Topic: GTA6 Thread

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@Oram77 I will remain sensible for the both of us, then 😅 I mean, I know i'll be as giddy as a kid at Christmas on day one, and my brain will be bursting with things I will want to try out just to push and test the game world to see how it responds, but also I need to actually play the game a bit first and just settle in and see how it feels in what will likely be a kind of a GTA/RPG hybrid. I need to experience it myself with my controller in charge of the action, and without outside influence. I think that part of the story, the bit you spoiler tagged will be the RDR2 moment where it hooks people in. Like, oh sh**, that is the reality of crime and policing and also, this specific unit appears to think they are the Untouchables or the Gangster Squad or something! But I think they are perhaps a touch worse than those, as the antagonists in this case 😬 let's say I doubt they filed their reports accurately and they maybe even accidentally turned off their bodycams on purpose

Honestly, very few games gave me the feeling of RDR2, probably none that exact feeling, so I will savour that when itnis time. It has been a long time since that first experience of that game and you only get that first playthrough once. Some games have been as good in different ways, of course (TW3, KCD, BG3) but put simply... it was damn good! And there were apparently people saying back then "oooh, the intro is too slow" but I was just playing it, and to me it was "I am in a white out on a mountain, and this is absolutely f***ing epic. What am I even playing right now? How is this level of quality possible" and that was that, I was in that world, everything felt new and interesting, and it kept on delivering. Now they are shoving GTA into that exact same design mindset and I still can't quite believe it 😅

What I will say is when I saw the cars tires got shot out, that was awesome. The car felt like a part of the world rather than like a toy. Hard to describe, but similar to when you shoot a rider in RDR2 and they begin to fall off the horse, the horse keeps going and game physics decides the rest based on the environment around it. My two little clips of lasooing a guy off his porch from a train, and the rider getting stuck in the mud as he is hanging off a horse I shared a few weeks ago in gif form, it is just the little details that make the world more real. It isn't a set animation, as such, it is an interaction between objects. I remember shooting a lawman in the knee when he was on a bit of a rocky ledge, he stumbled and tripped, dropped his gun, the gun went off as it hit a rock, and he tumbled down the hill. I didn't know that guns could do that if they hit a hard surface in video games, it showed me that the guns were a real tangible part of the environment even when not being used. Now we are however many years on, and we have this ethic of building a world in a dense city with traffic, guns, people, (i guess functioning) phones for npcs (as they seem to livestream, take selfies, text and call etc), crates of beer, and dog poos!? and all these things are all designed to be a part of the world, not set dressing.

And yeah, that is insane and I totally get the cyberpunk thing. As good as cyberpunk became, I know exactly the stuff that it struggled with. When I first got the game I followed a guy on the phone, he was clearly having a one sided conversation about f*** all, and just repeated himself in a cycle as he walked in a set pattern around one block. And I was like... "oh, that is absolutely shocking for a game set in a city" and i'm someone who even enjoyed the game up to a point until it became unplayable with seemingly infinite crashes and game breaking elements at that stage. The NPCs always stood out as trash on a fundamental level. It clearly wasn't done for any reason other than to fake some background movement and noise and it was not good enough. At least in the Witcher 3 it was good voice talent saying silly sh**, which I love in games, too. It is comforting, and you know they had fun with it. But Cyberpunk just had boring, clearly unfinished NPCs that didn't add anything but mass. It might have even been they were using placeholder dialogue it was that bad 😅

At the end of the day, everything i've seen makes me think the open world is going to be another step forward in Rockstars massive catalogue of awesome game worlds. And it is going to make me notice when games don't do stuff right even more than ever (spider-man, for example the city is literally just a dollhouse type thing made to swing from point a to point b in. Miniature villages have more intigue in them 😅 And that is always my go to example of very good games, very bad open world) open world games should be limited to developers who are willing to make it a living world in at least a few ways: living NPCs or at least entertaining and interesting npcs, interactivity, wildlife, realistic things to do (not just collecting items) reactivity, emergent gameplay opportunities (stuff like Dragon's Dogma where things unfold around your gameplay independant of you) and if they don't meet at least a few of those, they should put all the budget into story design and cutscenes and gameplay within chapters or something more linear and driven, a smaller scale but very detailed in the more contained environment. The Last of Us is probably the prime example of that. Their world is amazing because it isn't an empty open world, and they could meticulously craft it to tell a story and make it real that way. But there is the potential that GTA is going to nail every single one of the requirements for a great open-world in one game, and in a bigger map, and at a ridiculously high quality and in a dense city setting (I must keep the hype in check, but just think about that for a second 😁😁😁)

Anyway, I've rambled enough. I can't wait for people to get a taste of the extended trailer themselves. Already seen a bunch of people say they have been won over, which in itself is impressive, considering nearly everyone has played a GTA game if they were even remotely interested by now, and yet even more people are getting won over by their execution.