A long take on immersion in GTA Online, and what the original intention was on how to play

[Neonlila]

Hello everyone, thank you for tuning in.

 

The original trailer and intention of GTA Online

 

I think most of us can agree that the

portrayed a completely different direction and game style than the game we can play right now.

The way I see it, the original direction was much more immersive, story-driven and similar to the single player mode.

You can see a heavy focus on cutscenes, peaceful freemode activities, cooperation and individual but simple characters.

You can practically feel Rockstar trying to make it sound as if you were a small part of a huge, organic criminal world, who has to slowly and desperately try climbing the criminal career ladder.

There were many easy ways to make money, but after all, you had to struggle to keep yourself alive and beat the competition, partly even with a crew of friends to do jobs together.

You were supposed to feel like just another thug on the streets, in total anonymity, as you slowly and gradually gain reputation and money.

 

And, in a way, you can also feel how the introduction to the game very much does follow that faithful path as well. You, a complete no-name, are introduced to the city by Lamar in a cutscene and recieve your first gun. It is so obvious the main focus of the game used to be slowly struggling to work yourself up the ladder! You were supposed to use that first gun to do the dirty work until you can afford better weaponry and easier jobs on a bigger scale.

You are taken to a street race and get to know Gerald as a contact to do small-time jobs and missions for, and naturally, I'd expect to continue working for Gerald until I get to know someone else and work for them, then.

 

Up to this point, the game does feel like a regular GTA game. Slow introduction, getting to know more and more criminal and notorious characters. You walk into mission checkpoints to start a mission -- you meet up with other racers. Lamar even tells you to get a proper car and tune it to win more races! (That, by the way, is completely irrelevant as you get any car you choose, in any race, for free!)

 

Then suddenly, that all is dropped and you are plopped into a vast game world without any story continuation. It's as if it was cut from the game entirely. No cutscenes anymore, no interesting story lines, no specialization on certain types of crime, nothing.

Sure, you get to know some new characters, but all they do is call you, a feature that is both under- and overutilized as you are constantly annoyed by faceless messages of restless NPCs telling you to play their missions.

 

From a world-focused crime simulator to an MMO "lobby-focused" shooter.

 

What GTA Online instead has become

 

Instead, GTA Online dropped the story parts and immersion completely, making all kinds of powerful DLC weapons available from level 0. Everything is gated behind money limits, but money is easily gained in this game. There is barely anything to spend your money on except REALLY EXPENSIVE goodies such as vehicles or real estate, which both are heavily overpriced. That, in turn, means everyone has access to extreme weaponry basically from the start, while actual gameplay is hidden behind grinding exclusively.

 

Don't get me wrong, I love motorcycle clubs, offices, bunkers and so on -- but all of the possible immersion R* even accounted for by making you able to sit down in your club house, play darts or hang around in general is completely ignored by the players as the game puts the focus only on grinding for money, as anything fun is gated behind it. If, at least, it was play time or story progression to gate higher-tier features, it would have been much better to start with.

 

Also, the focus on immersing yourself via jobs is completely gone. The game offers you to start jobs by stepping into a mission markers, but completely ignores the fact that you can just start a quick job without any immersion or story whatsoever. You can just choose a vehicle you don't own and go! You can buy ammunition from the lobby screen! You are carried from screen to screen to screen without even trying to make it seem immersive or organic. Players cease being characters and start becoming avatars for a game that is incredibly focused on the menu, lobbies and HUD features so that free mode stops seeming like the real deal but rather serves as a waiting room for players to start the next grind.

 

Simply put, the GTA Online "criminal life simulator" was dropped from the start and instead became a caricature of itself -- a game so focused on game-like features it forgets to stay a world.

 

List of things R* could have done to make GTA Online the "criminal life simulator" it was meant to be

 

These are in no particular order.

 

