Do you assume all enemies "killed" are truly dead?

[LucidLocomotive]

In daddy's girl mission, when Michael pops the f-word haggler on the jetski, he mentions maybe he's only injured, and not necessarily passed away. I wonder if he could be onto something here. Like for instance, in the missions like Blitz Play, or the Paleto Score, is it your belief that every officer who we get the red "X" for, who goes down, is truly dead? Or, do you think the majority of them are simply put out of the fight where they will later receive medical treatment and make it out alive? At least in GTAIV, injured people would be visibly alive and injured and finished fighting, but in V we have to use our imagination. Now keep in mine im talking in terms of canon here. In this universe, truly, did the trio really kill all those cops with ZERO injuries, all deaths?
 

[cp1dell]

Michael killed people in front of his daughter. This is immediately following a conversation where Jimmy berates him for killing people in front of him days before. He’s trying to sweep it under the rug and say “no, he’s not really dead.”

 

What I wanna know is are you and your friends going to pay Ian Melcher some more? I really want to see what scoops he gives you guys.

[universetwisters]

I mean if I shot someone in the head with a rocket launcher I'm pretty certain there's no recourse from that

[slimeball supreme]

On 7/14/2022 at 4:26 AM, LucidLocomotive said:

Now keep in mine im talking in terms of canon here. In this universe, truly, did the trio really kill all those cops with ZERO injuries, all deaths?

im surprised this is being taken as such an obvious question/answer in all honesty. give my thanks to ian melcher

 

one thing that has struck me about rockstar game design, especially as of rdr2, is the tendency to overcompensate for player health and auto aim by inflating the enemy count. usually level design in the open world setting is done by populating an entire city block with an enemy count in the double digits, sometimes in several stages. when you actually try and pay attention to this number it can become a legitimately absurd venture. in rdr2 a lot of people actually complained about this, and i agree with them. you have to use this logic to kind of just assume its a 'gameplay only' thing and either a vast majority of those hit are wounded or in the reality of the story its just a lot less people. the latter mainly just so we dont ascribe our lovely protagonists as functionally sadistic serial killers but instead wanton spree killers - much more admirable trait

 

you bring up both the paleto score and blitz play, and i think the latter is a fantastic example of this - it also has my least favorite rockstar 'end mission' objective out of any. towards the end you have to kill as many cops as possible before the police 'give up' and leave you alone: this would never, ever happen. this also applies to tbogt where its used a few times. you end up killing around fifty police officers over an armored truck in arguably one of the lesser prioritized missions of the game. there is an entire word for a criminal who has killed a police officer - cop killer - and its met with such a huge amount of disdain and malice. usually when a 'cop killer' is a fugitive the entire area will lock down and they will search with everything they have: no knock raids, random car searches. killing a police officer is such a big deal most criminal organizations have de facto rules against it - when gus farace killed a single DEA agent in the late 1980s the new york city mafia was pestered by the federal government to such a degree they put an active hit out on the guy (which the mob beat the police to, they killed the kid with buckshot to the face). when kiki camarena, another DEA agent, got tortured and killed by the mexican cartel, this actively sabotaged american foreign policy. cops are known for being highly protective of their own

 

so we're left with two options. the dumber of the two is just to say "dont think too hard" - our trio commit some of the worst mass shootings against the police in american history, and this doesnt even break the front page. we can say 'boo hoo this is actually satire' because satire is a buzzword that means whatever you want, but it would make much more 'satirical' sense for the police to lock down the entire metropolitan area over a single cop getting a stubbed toe. the LAPD shut down the city over chris dorner shooting a challenge coin: they put protection details on the families of cops, they got so piss scared they riddled a newspaper delivery van with one hundred bullets, they burned the man's cabin down. and the actual heists these missions in question are based on ended with few fatalities for the law: neil mccauley's gang just executed three private security guards at point blank because waingro got his ego bruised, and the north hollywood shootout only ended with the bodybuilder perps dying after exchanging like 50 bazillion rounds

 

the other option here is just that 'canonically' we can ascribe only a few real deaths unless explicitly mentioned. in the case of the jetski, if you pop bobo and his buddy, you could say those two guys likely got killed. but its 'canon' aside that they dont: either way tracy gets a pissed off message on her facebook from the guy in question, with the characters face as the profile picture, so we can rest assured the canon route is michael outmaneuvered them. this becomes straight up comical when gta online (not canon anyway) brings up guys in storymode you saw get shot point blank, or blew up with a sticky bomb in the supposedly canon ending (what a fun word canon is! canon canon canon!). so i think this option is perfectly reasonable to presume! having 150 people die in a week is a little excessive, and we can already assume michael running over poodles on little portola or having a special ability to freeze time are also 'not canon'

 

so yeah. im of the opinion that in most cases, a lot less people are 'canonically' dying than the gameplay feedback we get to make a shootout feel punchy and fun, at least with the rockstar method. IV has an inbuilt way of showing this, whereas you just kind of have to think it when it comes to mowing down 45 poor black kids shooting you in self defense on grove street. this is bolstered by the fact that ingame newspapers speak in vague terms when it comes to mission body counts

 

as a brief aside: ive always been of the opinion that trevor's rampages are flat out just 'fantasies'. the screen color changes, the music changes, the bodies despawn almost instantly, there are no repercussions, and toward the end the enemies become absurd (killing 50 military guys or a bunch of hipsters on fixies with sawn off shotguns somehow). its a funnier image to just imagine trevor limply glaring at someone for mocking him and either taking out solely those two guys or imagining them and their friends all dying while driving home

[olzhas1one]

This isn't quite exactly the point of the topic, but what pissed me off on my recent playthrough is that the Taser and the cop Baton are pretty much novelty weapons. A lot of the time, if you taze someone, they can drop on the floor dead and bleed, the tazer's range is so piss-poor that it makes it practically useless. You can also somehow kill someone with the baton by smacking them in the arm, which also surprised me. I guess I was stupid for thinking that Rockstar would finally give you a proper "non-lethal" way of completing the game. What was the point of even putting these weapons in the game then?

