GTA has a satirical take on American culture told through a rags to riches story of a criminal. It’s humorous, filled with exaggerated characters, action packed, and tells the familiar Scarface-like story.
Is it just me getting older or does that humorous exaggeration really get less enjoyable every time they move the quality of the of the cityscape simulation backdrop up a notch?
The dark exaggerated story might somehow create a world where it is ok to, I don't know, shoot your way through that casino for robbing the vault or whatever, yet at the same time completely fail to construct a similar excuse for all the things the player character does to non-story NPCs. In the crude worlds of earlier GTA that was limited to the radical things like carjacking and all that pedestrian killing, but those were so crass that they defined that dark world. With increased fidelity however, it extends to a very long tail of bad behavior like blocking the bike lane with the getaway car. And for those subtle things, the excuse of "dark, humorous, twisted" just doesn't work out. It might, if the subtle things were the focus of the game (e.g. in a port of the mechanisms of untitled goose game from annoying waterfowl to annoying socker mom suv) but in a GTA they cannot be more than backdrop.
usrusr|4 years ago
The dark exaggerated story might somehow create a world where it is ok to, I don't know, shoot your way through that casino for robbing the vault or whatever, yet at the same time completely fail to construct a similar excuse for all the things the player character does to non-story NPCs. In the crude worlds of earlier GTA that was limited to the radical things like carjacking and all that pedestrian killing, but those were so crass that they defined that dark world. With increased fidelity however, it extends to a very long tail of bad behavior like blocking the bike lane with the getaway car. And for those subtle things, the excuse of "dark, humorous, twisted" just doesn't work out. It might, if the subtle things were the focus of the game (e.g. in a port of the mechanisms of untitled goose game from annoying waterfowl to annoying socker mom suv) but in a GTA they cannot be more than backdrop.