• Don't make Lester hide your blip from the radar. Make Lester reveal player blips for money and hide them by default. That stops unrealistic tracking of players unless you want to from a character perspective.
• Although it might be hard, remove quick jobs and job invitations, at least the way it is handled now. With such a focus on the internet app, you could expect a "job page" similar to Open Roads to find jobs to join; or rely on NPCs to give you the job invitations just as it is now and place you in a random lobby when you do. Maybe even with a short cutscene of all of you meeting. The markers would have a point, then.
• Gang relations! Be able to befriend or antagonize certain groups (using gang attacks, for example, or doing jobs for them to boost your influence). You could then retreat to friendly territory for them to defend you when you're preyed on by a player, or NPCs.
• Make players involved in missions. You have a bounty on your head? A lot of players will specifically join your game world to try and get that sweet money.
• Add a way to act as a mission provider yourself; if you're a MC president, you should be able to create a job, for example fetching a drug delivery -- the more difficult it is, the more money you get out of it if players complete it. Players could add you as their contact and join _your_ job instead of R*-made NPC missions. That is kind of done with the Bikers and Heists DLCs, but players barely use it immersively.
• Make the arms system significantly harder. Although it sounds bad at first, only being able to carry one small weapon and one large weapon at a time would give different weapons a point, larger vehicles a point and you could make cops react to open carrying heavy weaponry. It would certainly add more of a struggle being heavily armed at all times to the game, with high-level players having at least a disadvantage over low-levels as they then risk being caught by the cops.
• Stretch out the progression by gating content not that heavily behind money, but behind story progression or level.
• Give players an incentive to specialize. Make yourself a thug and thus get more or even exclusive gang-related jobs or even special contact abilities, while another player who specializes in high-class crime gets more or exclusive huge-scope stealth jobs and different, special contact abilities. Reward individuality, up your replayability.
• Make races custom-vehicle only, location-dependant and remove the class restrictions. Make the races we have right now (vehicle types, any car,...) something like "R* Races" or "professional races" and turn on the focus on tuner street racing. Would give more of an incentive tuning your vehicles and working towards becoming a professional racer in-character. Right now, everyone can specialize in everything. Make it harder but more rewarding to specialize!
• More players per lobby, but because the blips are hidden it makes the world seem more lively.
• Reward cooperation in free mode.
• CEO missions and biker missions are awesome because they are taking place in free mode and provide a way for small-time criminals to work for more notorious, higher-level players. Still, expand on this. Make entire missions, races, deathmatches in free mode. Because the blips are hidden, it shouldn't attract too many griefers.
• Add ways to actually be able to slip and lose progress. Make players scared of death. Lose all your weapons on death. Make players be able to rob you of the money you have in your hands.
• Make the voice chat location-based. The character already moves their mouth when you talk, but the entire map can hear it.
• Give high-level players access to tools that right now everybody has. Revealing blips, broadcasting job invitations, hiring players. A lot of this has already been expanded upon in the organized-crime-DLC. Would give levels a meaning and players can feel like a really small gangster or a really big boss.
• Although a lot of these have been about nerfing low-level players and buffing high-level players, also make it feel immersive and rewarding being a low level thug. It's easy to be killed, but you have the more exciting and street-like jobs, while high-level players usually don't, or have a lot to lose if they do. That way, both feel rewarded and it would give bodyguards, armed limos and more a point in the game if high level players want to feel the action themselves. Also acts as a way to drain multi-million bank accounts.

 

• In short: The more money you have, the more money you have to spend to secure it.
• If GTA Online focused on that simple thesis a little more, you'd have actual bodyguards and organizations that relied on their crewmen; you'd have a more balanced economy due to some rich people not making the cut in the end and losing a lot. Would give money a value and at the same time encourage you to spend it on securing it. Risk and reward. Rich and poor. Exactly what GTA V was meant to focus on.

 

• A STORY. Climb the career ladder!
• Individually tailored content for individual characters and play styles. Wanna be a biker? Here, have a few dozen biker missions you can do plus you can work your way up a club and become prez! Wanna be a gang member? Sure, have a lot of Gerald-style missions and maybe become a kingpin. Wanna be a hitman? Yea! Agent 14 gives you all the work you need. That adds replayability and curiosity what lies beyond, also would give you more possibilities to actually use the contact powers as they, too, could be specialized.
• Hide locked content until you unlock it. Why be able to see clothing you unlock in 20 levels? Just not make it available or visible to spark curiosity and encourage leveling.

 

 

 

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Edit: If you like this topic and would be interested to join a crew to make some of this reality, maybe consider shooting me a PM and I might open one up! Immersion-based light RP relying on what R* gave us.

Edited May 4, 2018 by Neonlila

[Yellow Dog with Cone]

Great topic!

 

I also agree that R* original vision of Online was more of a "living, evolving world", a rags-to-riches criminal simulator in similar vein to previous GTA games but said vision got lost in the process.

 

I may say that Import/Export was the last GTAO update with this vision, from Gunrunning onwards, the game started to become a literal arms race about who gets the new griefing machines first to f*ck up the rest of the playerbase.

 

Anyway, your list of suggestions is pretty good and while some of them aren't easily archiveable without rewriting whole lots of the game, I might add one thing:

 

- Make the updates follow a timeline of sorts. For example, completing either Prison Break Heist or The Humane Labs Raid (or both) introduces Bunkers as a game mechanic (I mean, Agent 14 directly says that he know "who we are" or something along those lines); completing the Series A Heist unlocks both Ron and Hangars, completing all Heists unlocks The Doomsday Heist and so on.

 

This way you make the player feel that he's rising up in the criminal underworld instead of all heists and businesses being disconected interactive pieces.

[Neonlila]

Is this a Bitch and Moan, a Gameplay Wishlist, a DLC Wishlist or all three?

It's a perspective on how I think the original game's direction was and how exactly the current game is different from that original scope.

 

I like GTA Online, but it's not exactly what I expected (or wished for).

[wizooord]

t'was supposed to be a bunch of randoms coming together in a rich immersive world and having fun, but it became a whack-a-mole of sorts, the hammer being cheaters and griefers, you as the mole and the "find a different session" button as the.. holes?

[Jenkiiii]

t'was supposed to be a bunch of randoms coming together in a rich immersive world and having fun, but it became a whack-a-mole of sorts, the hammer being cheaters and griefers, you as the mole and the "find a different session" button as the.. holes?