 

What partircularly bothered me the most is when I got to the first Solomon's mission, where you have to beat up Rocco on the roof, I tried tazing him and beating him up with the baton, which both resulted in me failing the mission, with the game saying Rocco died(!?). Apperantly you need to precisely beat him up with your bare hands, and no way else. I was so baffled and annoyed by this I've started to think how did people eat this sh*t up. This, right here, is precisely what I do not want to see in GTA 6. I even have screenshots of these things.

 

Edited July 15 by olzhas1one

[Americana]

Maybe that's why police is so deadly in Grand Theft Auto V.

Edited July 17 by Americana

[DeltaV20]

In LCS Toni kills Miguel and the game shows him perfectly dead but well he survives and comebacks in gta III / advance 

[Datalvarezguy]

3 hours ago, DeltaV20 said:

In LCS Toni kills Miguel and the game shows him perfectly dead but well he survives and comebacks in gta III / advance 

I always found this to be the worst (or second worse, The church mission is a close contender) story aspect of any GTA until V. Miguel is literally KILLED BY YOU for no good reason, then you just have to assume he got better. He was surrounded by fifty f*cking cops. He wouldn't have survived that.

 

[LucidLocomotive]

On 7/13/2022 at 5:02 PM, cp1dell said:

Michael killed people in front of his daughter. This is immediately following a conversation where Jimmy berates him for killing people in front of him days before. He’s trying to sweep it under the rug and say “no, he’s not really dead.”

 

What I wanna know is are you and your friends going to pay Ian Melcher some more? I really want to see what scoops he gives you guys.

Oh yes. Keep tuned for more coming soon, and thanks for the support!

[LucidLocomotive]

15 hours ago, slimeball supreme said:

im surprised this is being taken as such an obvious question/answer in all honesty. give my thanks to ian melcher

 

one thing that has struck me about rockstar game design, especially as of rdr2, is the tendency to overcompensate for player health and auto aim by inflating the enemy count. usually level design in the open world setting is done by populating an entire city block with an enemy count in the double digits, sometimes in several stages. when you actually try and pay attention to this number it can become a legitimately absurd venture. in rdr2 a lot of people actually complained about this, and i agree with them. you have to use this logic to kind of just assume its a 'gameplay only' thing and either a vast majority of those hit are wounded or in the reality of the story its just a lot less people. the latter mainly just so we dont ascribe our lovely protagonists as functionally sadistic serial killers but instead wanton spree killers - much more admirable trait

 

you bring up both the paleto score and blitz play, and i think the latter is a fantastic example of this - it also has my least favorite rockstar 'end mission' objective out of any. towards the end you have to kill as many cops as possible before the police 'give up' and leave you alone: this would never, ever happen. this also applies to tbogt where its used a few times. you end up killing around fifty police officers over an armored truck in arguably one of the lesser prioritized missions of the game. there is an entire word for a criminal who has killed a police officer - cop killer - and its met with such a huge amount of disdain and malice. usually when a 'cop killer' is a fugitive the entire area will lock down and they will search with everything they have: no knock raids, random car searches. killing a police officer is such a big deal most criminal organizations have de facto rules against it - when gus farace killed a single DEA agent in the late 1980s the new york city mafia was pestered by the federal government to such a degree they put an active hit out on the guy (which the mob beat the police to, they killed the kid with buckshot to the face). when kiki camarena, another DEA agent, got tortured and killed by the mexican cartel, this actively sabotaged american foreign policy. cops are known for being highly protective of their own

 

so we're left with two options. the dumber of the two is just to say "dont think too hard" - our trio commit some of the worst mass shootings against the police in american history, and this doesnt even break the front page. we can say 'boo hoo this is actually satire' because satire is a buzzword that means whatever you want, but it would make much more 'satirical' sense for the police to lock down the entire metropolitan area over a single cop getting a stubbed toe. the LAPD shut down the city over chris dorner shooting a challenge coin: they put protection details on the families of cops, they got so piss scared they riddled a newspaper delivery van with one hundred bullets, they burned the man's cabin down. and the actual heists these missions in question are based on ended with few fatalities for the law: neil mccauley's gang just executed three private security guards at point blank because waingro got his ego bruised, and the north hollywood shootout only ended with the bodybuilder perps dying after exchanging like 50 bazillion rounds

