthy single player mode.
Side stuff, the novely wears off. You realize all this stuff sounds cool, but wears out like anything else after you do it a time or two. In fact, a lot of this stuff was in older GTA's, so I guess SR's is ripping off GTA again. Older GTA's had small airplanes, there was an arena demolition derby thing in Vice City you could do, you can push a guy in front of a train in GTA IV (in fact I did it like 3 times the other day), there were a couple of of missions in the old GTA where you dressed as a cop.
All this stuff is nice, but if there's really no point to it, it will wear out just like the GTA side stuff, or any other "sandbox" game.
What the fuck
QFT WTF FTW and other TLAs as appropriate.
"You realize all this stuff sounds cool, but wears out like anything else after you do it a time or two." It's reckless to assume you understand what makes a game fun for other people. Hell, I don't like RPGs, it looks like spreadsheets fighting each other to me, broken up by lengthy CGI rife with androgynes, but I don't make the assumption that they suck.
In previous
GTAs the bulk of my time has been spent in trying to complete the side challenges, which are consistently more intense and interesting than the story missions, and usually require a lot of effort to clear. Other than the last mission of
GTA III, the "civic" side missions of Firefighter, Vigilante, and Ambulance are the ones that have been the most transportative, immersive experiences, engendering a state of "flow" where I'm really just hooked into the game. And as mentioned in the "Why GTA IV sucks" thread, the removal of those bits of gameplay was an epic mistake to me.
On the other hand the
original Saints Row took those side missions one step further, and instead of
delivering noodles or
driving a taxi or bus, they looked at what people did FOR FUN in
GTA, how people made their own emergent gameplay, and then addressed most of them with their own side missions. The one that springs immediately to mind is Mayhem, where just causing rampant destruction on an escalating scale is the only goal. It's nuts.
Anyway, if you're one of those players for whom story missions is the most important thing, great. But you shouldn't assume that everyone likes what you do, especially in a game where the focus is being able to do whatever you want.
edit: YAY! 100 posts.