 

I agree. The first thing I do in freemode is check the list of participants for known griefers and griefing crews. I got hit by the orbital cannon last night while doing Sightseer! Although I think it's kind of funny that someone would spend 750k just to deprive me of 20k and get a kill, it's pretty indicative of everything that's wrong with the game right now. No logic, no sense, no thought about making money, just the need to get a kill at any price.

 

The idea behind freemode is a place where we can fully explore the map and do anything we want without being restricted to a gaming lobby governed by rules such as completing a heist, or competing in a race or an adversary mode, but that's not actually the way it is. We can't do what we want at all, and have to watch our backs and defend all the time.

 

One of the solutions in the future, when networking is improved and more players (perhaps hundreds) can enter a single session, is to remove blips. There will still be griefers waiting around every corner, lurking and pouncing, but at least there'd be a certain amount of anonymity. My thoughts.

[ALifeOfMisery]

IMO immersion is something online could have excelled in, but completely lacks.

 

As the game has been continuously focused towards making money, both in game for our character and irl for R*, aspects such as gameplay, enjoyment and immersion have suffered massively.

 

R*s intent on making freeroam a war zone has completely killed immersion. Unless of course you play as an all knowing billionaire sociopath, in which case I imagine one could easily lose themselves completely.

 

As Jenkiii said above, removing blips would be a huge step in the right direction, the game would be so much more immersive if no one knew where you were and likewise you had no idea who was around the next corner.

 

Progressive accomplishments would also help the cause. I'm not advocating that the money making aspects of the game should be removed, but not everything should be able to be achieved through having cash alone. How the original heists worked originally was a good example of this. You had to complete the missions to unlock the ability to purchase certain things if and when you had the cash.

 

This could have been extended as Voodoo Hendrix said, the freeroam businesses could have been locked behind completing certain missions. I'd go further, things like the penthouse apartments and stilt houses could have had their purchases locked behind story driven content. Maybe lock certain cars behind completing an amount of Simeon deliveries. I could go on.

 

On an off topic note, even though I'm not overly interested in the prospect of RDR2 Online, if the level of immersion that is hinted at being in SP is extended to RDR2O my interest will certainly rise. Because that's what I want from a R* game, to escape and get lost in it.

Edited May 4, 2018 by ALifeOfMisery

[REXX]

Technically, most of what has been mentioned is already in the game. Want to be a thug? Gerald, Lamar, rob stores. Want to be a biker? MC. Want to race? Easy.

 

Progression in the game is already existant. Rank wise its up to 130 and the rest is money.

 

The story is what the player wants it to be.

 

Its well written, but as I said, most is already there.

 

I will add that I am 100% agreeing with you regarding player blips!

[Neonlila]

Technically, most of what has been mentioned is already in the game. Want to be a thug? Gerald, Lamar, rob stores. Want to be a biker? MC. Want to race? Easy.

 

Progression in the game is already existant. Rank wise its up to 130 and the rest is money.

 

The story is what the player wants it to be.

 

Its well written, but as I said, most is already there.

 

I will add that I am 100% agreeing with you regarding player blips!

None of those though are properly integrated into the game. Nobody will find robbing stores and Gerald missions to be a fulfilling part of being a thug. It's just not enough content, and you can't get far doing those. It's just a stepping stone, a very small one.

[Veleno]

"making all kinds of powerful DLC weapons available from level 0"

 

this was a big mistake by R*. old players had to rank up for weapons that KIND OF work.

 

should've been and should be: Special Carbine rifle unlock at rank 110+. homing launcher at 200+

[vipprimo]

Although I do like what you're putting down I have to say online is EXACTLY what R* wanted. It just proved it with the money they made.

 

The crazy thing is they expected it to be player driven. I think that's a niave mistake that we all made so I'm not selling them short on it, but the reality is that what we got was exactly what they intended and instead of us doing something cool and creative with it we showed the chaos that is human nature.

 

That being said I like your ideas and I think you should keep saying them, but I don't think they'll work for GTA 5.

 

But just like GTA 4 to 5 expect Online to continue to evolve with input from players just like yourself and I can attest that they do listen!

[FlacidJack]

IMO they brought the best of the game updates (businesses) into the worst place possible, public sessions (only really due to the cheaters, at least on PC). You can't mix PvE with PvP with totally ruining the PvE imo, in fact I don't even bother shooting npcs since there's a chance they'll distact a real attacker just long enough so I can deliver.

 

After the original heists released R* definitely saw that players could easily beat the lucrative heists and the only enemy strong enough to make players fail at making big bucks, was other players (in easily accessible jets and other armed vehicles)

So now we're stuck playing against the toxic tryhards or cheating our way into a solo session to play online PvE alone... that's pathetic imo.

 

As for immersion, even if the story was really immersive I'm not a fan of getting yelled at by Lester as my friends and I try to talk and complete missions that are scripted for failure... whether by headshot, connection error or some other excuse for piss poor mission scripting.

The game isn't about the story anymore anyways, most players just want money so they can buy expensive toys and R* just want real money so they're job is to make in-game money hard to get. Neither is a worthy goal imo when it comes to gaming or designing games.