 

the other option here is just that 'canonically' we can ascribe only a few real deaths unless explicitly mentioned. in the case of the jetski, if you pop bobo and his buddy, you could say those two guys likely got killed. but its 'canon' aside that they dont: either way tracy gets a pissed off message on her facebook from the guy in question, with the characters face as the profile picture, so we can rest assured the canon route is michael outmaneuvered them. this becomes straight up comical when gta online (not canon anyway) brings up guys in storymode you saw get shot point blank, or blew up with a sticky bomb in the supposedly canon ending (what a fun word canon is! canon canon canon!). so i think this option is perfectly reasonable to presume! having 150 people die in a week is a little excessive, and we can already assume michael running over poodles on little portola or having a special ability to freeze time are also 'not canon'

 

so yeah. im of the opinion that in most cases, a lot less people are 'canonically' dying than the gameplay feedback we get to make a shootout feel punchy and fun, at least with the rockstar method. IV has an inbuilt way of showing this, whereas you just kind of have to think it when it comes to mowing down 45 poor black kids shooting you in self defense on grove street. this is bolstered by the fact that ingame newspapers speak in vague terms when it comes to mission body counts

 

as a brief aside: ive always been of the opinion that trevor's rampages are flat out just 'fantasies'. the screen color changes, the music changes, the bodies despawn almost instantly, there are no repercussions, and toward the end the enemies become absurd (killing 50 military guys or a bunch of hipsters on fixies with sawn off shotguns somehow). its a funnier image to just imagine trevor limply glaring at someone for mocking him and either taking out solely those two guys or imagining them and their friends all dying while driving home

Thank you! This is exactly the kind of discussion I love to have and was attempting to get going. I love how GTA IV has the “injured” state for NPCs, so you can literally get through the three leaf clover heist with only 2 or 3 deaths occurring. I really hope they bring that back for GTAVI. Also I agree about the Trevor rampages. I’ve always thought that they were hallucinations or daydreams since I first played them. First of all, they always start with the guys provoking it running away from Trevor, and the rest of the people come out of thin air, and then disappear. Also the screen effect and all that makes them seem like they are in the same category as Barry weed hallucinations. Also just the fact that we know from dialogue and character switches that Trevor does have all kinds of hallucinations and episodes

[LucidLocomotive]

18 hours ago, slimeball supreme said:

im surprised this is being taken as such an obvious question/answer in all honesty. give my thanks to ian melcher

 

one thing that has struck me about rockstar game design, especially as of rdr2, is the tendency to overcompensate for player health and auto aim by inflating the enemy count. usually level design in the open world setting is done by populating an entire city block with an enemy count in the double digits, sometimes in several stages. when you actually try and pay attention to this number it can become a legitimately absurd venture. in rdr2 a lot of people actually complained about this, and i agree with them. you have to use this logic to kind of just assume its a 'gameplay only' thing and either a vast majority of those hit are wounded or in the reality of the story its just a lot less people. the latter mainly just so we dont ascribe our lovely protagonists as functionally sadistic serial killers but instead wanton spree killers - much more admirable trait

 

you bring up both the paleto score and blitz play, and i think the latter is a fantastic example of this - it also has my least favorite rockstar 'end mission' objective out of any. towards the end you have to kill as many cops as possible before the police 'give up' and leave you alone: this would never, ever happen. this also applies to tbogt where its used a few times. you end up killing around fifty police officers over an armored truck in arguably one of the lesser prioritized missions of the game. there is an entire word for a criminal who has killed a police officer - cop killer - and its met with such a huge amount of disdain and malice. usually when a 'cop killer' is a fugitive the entire area will lock down and they will search with everything they have: no knock raids, random car searches. killing a police officer is such a big deal most criminal organizations have de facto rules against it - when gus farace killed a single DEA agent in the late 1980s the new york city mafia was pestered by the federal government to such a degree they put an active hit out on the guy (which the mob beat the police to, they killed the kid with buckshot to the face). when kiki camarena, another DEA agent, got tortured and killed by the mexican cartel, this actively sabotaged american foreign policy. cops are known for being highly protective of their own

 

so we're left with two options. the dumber of the two is just to say "dont think too hard" - our trio commit some of the worst mass shootings against the police in american history, and this doesnt even break the front page. we can say 'boo hoo this is actually satire' because satire is a buzzword that means whatever you want, but it would make much more 'satirical' sense for the police to lock down the entire metropolitan area over a single cop getting a stubbed toe. the LAPD shut down the city over chris dorner shooting a challenge coin: they put protection details on the families of cops, they got so piss scared they riddled a newspaper delivery van with one hundred bullets, they burned the man's cabin down. and the actual heists these missions in question are based on ended with few fatalities for the law: neil mccauley's gang just executed three private security guards at point blank because waingro got his ego bruised, and the north hollywood shootout only ended with the bodybuilder perps dying after exchanging like 50 bazillion rounds

 

the other option here is just that 'canonically' we can ascribe only a few real deaths unless explicitly mentioned. in the case of the jetski, if you pop bobo and his buddy, you could say those two guys likely got killed. but its 'canon' aside that they dont: either way tracy gets a pissed off message on her facebook from the guy in question, with the characters face as the profile picture, so we can rest assured the canon route is michael outmaneuvered them. this becomes straight up comical when gta online (not canon anyway) brings up guys in storymode you saw get shot point blank, or blew up with a sticky bomb in the supposedly canon ending (what a fun word canon is! canon canon canon!). so i think this option is perfectly reasonable to presume! having 150 people die in a week is a little excessive, and we can already assume michael running over poodles on little portola or having a special ability to freeze time are also 'not canon'

