I'm kinda hopeful singleplayer is on par with rdr2, if that's anything to go by then it will be considerably improved over 5 and honestly 5 is still a better singleplayer game than 99.9% of new AAA releases today.
I used to covet the game as a kid because my parents wouldn't let me play it. When I finally was able to play the series I barely got 30 minutes in thinking "wtf is this shit?"
Only one I've finish was GTA 4 mostly because i liked the vibe of it but I really didn't have much fun with the gameplay which is consistently shite for the entire series.
I have never tried to sincerely play the actual storyline, but I have had hours of fun running around in Vice City with weapons cheats enabled, flame thrower in hand, seeing how many stars I could rack up and cops I could kill before they finally took me out. That's probably exactly the behavior your parents were worried about, and I can't recommend it highly enough.
I highly enjoyed the mission in GTA V where you kill Marc Zuckerberg and I also found it amusing how most of the story boils down to petty infighting between the FBI and CIA.
I really like it when the letter agencies are shown as the pathetic weasels they are.
That really depends on if you mean aggregate rating or frequency of positive rating. If you mean the former, you are right. If you mean the latter, there are many "divisive" games where the supporters are incredibly wrong.
San Andreas is good. Vice City and IV have their strengths. V is very mid though, I didn't even finish it. (Because I had watched a let's play eons ago, my PC ran it badly and the story being meh)
Combine singleplayer and multiplayer unlocks, both of which are from lootboxes. The lootboxes worth having are not available until you've unlocked 80% of the items in the lower tier lootboxes. There is no compensation for duplicates. A single roll is $10.
The story is about how NFTs are good, and the villain is a blue-haired SJW.
The villains are fascists and antifa as dual-antagonist factions, like Aqua and Magma in Pokemon Emerald. The moral is that both extremes are wrong and the neoliberal status quo is good enough so long as we're all kind.
I just finished red dead redemption 2 and it was probably the most enjoyable Rockstar game I've played. Quite frankly it's one of my top games with regards to storytelling and character development
100% agree it's actually crazy how detailed that game is. Not just in its sandbox interactions but the writing is far and away above anything else.
I don't know what Rockstar's process is for writing but I get the impression story writers have significantly more power and impact inside the company than in other companies where they're sidelined by level design and programming. Something significant must be different about their internal structure to cause the difference too because it's been consistently improving over time and that must include staff turnover.
Yeah they definitely got quality writers and are letting them work their magic without the usual gamer Corp restrictions. I usually struggle to get any immersion in any entertainment media I consuuuuuuume, but I noticed as each chapter passed I actually started to feel like I was with Arthur every step of the way. From watching the rain piss down from under the tent, to sluffing through knee deep snow on the mountains trying not to slip and eat shit just to get to the top and drink in the view of the valley below.
I'd venture to say that because Rockstar has a literal cash cow they can milk for liquid gold in the form of GTA online they can actually afford to justify the alternative operating plan in their games manufacturing department.
i still play GTAV online with a friend of mine. never spent a cent more than the original purchase price over 10 years ago. it never got old driving around in stolen shitboxes with my friend and blowing cops away in pseudo southern california.
kinda looking forward to more of this in the vice city / south florida setting, because my friend and i are both from there and lighting up FL cops is gonna be cathartic.
I still love how grounded and low key the original setup to GTA Online was. Get off a plane, get handed a shitty pistol and a couple hundred, get your first shitbox car by literally stealing one off the street.
the inflation thing is real stupid. like a tshirt costing $20k or an old 1970s van costing a million. they definitely fucked up the economy and seem to scramble to make monkey sinks for online. i'll log into the single player to dick around a little and its jarring to "only" have a few hundred K, but then i realize everything is far more normally priced so i'm actually loaded. but nothing in the online game requires the spending of real money. everything can be had with fake game money which can be earned doing cheesy AFK b.s. if you don't want to invest real time and effort. shark cards are a scam for whales only.
my chief complaint about the online game is the inclusion of all the extremely stupid futuristic/sci fi BS like the flying rocket that shoots missles and all that sort of b.s. it's all way too over the top. my second biggest complaint is how prevalent the god mode modding is. but really, the second problem just means its not worth it to buy big expensive weapons, because so many random idiots pretending to play are actually invincible.