 

Don't get me wrong though, it's a really fun game to play when you just play for fun... but most people I play with these days only find it fun when they see their bank digits rise fast, it's a pity that such a beautiful game has come to this point, without a single expansion too, just drip fed toys that mostly existed since the game launched in 2013.

[Neonlila]

Although I do like what you're putting down I have to say online is EXACTLY what R* wanted. It just proved it with the money they made.

 

The crazy thing is they expected it to be player driven. I think that's a niave mistake that we all made so I'm not selling them short on it, but the reality is that what we got was exactly what they intended and instead of us doing something cool and creative with it we showed the chaos that is human nature.

 

That being said I like your ideas and I think you should keep saying them, but I don't think they'll work for GTA 5.

 

But just like GTA 4 to 5 expect Online to continue to evolve with input from players just like yourself and I can attest that they do listen!

It's maybe what the executives wanted, but the artists surely didn't.

[Aznknight]

Lol. It's still exactly the way the trailer describes your experience will be. Except maybe for being obliterated by an orbital strike

[Neonlila]

Lol. It's still exactly the way the trailer describes your experience will be. Except maybe for being obliterated by an orbital strike

Suuuure. "Get to know more characters" showing literally the only two cutscenes in the game. "Cruise around showing off", sure, as nobody has *no* incentive of killing you or any risk involving it whatsoever. Not even talking about free mode races, parachuting with friends...

 

Of course, it all technically is in the game, but it actively discourages you from using it!

[FlacidJack]

Lol. It's still exactly the way the trailer describes your experience will be. Except maybe for being obliterated by an orbital strike

t r i g g e r r r r e d

 

Jack collapses and has flashbacks to the original trailer... hears nothing but a deafening echoed loop of "PERSISTENT AND EVER-EXPANDING WORLD, PERSISTENT AND EVER-EXPANDING WORLD, PERSISTENT AND EVER-EXPANDING WORLD"

 

Jack snaps out of it... still on the same little lone island in an ever-stagnating ocean lacking anything remotely similar to persistence apart from the miriad of cheaters on the horizon owning everyone and everything in sight. Cargo explodes all around, chunks of rare tusks and clouds of burning narcotics fill the skies along with flying cars and motorcycles launching rocket after rocket with no cooldown!

 

Did jack wake up from the wet dream of a persistent ever-expanding world? Or is Jack stuck in an ever-changing nightmare with clowns and insidious smiles? Pinch me!

[HamwithCheese]

Immersion is all on you. Spawn from your bed, put on some shorts and boots, drive your jeep to the lake and...well that's it. And that's the REAL problem here. In terms of environment, its pretty much the same since launch, and your character barely interacts with it.

 

Eat at a restaurant. Fishing at a lake. Hunt. Pool, bowling, hell even just sitting down on the ground are ways you add immersion to the map.

[2Pacalypse Now]

Another problem is R* didn't bother to implement a free mode where players can't kill eachother like in GTA 4, I had so much fun in GTA 4 just messing around in the airport and interacting with random players because I COULD where as in GTA V it's basically a survival of the fittest.

[Pedinhuh]

Those who played this game from 2014 all the way to 2015 know what it was like, the game was unbalanced as hell(still is, but now we can have more of a fighting chance) and with tons of glitches...But goddamn it was immersive!

 

No meme vehicles whatsoever, those who wanted a jet had to steal it from the base(until the Hydra came and f*cked that up), no OP thermal vision, no need for explosive rounds, no constant adversary modes invites...

 

You really did started small, with nothing but a pistol and a free car that wasn't worth more than 100k, then had to do more mission to unlock more weapons, clothes and whatnot...Street racing was the most played activity and not this stunt race crap!

 

And then there were the vehicle classes...Besides Off-Road, Vans and Utility, all other vehicle classes were more less balanced.

 

The Adder had the highest top speed, but it handled like a boat so you needed the Entity XF for races with many corners, or if you just wanted a good all-rounder, the Zentorno was the best car for it...Any of those cars costed less than a million!

 

Best sports car? There was no best, it's was a very well balanced class, and the Elegy was a great all-rounder which you could get for free!

 

Best muscle? Dominator, Gauntlet or even the Sabre Turbo, again you could get these from the streets, hell I could make do with my old Bucanneer too.

 

Best Sedan? You had the Tailgater, Schafter, Warrener...Even the Fugitive was a decent car for racing, all free as well.

 

But now, this game is just a shadow of its former shelf...I mean we don't get missions invites anymore, we have to call our contact AND ASK them for a mission!

 

Today this game feels almost like Saints Row

Edited May 5, 2018 by Pedinhuh

[Commander S]

Today this game feels almost like Saints Row

 

As someone currently playing through Saints Row 2, with decent character customisation, safehouse customisation (similar to that for clubhouses - except SR2 did it eight years earlier...), etc., that wouldn't be a bad thing at all, IMO...