 

so yeah. im of the opinion that in most cases, a lot less people are 'canonically' dying than the gameplay feedback we get to make a shootout feel punchy and fun, at least with the rockstar method. IV has an inbuilt way of showing this, whereas you just kind of have to think it when it comes to mowing down 45 poor black kids shooting you in self defense on grove street. this is bolstered by the fact that ingame newspapers speak in vague terms when it comes to mission body counts

 

as a brief aside: ive always been of the opinion that trevor's rampages are flat out just 'fantasies'. the screen color changes, the music changes, the bodies despawn almost instantly, there are no repercussions, and toward the end the enemies become absurd (killing 50 military guys or a bunch of hipsters on fixies with sawn off shotguns somehow). its a funnier image to just imagine trevor limply glaring at someone for mocking him and either taking out solely those two guys or imagining them and their friends all dying while driving home

Some further f*ckin’ evidence that we may have a case of a couple of non-death “injuries” on our hands here, is present in the fact that certain missions treat several “lethal-while-off-mission” activities as non-lethal within the missions. Such as “knock-out the gardener” -huh? But wait, I thought fist-based attacks off-mission always add to the “kills” stat in the pause menu?! Oh and also there’s the taser during the mission “monkey business”, as well as the taser during the illicit immigrants missions which feature our Trevor. A couple other examples could come to my mind some time soon if I keep on thinkin’ about it. 

[universetwisters]

On 7/14/2022 at 11:01 PM, slimeball supreme said:

. IV has an inbuilt way of showing this, whereas you just kind of have to think it when it comes to mowing down 45 poor black kids shooting you in self defense on grove street. this is bolstered by the fact that ingame newspapers speak in vague terms when it comes to mission body counts

Hell of a good writeup, but what about the few times in IV when you’re canonically killing a sh*tton of cops, like in BAD COP DROP and THREE LEAF CLOVER where multiple cops are listed in newspapers as canonically murdered?

 

Idk I always though gta took place in a dystopian hellhole where there’s no censorship monitoring the radio, people are dumb enough to buy things that are actively advertising themselves as being sh*tty and violence is so commonplace, either the police don’t give a sh*t and are used to getting killed or that “cop killer” stigma is inverted and the department just don’t care to investigate things like that (especially once the suspect ducks into a paint garage)

[Aquamaniac]

On 7/13/2022 at 8:26 PM, LucidLocomotive said:

In daddy's girl mission, when Michael pops the f-word haggler on the jetski, he mentions maybe he's only injured, and not necessarily passed away. I wonder if he could be onto something here. Like for instance, in the missions like Blitz Play, or the Paleto Score, is it your belief that every officer who we get the red "X" for, who goes down, is truly dead? Or, do you think the majority of them are simply put out of the fight where they will later receive medical treatment and make it out alive? At least in GTAIV, injured people would be visibly alive and injured and finished fighting, but in V we have to use our imagination. Now keep in mine im talking in terms of canon here. In this universe, truly, did the trio really kill all those cops with ZERO injuries, all deaths?
 

 

Well they could respawn in the hospital as the protagonists do.

[slimeball supreme]

22 minutes ago, universetwisters said:

Hell of a good writeup, but what about the few times in IV when you’re canonically killing a sh*tton of cops, like in BAD COP DROP and THREE LEAF CLOVER where multiple cops are listed in newspapers as canonically murdered?

both good points. three leaf clover's heist is probably the game's biggest setpiece, both in intention and execution, so it can be safely said those cops deaths are canon. i wrote an in-universe article about the heist with cebra that indicates that it was functionally a historic event: enough for michael to have heard about such a brazen robbery and certainly enough to inspire the writing of gta 5. the same also probably applies to the paleto score where you have a minigun and are functionally tasked with turning paleto bay into fallujah

 

bad cop drop is another thing. TLAD in general plays oddly very fast and loose when it comes to action sequences - i actually generally have a problem with the way the corrupt cops in it are introduced and immediately killed, thats just bad writing and they were really fun villains for the brief period they appear - you not only have this particular mission but a one where you race from bohan all the way down to south algonquin turning every cop you see into paste, or the mission where you just f*cking destroy the gate of a prison and kill every guard you see. in the vernacular of action movies or games this isnt a big deal, but in the sort of grounded reality these HD games at least try present they are functionally unprecedented. unless some much worse stuff happened historically, which is always a possibility. maybe in the 1980s the gta 6 protagonist killed 2000000 cops in one mission and that was the reason they started the war on drugs in this timeline

 

theres a reason i can say names like gus farace or kiki camarena. they were historic. i see no reason for some of these loopy ass missions to maybe be similar in-universe

 

the newspapers ingame use a lot of weasel words generally: 'multiple', 'several', 'many'. this is probably the best argument for my thoughts on the matter given they try to downplay those killcounts or focus on the actual acts they were trying to do: a good example is that the blitz play article focuses on the robbery, the stolen bank bonds, and not the dead cops. bad cop drop, it's several. when you blow up tony black, it says casualties and not fatalities. i think the articles as a record are a good way of gauging the priority or severity of events in question

 

34 minutes ago, universetwisters said:

Idk I always though gta took place in a dystopian hellhole where there’s no censorship monitoring the radio, people are dumb enough to buy things that are actively advertising themselves as being sh*tty and violence is so commonplace, either the police don’t give a sh*t and are used to getting killed or that “cop killer” stigma is inverted and the department just don’t care to investigate things like that (especially once the suspect ducks into a paint garage)

i will say the pay and spray escape method is another example of what i mean when i point out special abilities or the main characters not addressing the fact they murdered 60 innocent people outside the weazel dorset theater when they stepped out of the hospital. respawning or that method of losing the cops are just sort of gameplay oriented ways of keeping the action moving to me. otherwise its insta-death and getting busted by the cops for speeding on the way to the jewelry store job. its a kind of necessary gameplay-story segregation, unlike the dissonance typically talked about where they feel the players actions arent congruent with the protagonist: in this case its the only way it can function as an open world game. i sure as sh*t dont think theyre actually walking out of the hospital every time they die. that just means nobody dies and the story has no f*cking stakes

 

its a pretty reasonable interpretation to think that its set in a hyperviolent reality where death is commonplace, but ive never really ascribed to it. i feel it sort of cheapens the actual narratives themselves and doesnt really work when a lot of characters do balk at violence, or are shocked at it happening to them, or they make these same sort of cop killer references in the game. gta 4 was often about the 2000s paranoia about terrorism: the entire city was locked down because of an internet rumor about a bomb, there are a dozen missions that the government decides to call terror threats and use as an excuse, the entire fib plot of V is sort of focused around chasing terrorist ghosts and inventing a crisis so they can get more funding. blitz play itself is about stealing CIA government bonds used for trafficking cocaine. i think if these were more commonplace, that satire would be undermined and the insane jingoist paranoia would be moot. they would have turned the entire country into a prison by this point, let alone shut down the bridges over a bomb scare!

 

im sort of biased however. ive been writing a lot of grounded stuff set in the universe, which probably means i have incentive to paint things as much closer to the ground than they might be, but i do think that the hd approach has been more of a heightened version of what we see on a day to day basis rather than just a cartoon world. i think the real world itself is pretty ridiculous! i think copious advertising is vulgar even if it doesnt have a sexual joke in the name, i think GTA's approach is often a parody of intrusive product placement both in media and in real life conversation. i think its pretty typical to see stupid news stories, or meet shallow assholes, or hear about constant violence every day, or read about the fact the american government really is hysterical. but theres enough humanity in a lot of the characters we see that i dont think everything is heightened. just like real life, its a lot of real human people living in an absurd capitalist nightmare

 

9 hours ago, LucidLocomotive said:

Some further f*ckin’ evidence that we may have a case of a couple of non-death “injuries” on our hands here, is present in the fact that certain missions treat several “lethal-while-off-mission” activities as non-lethal within the missions. Such as “knock-out the gardener” -huh? But wait, I thought fist-based attacks off-mission always add to the “kills” stat in the pause menu?! Oh and also there’s the taser during the mission “monkey business”, as well as the taser during the illicit immigrants missions which feature our Trevor. A couple other examples could come to my mind some time soon if I keep on thinkin’ about it. 

in general they did legitimately botch combat by turning every knock down into a kill. the injury mechanic was genuinely just a really cool addition: seeing guys limp away, or have a reason to get healed by the ambulance, or executing them in cold blood or having the aftermath of a shootout punctuated with cries for mercy. theres a real brutality and energy to it.

 

it doesnt make sense to me that a taser hit to the arm will make you bleed out and instantly die

 

but you are correct that there are several fist fights in V that do not end lethally, similarly as well when it comes to the stun gun or other typically lethal weapons. one of the first missions in the game is kicking the sh*t out of simeon, and we know that stubborn bastard doesnt bite the dust from that. also applies to every forced stealth mission where you sneak around and attack guys from behind - these still count toward the fudged kill stat.

[LucidLocomotive]

17 hours ago, slimeball supreme said:

both good points. three leaf clover's heist is probably the game's biggest setpiece, both in intention and execution, so it can be safely said those cops deaths are canon. i wrote an in-universe article about the heist with cebra that indicates that it was functionally a historic event: enough for michael to have heard about such a brazen robbery and certainly enough to inspire the writing of gta 5. the same also probably applies to the paleto score where you have a minigun and are functionally tasked with turning paleto bay into fallujah

 

bad cop drop is another thing. TLAD in general plays oddly very fast and loose when it comes to action sequences - i actually generally have a problem with the way the corrupt cops in it are introduced and immediately killed, thats just bad writing and they were really fun villains for the brief period they appear - you not only have this particular mission but a one where you race from bohan all the way down to south algonquin turning every cop you see into paste, or the mission where you just f*cking destroy the gate of a prison and kill every guard you see. in the vernacular of action movies or games this isnt a big deal, but in the sort of grounded reality these HD games at least try present they are functionally unprecedented. unless some much worse stuff happened historically, which is always a possibility. maybe in the 1980s the gta 6 protagonist killed 2000000 cops in one mission and that was the reason they started the war on drugs in this timeline

 

theres a reason i can say names like gus farace or kiki camarena. they were historic. i see no reason for some of these loopy ass missions to maybe be similar in-universe

