Man, I can't stop thinking about
GTAV. What an incredible game that was. I read up about the alternate endings (did the best ending) and I don't have any interest in playing them or watching videos of them, just the descriptions sound gross. It says something that by the end I cared so much about these characters that
spoiler (click to show/hide)
I can't even imagine doing a mission where I have to kill one of them, because it just feel so wrong. Even Trevor, whose a horrible person and scary especially midway when he starts having a mental breakdown, but by the end there's enough narrative dissonance that I like him as a character and it'd depress the shit out of me to kill him. Same with Micheal. The good ending with all three of them teaming up and doing a multi-kill assassination run to take out all the assholes who'd been bossing them around the whole game at the same time, ending with pushing Devon off a cliff and parting ways in the sunset was incredibly satisfying. Best amateur Tarantino game ever!
People say GTAV's plot falls apart, ends abruptly, and is too short, but I didn't see any of that. It had some narrative issues around the middle with Franklin basically disappearing from the story for a while and his story with Lamar kind of taking a backdrop to the Trevor/Michael story, but in the end I felt like everything really came together and then ended perfectly. I've never liked GTA writing or characters much before (never even got more than 20 missions into any of the previous games), but I feel like GTAV was really well written for a videogame. The characters were great and their choices felt in character and everything made sense for the world they were in.
The missions were great. Just the uniqueness of it all. 50+ hours of mission/side missions and basically no repetition. Every hour was unique. Compared to the other sandbox games with 10 mission types cloned 6x each, it's just feels amazingly fresh and compelling. Plus everything was fun. Making GTA easier with the god mode special abilities and the checkpoints everywhere made the game so.much.more.enjoyable than past GTAs that were constantly frustrating because of bad controls and weak mission design and lack of checkpoints. Fun >>>> Frustrating in a game like this.
It helps that at 4k/60fps it's also the best looking game in existence at the moment, with the most impressively detailed sandbox world ever. There's also just enough activities to do that it feels alive and not just some static dead world you drive around. There's a lot of cool interiors and buildings are often complexly detailed in design, complete with ladders
everywhere so you can vertically get up on basically every object.
GTAV feels like MGS3 to me. A huge, amazing game that I could see myself replaying every year because it's fun, looks great, and I like the characters/writing/cutscenes. RDR was also one of my favorite games of all time, with a great lead character in Marston and a really cool world to explore that looked gorgeous and missions that were fun to play. So even though I was never a Rockstar fan and always thought they were super overrated, their last two games have really blown me away, so at this point I've got to jump on the bandwagon and be a fan of the company. RDR and GTAV show they've learned a ton about making fun, enjoyable games with likeable characters, so hopefully the quality continues. It's going to be tough for RDR2 to have a lead anywhere near as good as Marston, but I hope they can pull it off!