 

The problem I have with R* North's current attitude to GTAO is that the whole 'just what you choose to do is up to you' notion is more or less out of the window - with stuff like the Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack, it's made clear that R* expects players to own ALL THE THINGS. If you don't want to get saddled with military-grade bunkers and whatnot, then the game will nag you constantly every time you log in that you've not done so yet - and you'll be missing out on the majority of new content, since most of it is locked behind those purchases.

 

I feel there was a brief moment where it looked like they were going to let players choose what type of criminal they wanted to be, in the post-Heists 'endgame' status quo: that was Bikers, where they added a second organisation type and HQ, as a contrast to SecuroServ and CEOs. I was really hoping that they'd do the same for other styles of criminal enterprise (for instance, have bunkers be the HQs for 'PMCs', as a quasi-military thing), but instead, Import/Export was just ...an extension of CEO work. And then bunkers, hangars, facilities, etc. likewise became things tacked on to the SecuroServ and MC organisation types - because sure, it makes a lick of sense for some random biker gang to get given access to an army base...

 

 

I still think something like that would be possible, simply by adding different organisation themes to the game, that function in the same way as SecuroServ and MCs - choose the type of criminal organisation you want to run (big-money SecuroServ thing, biker gang, rogue militia, traditional heist crew, etc.), run it from the HQ property that suits your style (maybe by adding some alternatives to offices and clubhouses), and then pick and choose what operations you want to run (bunkers, hangars, maybe some new things), and likewise what you don't want to include. But again, R* seems to want ALL players to be 'ruler of San Andreas' at all times, owning everything everywhere ...even though everyone else also owns all the same stuff. Everyone's a generic, off-brand Devin Weston these days, because R* want to sell expensive toys to players, even at the cost of setting and verisimilitude.

Edited May 5, 2018 by Commander S

[Willy A. Jeep]

Hahah, wow, I typed a page out for you guys. I'll put it in a spoiler because I really don't want my head to roll for making a post longer than the Divine Comedy.

 

 

 

I have long resisted playing into Rockstar's premade image of the GTA Online Protagonist. Flint's a getaway driver and occasional gun for hire, not the owner of some multi-million company or a Motorcycle Club president. Sam's a two-bit gangster who slings mary-jane and street races for a living, not an agent for the IAA or a friend of Lester Crest. I was originally drawn to Online for that promise of a player-made experience in an evolving criminal environment that had already been fun to play in with the completely scripted Singleplayer.

 

Well, it is still player-made, huh? And ever-evolving. But, damn, it seems like it really devolved from the image of perfection we were looking at back in 2013. Silly, we all are, for imagining that it could ever be so perfect - whatever that might mean to any of us - but it really burns since it seems we're even further from the fun experience we expected.

 

I'll get my criticisms of your post out of the way first, Neonlila. It's well written and I greatly appreciate the topic! But the idea of locking content off, especially by level... I imagine that would turn away more players than it's worth. Voodoo-Hendrix (who I should really thank for liking so many of my posts) has the right idea when it comes to mission-locked things - story progression makes a lot of sense for an immersive, story-driven experience! - but making people grind levels and money is the opposite of what good game design is. I've long preferred game design that is more inclusive, less user-hostile, and Rockstar has atleast made the game accessible to anybody with the cash. I don't think it's a good idea to make folks work to have fun the way they want to, especially in an open-world sandbox crime game like GTA. Rockstar has done this a lot already, with locks on cars, paywalls in the guise of properties, et cetera, and it's all offensive to me. People didn't like having to do petty side-missions to unlock basic functionality in previous games, and that was mostly done away with in V and Online. For special abilities, sure - effort and reward, but the idea of a gun or a house being kept from peoples' hands with no good reason is really lame. Another, smaller critique that's more of a suggestion is that, with the "no blips" idea, friends and crew should still be visible without paying. Just make it easier, and optional like car access.

 

The OP sounds like a lot of structure being applied over a game that traditionally allowed a huge amount of freedom, and I dislike that. But structure added on for those who want it, and where it's needed which, too, is lacking, is a grand idea.

 

OK, with that out of the way, I'll get to my criticisms of Rockstar and my ideas on the subject. This is already getting to be a long post, so, uh... sorry? It's going to get longer.

 

On the whole, I think Rockstar mismanaged Online from the outset. From the drawing board. From conception! A very basic problem of GTA in a multiplayer environment is that, unlike so many other games, GTA draws in millions of players who all want to play their own way. The series is the premier open-world sandbox - so much so that many other games have been called "GTA clones" or "GTA-likes" - and that position means it is flocked to for its mastery of the style. You can explore, you can race, you can shoot, you can fly, you can follow the story, you can watch TV, you can play card games and darts and golf and tennis and and and... It's a whole load of games packed into a single, $60 package. But this doesn't play well with the multiplayer aspect, even with just a few dozen players on a rather expansive map. Six might want to just enjoy their time alone, cruising along the highways, and two might want to be goofing off in a friendly 1v1, but three might be looking for a bit of combat, to test out their new super-duper-death-copter. That can turn nasty real quick, but it's what the game always has been. Do anything you want. Unfortunately, now you're not just wiping lines of code off the map, but you're wasting the actual lifetime of some other human being. And people HATE having their their time wasted, their fun ruined.