 

the newspapers ingame use a lot of weasel words generally: 'multiple', 'several', 'many'. this is probably the best argument for my thoughts on the matter given they try to downplay those killcounts or focus on the actual acts they were trying to do: a good example is that the blitz play article focuses on the robbery, the stolen bank bonds, and not the dead cops. bad cop drop, it's several. when you blow up tony black, it says casualties and not fatalities. i think the articles as a record are a good way of gauging the priority or severity of events in question

 

i will say the pay and spray escape method is another example of what i mean when i point out special abilities or the main characters not addressing the fact they murdered 60 innocent people outside the weazel dorset theater when they stepped out of the hospital. respawning or that method of losing the cops are just sort of gameplay oriented ways of keeping the action moving to me. otherwise its insta-death and getting busted by the cops for speeding on the way to the jewelry store job. its a kind of necessary gameplay-story segregation, unlike the dissonance typically talked about where they feel the players actions arent congruent with the protagonist: in this case its the only way it can function as an open world game. i sure as sh*t dont think theyre actually walking out of the hospital every time they die. that just means nobody dies and the story has no f*cking stakes

 

its a pretty reasonable interpretation to think that its set in a hyperviolent reality where death is commonplace, but ive never really ascribed to it. i feel it sort of cheapens the actual narratives themselves and doesnt really work when a lot of characters do balk at violence, or are shocked at it happening to them, or they make these same sort of cop killer references in the game. gta 4 was often about the 2000s paranoia about terrorism: the entire city was locked down because of an internet rumor about a bomb, there are a dozen missions that the government decides to call terror threats and use as an excuse, the entire fib plot of V is sort of focused around chasing terrorist ghosts and inventing a crisis so they can get more funding. blitz play itself is about stealing CIA government bonds used for trafficking cocaine. i think if these were more commonplace, that satire would be undermined and the insane jingoist paranoia would be moot. they would have turned the entire country into a prison by this point, let alone shut down the bridges over a bomb scare!

 

im sort of biased however. ive been writing a lot of grounded stuff set in the universe, which probably means i have incentive to paint things as much closer to the ground than they might be, but i do think that the hd approach has been more of a heightened version of what we see on a day to day basis rather than just a cartoon world. i think the real world itself is pretty ridiculous! i think copious advertising is vulgar even if it doesnt have a sexual joke in the name, i think GTA's approach is often a parody of intrusive product placement both in media and in real life conversation. i think its pretty typical to see stupid news stories, or meet shallow assholes, or hear about constant violence every day, or read about the fact the american government really is hysterical. but theres enough humanity in a lot of the characters we see that i dont think everything is heightened. just like real life, its a lot of real human people living in an absurd capitalist nightmare

 

in general they did legitimately botch combat by turning every knock down into a kill. the injury mechanic was genuinely just a really cool addition: seeing guys limp away, or have a reason to get healed by the ambulance, or executing them in cold blood or having the aftermath of a shootout punctuated with cries for mercy. theres a real brutality and energy to it.

 

it doesnt make sense to me that a taser hit to the arm will make you bleed out and instantly die

 

but you are correct that there are several fist fights in V that do not end lethally, similarly as well when it comes to the stun gun or other typically lethal weapons. one of the first missions in the game is kicking the sh*t out of simeon, and we know that stubborn bastard doesnt bite the dust from that. also applies to every forced stealth mission where you sneak around and attack guys from behind - these still count toward the fudged kill stat.

Wow you and I do think and approach these HD games very similarly and I have been THIRSTING for these types of discussions. Another thing I really liked in IV and V is having the protagonists involved with and used as assets by government (IAA for Niko, FIB for the trio). The reason I like it is because it provides an in-universe explanation for some of the bigger crimes and cop kills. Presumably U.L. Paper and Dave Norton are cleaning up after their respective protagonists, or having other people arrested for their crimes, to explain why they are able to leave DNA all over these scenes without it coming back to them. A few times, like 3s company, they explain it away by telling the press it was a training exercise for example. So maybe blitz play WAS treated as a major historic event, but Dave and company already had their “suspects” lined up and planned ahead of time to shut down the investigation and have the case closed by pulling the right strings. If they can do that, then they can also make sure it doesn’t get too much attention from the press. Or maybe it does and the protagonists just don’t tune into the reports, or aren’t in town when the big memorials are taking place. I do really hope this government ally aspect returns in VI, maybe with the GTA version of the NSA since we’ve already seen the other two big ones. 

[universetwisters]

20 hours ago, slimeball supreme said:

 

 

im sort of biased however. ive been writing a lot of grounded stuff set in the universe, which probably means i have incentive to paint things as much closer to the ground than they might be, but i do think that the hd approach has been more of a heightened version of what we see on a day to day basis rather than just a cartoon world. i think the real world itself is pretty ridiculous! i think copious advertising is vulgar even if it doesnt have a sexual joke in the name, i think GTA's approach is often a parody of intrusive product placement both in media and in real life conversation. i think its pretty typical to see stupid news stories, or meet shallow assholes, or hear about constant violence every day, or read about the fact the american government really is hysterical. but theres enough humanity in a lot of the characters we see that i dont think everything is heightened. just like real life, its a lot of real human people living in an absurd capitalist nightmare

Your Liberty Tree writeup about the THREE LEAF CLOVER mission is really good (even though I’m curious why they didn’t notice nikos name on the prison visitors list like what Gerry said he put it there but it’s w/e) as well as your series about riding yours to Los santos, but honestly, having silly gta brands like Pisswasser and Twat in a serious setting just really take you out of it. Like you could try to make a serious story out of it but it’d just be as confusing as walking in on your dad in bed with your science teacher (which is why all my stories take place in the real world but it’s whatever I guess)

 

Idk I just try not to think about it otherwise I’d be up all night 

 

E. What’s your take on “Get Lost”? Like I know it doesn’t mention any real deaths in newspaper articles but surely that couldn’t have been bloodless. Would there have been an in-universe coverup or is it another TLAD mission that just didn’t happen or whatever in canon?

