There you go about sweeping generalizations. I only use that when I'm offended about something.
And yet Quietid and your posts still suggest exactly what I have been saying all along, that RDR's gameplay is pretty similar to GTA4's, but the simplicity of the western setting fixes most of GTA4's problems. In GTA4, driving is an issue for a lot of people: the physics make vehicles not fun to drive, the city is too big to want to drive from one end to the next, the game employs more realistic traffic making you have to go even slower. With a western setting, this is not an issue because: 1. you mainly use horses and horses don't need to drift or edge around tight city streets or 2. due to the desert setting one does not need to go through miles of traffic. And this is just vehicular transportation. I haven't mentioned shooting (more simplistic guns) and other features people felt were lacking in GTA4. From every single thing I've read about it, the desert setting seems to compliment the GTA4 gameplay more so than GTA4 itself.
This is all I meant by my original post, so sorry for not going into more detail, my original post was merely an observation. I wasn't judging (like you have suggested) or anything as I haven't played it. One can't make minute observations? I don't see why you have to get up in arms about an observation someone makes anyways.
I not once argued sales. You brought up sales. All I brought up was an observation. You have since done nothing but try to prove me wrong, why I don't know.
I will repeat: a change in not only time period but setting would do wonders for the GTA formula. It could help iron out the kinks and fix the problems a lot of people have had with GTA4: the physics, the scope, the story. I think the guys at Rockstar are good for it and I'd like to see something different from them.
Himumu, I'm not trying to
prove you wrong, you simply
are wrong and I've taken the time to try and show you in what ways you are wrong. If I've failed to be sufficiently polite while demonstrating this, or if you've taken the intense tone of my arguments personally, I'm sorry to have caused you distress.
I note with sadness and frustration that you're still imagining all these reasons why RDR works and GTA IV does not, getting some of it right and some of it wrong. Of course "one can make minute observations" or "one can make broad statements which read as though one hasn't played the game, because in fact one hasn't" -- but you should expect to get called on it by people who have played the game and actually know what they're talking about.
I'll repeat this one last time, but I'm done after this attempt: The nature of the systems which make RDR compelling and consistently exciting to play can be adapted to any setting, including urban crime. I'll paraphrase a friend who said about GTA IV vs RDR, "One is full of life but devoid of content, the other is lifeless and desolate, but full of opportunity.
QuietID and I agree that the missions are very similar to GTA IV's structure, and I agree with you that the western setting has positively influenced my feelings about some missions involving nothing but "go there and shoot those guys" - in a western, there are lots of bad people who need to be killed, and frontier justice feels good, man. Riding up on a gang that is about to lynch some guy's wife? Give me my goddamned white hat. While I think it would have a different flavor than RDR, GTA IV would have benefited letting Niko break up muggings, stop rapes, or be ambushed while helping a woman with a stalled car. Hopefully they'll be more creative than I've been with this direct import of RDR ambient tasks into GTA FIVE.
GTA4 did have stranger missions and I loved the stranger missions.
But they weren't really common and the game never really advertised it. It's like, you get a blue person on the map and you can do a mission for them. Sometimes the blue person blends in with the background and I can't fucking see them either.
Here, you and I are in agreement. I didn't even know about the Stranger missions until I was finished with the main story. In GTA IV the strangers show up on the map/radar only if both of the following conditions are true: (a) Niko is physically near them, maybe within one city block, and (b) the prerequisite narrative missions have been successfully completed. So you can drive around the entire map, find no Strangers, clear one more story mission, opening up perhaps several Stranger encounters, but unless you revisit that specific portion of the map, you'll never encounter them. What a waste. In RDR they seemed to only have the first condition, though I did find that
Aztec Gold only appeared when I was very nearby its initiation location.