 

GTA has always been about the pursuit of the American Dream and the Almighty Dollar. Further, the focus has always either been very story-driven or very player-driven - either you're following along with the characters on their quest, or you're just doing your own thing in the world. Online leads in like it has structure, then drops it and loses focus. This causes players to have a whole bunch of freedom, but doesn't really work without some structure to it to make it fun and interesting as time goes on. Unlike when you're following a story, you're just left waiting for a lucky break, getting pummeled by people who've been around longer. Chasing money can be rewarding - that's the entire point - but it's easily a dry, tedious endeavor, and Online has drawn out the pursuit so long that people are surprised when they think of something new to reward players with. The goal of the American Dream has fallen by the wayside as Rockstar has attempted to make this pursuit the never-ending focus, rather than making it the fun journey to something better. A finite singleplayer game can find ways to be new and unexpected when its final goal has been achieved, but Online doesn't have anything like that. It's just more time and effort with little reward beyond more time and effort.

 

I think the game has been horrendously imbalanced since launch. Further depth in this is discussed below, of course, but this is the generality of it. Things like explosive rounds in jets (and now guns...), the abundance of explosives, and ridiculously accessible nature of most aircraft doesn't make for a fun experience in the game as-it-is. This plays against some of my other ideas a little bit, and I know Rockstar loves their over-the-top criminal empire caricatures in all the games, but it doesn't make for a fun experience in multiplayer. We should never have been given access to so much military hardware, and of the things that could feasibly be balanced AND make sense, they'd need to be of that story-unlocked idea. The original Heists did just that, but the relative cheapness of the Hydra and its dexterity in combat made it a regular nightmare. The armoured Kuruma (and other armoured vehicles in general) shouldn't have included the ability to shoot out of them, because it just doesn't make any sense and it plays against the point of them being "turtle" options. Defense at the cost of offense.

 

Since the introduction of different lobby types, I have been a staunch supporter of another such specification: PvP and PvE lobbies, separated. With the current build of Online, the idea has been that PvE lobbies would have lower payouts for freeroam missions, as a penalty for having no player competition, while PvE lobbies would have no passive mode and HUGE restrictions upon oft-abused systems like OTR and EWO. Time and money, to discourage the abuse. However, if the game were to have taken on a more RPG (role-playing game, fellas) approach, with the story-driven experience, much livelier world, more interactive characters, I imagine it would be more of an option: Select "Enable PvP" in the interaction menu (what a vile thing) to do just that, and now you can be damaged by other players because you want to be. If not, you're obviously looking for partners and friends to play cooperatively.

 

Of course, I'm of the understanding that it's still a game, and that some things are tedious and not fun. I've always liked how Rockstar allows the player to call their cars and they arrive quickly, though it could certainly be more restricted. But when it comes to Pegasus... I wouldn't have minded having a hangar for planes and a pier for boats from the very start, like in singleplayer. Since aircraft can easily overpower land-based vehicles, it makes sense to restrict them in a somewhat realistic way. Concierge for land-based vehicles that are too large or specialized makes sense, sure, but again, the delivery system is kinda strange. Most vehicles could be placed near the player, and a select few should have specific spawns - Dump, Rhino - because they're specialized. I'm pretty comfortable with the ability to carry a bunch of weapons at once, but I'd also just be as happy with a single weapon from each category. It would stink to be locked down by a far-distance enemy because you've got only a single rifle slot, and you chose an SMG instead of a sniper, but allowing everybody only one type of weapon of each class could be a happy medium. Create a need for tactics while not limiting players' ability too far. Some weapons should have been handled differently - especially the launcher-type weapons, which needed to be more-or-less "one shot, one kill" tide-turners than spammable death-tubes. The Homing Launcher certainly makes more sense as a playing field leveler, with extreme accuracy and near certainty of ending an aircraft's flight, but only one-shot before having to be reloaded at an Ammunation. Armour should have cost more and done more, but also made the player slower, be unavailable in vehicles, and be a single-use before needing to be purchased again at Ammunation.

 

Power creep works, but it's hard to master, and I think Rockstar has NEVER done it well, and the current system isn't an exception. Every single one of the games has seen hard jumps and bizarre happenings that (rather clumsily) come together to give the player crazy power or beat them down back to nothing. The former isn't fun, because you feel like you didn't really earn anything, and the latter isn't fun, because you wasted so much effort. Which might work in a scripted story, but in a multiplayer game, it's just awful. Think of V's singleplayer: Trevor thinks he's going to get a huge payday from hijacking the Merryweather shipment, but loses it, but that's OK because the story has more heists in store. Then compare that to doing a heist in Online: You think you're going to get a huge payday from Pacific Standard, but then a member fails in some way, and then somebody leaves, and then it's time to go to work and you have no certainty if you'll even get anything for your time and effort. This is why I don't like the "lose everything" idea - it kills the mood, and drives players who just want to have fun away. The concept sounds cool on paper, but really isn't when you experience it. The ideal for me is that you don't "fail," necessarily, but like the Pacific Standard finale, you lose bits of payout when you die in a mission, so you can keep trying and get better and earn the rewards at the end, and the next mission is just a little bit harder, slowly introducing new features like sneaking or hacking, rather than Rockstar's established, oddly-jumpy difficulty that goes "drive a truck, then invade an air force base, now sneak through somebody's yard, next steal a helicopter, and then blow up fifteen specific cars in three minutes". It's all very incongruous, which is bad for both gameplay and immersion.