Edited July 17 by universetwisters

[slimeball supreme]

i had a reply already written but i reloaded the page and lost everything. all my unnecessary verbosity gone, soon to be replaced by perhaps only mildly muted verbosity

 

12 hours ago, universetwisters said:

even though I’m curious why they didn’t notice nikos name on the prison visitors list like what Gerry said he put it there

we did consider this and thought about it in two ways. the former is that to actually visit someone in a prison you need valid proof of identity, and niko bellic is canonically an illegal immigrant (no visa, no drivers license, que nada) which we initially thought would make the entire thing completely impossible, however it makes a whole lot of sense that niko has proof of employment through roman's cab service. it's a neat little picture to imagine taking a fare and seeing niko do the mugshot glare for the photo like he's paulie walnuts becoming a 2006 honoree for excellence in recycling. regardless, you have to account for the severe mismanagement in the american prison system: at this point i imagine ASCF is still using paper records, still logging everything in supply closets where you have to sift through pile after pile of paperwork. its likely, like so many things, niko bellic's name could be found in the facility's fetid innards

 

simultaneously we also have to factor in the ULP: niko is covered for throughout the story as an intelligence asset for the government, real shady anti-terrorist sh*t. this is a nifty little way of excusing why he gets away with so much, why he could potentially be let out of the police station when hes picked up. ULP straight up says hes covering for him and squashing charges, jon gravelli says that in exchange for his work his entire police file will be erased. in the article we operated under the assumption, to minimize all ties to the agency, as many loose threads were severed as possible. names are artificially obscured in wiretap recordings, documents are retroactively classified, the case is closed. we left niko's fate up to interpretation beyond the fact all ties to the events are severed. there are little hints of his existence: an expunged database file, invalid documentation, a long paper trail

 

13 hours ago, universetwisters said:

having silly gta brands like Pisswasser and Twat in a serious setting just really take you out of it. Like you could try to make a serious story out of it but it’d just be as confusing as walking in on your dad in bed with your science teacher (which is why all my stories take place in the real world but it’s whatever I guess)

i do get this in all honesty. ive tried to write around it and even in the games often they substitute real references or brand references for generic stuff: they say "get me a tissue" instead of "get me a cleenex/COMERAG™", brian meech only opaquely references "the movie with the giant boulder" on the way to buy a huge f*ck off crack rock. its a trick they pull pretty frequently and it works pretty good, often better than just namedropping either a brand/event or an in-universe equivalent

 

however i honestly dont mind it. in fact i even like it, in a sort of 'this is set in a dystopian world where the soviet union lost' kind of way. gta's brands are one of the only ones visually interesting enough for me to remember them all, and there's a real attention to making those equivalences matter. my thinking is that its somewhat of a parody of product placement and generally just synonymous for the vulgarity of advertising period. walking into times square and seeing all of the logos and bright colors cynically pushed in your face should make you roll your eyes, hearing someone talk about their favorite commercials or what brand they like is gross in a sense. especially when it worms its way into stories, and you see characters plugging stuff and showing off the logo to the camera. it just becomes literally crass in this case. a vandalization of the greater american love of materialism: and no this isn't pretentious, they say sh*t like this in the games all the time, dan houser is the pretentious one!

 

13 hours ago, universetwisters said:

E. What’s your take on “Get Lost”? Like I know it doesn’t mention any real deaths in newspaper articles but surely that couldn’t have been bloodless. Would there have been an in-universe coverup or is it another TLAD mission that just didn’t happen or whatever in canon?

its funny you mention the newspaper articles because there isnt one. this was actually disappointing. they instead wrote a vague article used to lampoon both sides of the rehabilitation vs retribution argument. get lost is only referred to as a 'murderous incident'.

 

one thing ill say is that in TLAD's beta, the mission actually had several ways of completion. if you check the voice line files in openiv you can find voice lines from stubbs and clay discussing two more ways of entering the jail: one being a stunt ramp directly inside, the other being disguising yourself as a prison guard by stealing a uniform off a laundry truck. i guess they cut those two for the bombastic finale we see, which is a shame, but explains the above vague references to said murderous incident. if it were up to me id go with the laundry truck as canon, but thats not what literally 100% of players saw

 

johnny is lucky because he has stubbs, like niko has the ULP and our V trio have a corrupt clique of federal agents. as one last favor i could see someone like stubbs, a high up member of the neighboring state's legislature, severely impeding investigation into the incident. a lot of lost camera footage. but in general the assault itself would still be historically important, as well as coinciding with a general prison riot and probably more prisoner deaths than guards by the end. in three leaf clover and i rode mine we went with the angels of death and greater white supremacist prison gangs as the state's culprit, leading to a prosecution of the AOD's liberty chapter for the deaths of both mccornish and matthews alongside the raid. the charges wouldnt stick, because of course they couldnt, but theres a sort of precedent for biker shootings leading to no legal consequences