 

And, on that, immersion! It's in the name of the topic and I'm just now getting to it. Ah, well. This part, obviously, is going to be more biased, but that's immersion for you. Catering to the player.

 

I very much fell in love with GTA IV's Liberty City. The way everything felt so alive and interactive and like the world recognized you as special while not doing you any favors was a perfect experience for the game. Barring the aforementioned jumpiness of difficulty and plot, the world and characters that lived therein were amazing, even when I had to suspend my disbelief. GTA San Andreas and V have always felt more shallow and cartoonish to me - and that's not bad for what they wanted to be - but Liberty City and its people felt like they were... real, in their own way. Like these were people with more to them than characters in a story, and the buildings and streets were a world where wind blows and sun shines and people live and die. The little details of being able to take Niko and Johnny and Luis into buildings and alleys and up elevators all around the city made it feel so much more like I was exploring a city than the more cardboard facsimile that Los Santos has always felt like. I've sometimes imagined that it was intentional on Rockstar's part to make LS feel more vapid - a critique on Los Angeles and Hollywood, as if it "sold out" or somesuch - and the story being more slim was clearly deliberate - a tribute to action films more than GTA IV's love letter to crime drama. But, for those of us who like to be able to feel and get to know a world on some personal level, Los Santos just didn't quite click. I still think it's fantastically designed, of course - being able to scale all these buildings, know the streets, discover all the little nooks and crannies is just as fun as it was in IV, but it's not quite to the same level of reality. That being said, I didn't like IV's gamey tendency to hide certain vehicles and weapons in secret places that didn't make much sense. V and Online have stepped away from that, somewhat.

 

It's clear that, somewhere along the line, Rockstar wanted Online's world to be interactive and reactive. We can use ATMs, visit stores, use furniture, et cetera. But it all falls by the wayside when there's systems in place that make these pointless. We shouldn't need an interaction menu for anything more than technical reasons - like getting stuck and needing to respawn, vehicle access settings, or spawn locations - rather, most of these could have been handled by the phone menu. Maze Bank's website should have been used to share money with players, ATMs used for actually banking money. Business management, whatever that might be in this concept of an Online-that-is-not, should be able to be accessed from anywhere. Even the GPS could have been through the phone rather than the pause menu - that could even streamline the feature, having quick options and the full map together. Health could have regenerated completely while in player homes. On a grander scale, we could have had more social environments, like Bahama Mamas and Split Sides, much like the Vanilla Unicorn, but with minigames like dancing, drinking, and fighting. Lowrider challenges! Foot races! Triathlons! Actual car shows! It's a whole load of wasted potential.

 

Too, I'll bring up the example of the games that got me interested in GTA: The Saints Row series. Yes, yes, loathe me all you want, but I wouldn't be on these forums if not for those games. Saints Row 1 and 2 were set in a city called Stilwater, a sort-of mixture of Detroit and Miami, with little bits of other American cities thrown in. The first game was pretty simple - a sort-of knock-off San Andreas with a less emotional story, fun but not anything revolutionary - but Saints Row 2 went all-out. Stilwater became a place of secrets and unspoken detail, with loads of explorable interiors, a wide variety of different, unique boroughs, a plethora of (mostly) enjoyable side activities (including GTA classics like taxi, firefighter, and EMT diversions), and host to a storyline that very finely treaded the line between silly and serious. While the missions were not always perfect for difficulty development - sometimes easy enemies that can be gunned down, sometimes bosses that require timing and QTEs - there was always some reward that helped bring the player up the power ladder at a consistent rate. Saints Row 3 and 4 did lose some of the better qualities of the first two games, and the city of Steelport in both feels much like Los Santos to me - more a facade for the sake of a setting than a city where a story happens to take place - but they still kept a sense of good pacing and power creep unlike GTA, though the power creep was more like a power sprint. Cooperative gameplay in SR2 and the next two installments has generated some of the best goof-off play sessions with friends I've had in years.

 

I'm sure I have more to say, but I can't think of more right now. In short, I think GTA Online really needs a complete overhaul to be on par with other games with better focus and development. To be fun, a lot of changes would need to be made to long-standing systems. To be immersive, huge changes to the world and the way players are able to interact with it would have to come to pass. A structured, expanding story within the sandbox can be great, but it can't defeat the world it lives in.

 

We're not exactly too far off from a player-driven experience or an ever-evolving world, but damn, it's like a dystopian version of a utopia we all once glimpsed.

 

 

[fw3]

 

Is this a Bitch and Moan, a Gameplay Wishlist, a DLC Wishlist or all three?

It's a perspective on how I think the original game's direction was and how exactly the current game is different from that original scope.

Actually, your perspective is a B!tch & Moan AND a Gameplay Wishlist AND a DLC Wishlist AND an opinion piece, all in one.

 

Removing words like, "think," "believe," "feel," and "the way I see it" may better reveal the facts of your case.

 

Anyone who's played prior versions of the game had fair expectations of GTAV/O.

The only unexpected aspect, likely was the prominent role microtransactions would have.

 

No offense, but everything else shows a lack of scope for what a company will do to maintain its foothold in the marketplace.

Rockstar has clearly done extremely well with GTAV/O, as is evident in that we're still discussing it after 5 years.

 

Just my 2¢. Cheers.

Edited May 5, 2018 by fw3

[Snoopbr]

"Or simply cruise around, showing off." LOL.
*I wish we could see Police Cruisers and Police Buffalos during missions.

Edited May 5, 2018 by Snoopbr

[CosmicBuffalo]

One very immersive yet way overlooked feature is impromtu races. If you can get someone to do them, they are fun. The payout are terrible though. They should have the payouts quadrupled to encourge players to play them. One on one dms, everyone can see you, buy you cant see them, those need a fix. The old freemode events should be readded. They pretty much left those in the dust. They tried to go this route buts implementation stutered in favor of heists. Freeroam should have more businesses open to rob or simply perform an activity like golf where you do not have to load into another lobby. If interrupt someone you get badsported immediately.

[P_Death]

I think one of the things missing is choices in missions. Especially ones that affect your character long term.

 

How would it be if there wasn't just Agent 14, but several fractions we could be producing weapons for with the bunker. And we had to chose one, and it would have consequences for who we would face in freeroam and how people would react.

 

Also we could have many more actual multi-part stories. The Doomsday Heist is currently the only thing in Online that comes close.

 

How if you could permanently kill a character like Trevor or Martin or Simeon, and from then on they would not be available to you, unless you had a time-travelling Deluxo?

 

I used to play City of Heroes/Villains. There are some things relevant to this discussion from that game:

- There was an alignment system, where your actions determined if you were a Hero, Villain or somewhere in between (Vigilante, Rogue), and it had an affect on how for example the cops would treat you. Imagine having to chose between a $200.000 payout and saving a character (and getting further missions). For how much would you let Lester die permanently?

- It had a lot of good stories. I think it had hundreds Doomsday Heist sized stories and some even bigger ones, sometimes with multiple endings. It also had a mission and story builder and about 200.000 player created story lines.

- You could arrange your own apartment/base. Not a preset of 4-9 choices, but you could pick from about 100.000 items with models in the game and put your own furniture, room layout, etc. Imagine if you could do that for your Motor Club or CEO Office.

 

I also used to play World of Warcraft, it also has some features that would help:

- Fractions. Sometimes opposing ones. Imagine having to chose between The Lost and The Ballas. It might even affect what cars you can have, clothes you can wear, buildings you can access...

- It has fasing, where what and who you see in the world depends on what you have done.

Edited May 11, 2018 by P_Death

[vipprimo]

 

Although I do like what you're putting down I have to say online is EXACTLY what R* wanted. It just proved it with the money they made.

 

The crazy thing is they expected it to be player driven. I think that's a niave mistake that we all made so I'm not selling them short on it, but the reality is that what we got was exactly what they intended and instead of us doing something cool and creative with it we showed the chaos that is human nature.

 

That being said I like your ideas and I think you should keep saying them, but I don't think they'll work for GTA 5.

 

But just like GTA 4 to 5 expect Online to continue to evolve with input from players just like yourself and I can attest that they do listen!

It's maybe what the executives wanted, but the artists surely didn't.

 

 

Artists? What artistry do we have here? No offense directed toward you at all, but this is a money making venture. If you want artistry then build a free app. Every single programmer, every single designer, every single photographer, artist, you name it, didn't get up to not feed their kids. There are no artists at R*. Sure, there are people who are very proud of their work as well they should be, but not one of them said, "all good, I don't need compensation for that 100 hours a week I worked getting your product out."

 

If you'd like to point out what artists there are I would be happy to discuss that, but let's not just say "a bunch of executives are forcing people to make money" because that's laughable at best.

 

If we're every going to see ANY change in this game it'll be with our wallets. We can talk about how we, "the good players" if you will, know what a better game is all day, but chances are we're not as smart as we think we are. When games like Forza introduce Hot Wheels tracks right after GTA adds Stunt Races then I'm thinking we're in the minority.

 

That being said, I still think we can all get what we want while getting a game that has replay ability and I think R* is 100% into that because although they have success right now they know it's because of kids who are suppose to be too young to play the game spending mom's money on cash cards so they can destroy freeroams. If we can get a story, one that we can repeat and play whenever we want, whichever part we want, that unlocks stuff as we go along, that's dynamic based on how much you dedicate to it, e.g. reward players who are loyal, then I think we'll have something that any player can "invest" in.

 

Heck, I still play this game now but it's because of an environment I created and a bunch of like-minded people jumped on board and made it happen. If I can get R* to do that then life will be beautiful because I'm betting the majority of gamers aren't building up their "weed" business.