 

16 hours ago, LucidLocomotive said:

Another thing I really liked in IV and V is having the protagonists involved with and used as assets by government (IAA for Niko, FIB for the trio). The reason I like it is because it provides an in-universe explanation for some of the bigger crimes and cop kills. Presumably U.L. Paper and Dave Norton are cleaning up after their respective protagonists, or having other people arrested for their crimes, to explain why they are able to leave DNA all over these scenes without it coming back to them. A few times, like 3s company, they explain it away by telling the press it was a training exercise for example.

its genuinely vital and really helps maintain a suspension of disbelief. naturally we have to continue to refer to game/story segregation in some ways, especially dna evidence - no minigame of picking up shell casings and disassembling your guns before throwing them in the river. without that connection to the law through corrupt cops, which happens all the time in real life anyway, you would have a lot less success. it is functionally required to explain how these guys get away with it all, and they do: training exercise cover-ups, burnt investigations. haines literally tasks you to destroy the fib's files on both him and you! sh*t, even in the criminal world, niko lives as long as he does because pegorino openly vouches for him and stops any hits going through liberty city's governing criminal authority

 

there is also a precedent of professional criminals doing work for dirty law enforcement in the united states. colombo capo greg scarpa was tasked by the fbi to go into mississippi and investigate the KKK murdering three civil rights activists, which is a very gta 5 style assignment if you think about it. the same goes for the CIA tasking mobsters to do dirty work in setting up castro's assassination - which reveals a mutual incompetence we also see on display in V. a lot of smoke and mirrors, extrajudicial torture and infiltration for a TV repairman, a dead green energy entrepreneur, and a vial of perfume that steve haines steadfastly believes is nerve gas

 

16 hours ago, LucidLocomotive said:

I do really hope this government ally aspect returns in VI, maybe with the GTA version of the NSA since we’ve already seen the other two big ones. 

if we end up getting a miami drug smuggling setting, this is really perfect timing to introduce the oft-neglected drug observation agency. the DOA have been in both IV and V with only minor roles, and the drug trade is ripe territory to explore it. especially a period piece like the 1980s, where miami became america's nexus point for the cocaine trade and turned it into the country's most dangerous city. the murder rate was so high that the coroners used massive ice trucks to move several bodies at a time. this dangerous, flashy environment, all the while dealing with dirty agents on your payroll and feeding them busts on rivals

[olzhas1one]

On 7/16/2022 at 12:57 AM, LucidLocomotive said:

Some further f*ckin’ evidence that we may have a case of a couple of non-death “injuries” on our hands here, is present in the fact that certain missions treat several “lethal-while-off-mission” activities as non-lethal within the missions. Such as “knock-out the gardener” -huh? But wait, I thought fist-based attacks off-mission always add to the “kills” stat in the pause menu?! Oh and also there’s the taser during the mission “monkey business”, as well as the taser during the illicit immigrants missions which feature our Trevor. A couple other examples could come to my mind some time soon if I keep on thinkin’ about it. 

Regarding GTA 5, it's really, really hard to actually assume what would be the canonical death count since the game's mechanics are so jank. When I tazed every hostage in the Paleto Bay heist, the game still acted as if I shot all of them to death.

Speaking of which, do we count the possible alternative outcomes like that? We can write off cop-killing in mission design, but what about executions/deaths that characters can react to, but are not forced to happen?

 

Coming back to this post:
 

On 7/15/2022 at 6:01 AM, slimeball supreme said:

you bring up both the paleto score and blitz play, and i think the latter is a fantastic example of this - it also has my least favorite rockstar 'end mission' objective out of any. towards the end you have to kill as many cops as possible before the police 'give up' and leave you alone: this would never, ever happen. this also applies to tbogt where its used a few times. you end up killing around fifty police officers over an armored truck in arguably one of the lesser prioritized missions of the game. there is an entire word for a criminal who has killed a police officer - cop killer - and its met with such a huge amount of disdain and malice. usually when a 'cop killer' is a fugitive the entire area will lock down and they will search with everything they have: no knock raids, random car searches. killing a police officer is such a big deal most criminal organizations have de facto rules against it - when gus farace killed a single DEA agent in the late 1980s the new york city mafia was pestered by the federal government to such a degree they put an active hit out on the guy (which the mob beat the police to, they killed the kid with buckshot to the face). when kiki camarena, another DEA agent, got tortured and killed by the mexican cartel, this actively sabotaged american foreign policy. cops are known for being highly protective of their own

This reminds me of Blood Brothers in GTA 4. It makes perfect sense why nothing happens after Derrick's death, but when Francis dies, what @slimeball supreme described for some reason doesn't seem to happen at all. All I remember is a Weazel News report and a website article. It's something I see in general as a big problem of GTA's modern world-building - the impact of your actions is severely reduced. It doesn't matter in which order you complete missions or story arcs, nobody reacts to them anyway. Though, realistically, you'd think that with Francis' death, Niko should've faced a lot more repercussions, narrative wise and perhaps gameplay wise too. I feel this might've been the direction Rockstar wanted to take, since the way I see it, GTA 4 was testing the waters for a changing narrative and story choices, but for whatever reason, they did a 180 and have been downgrading their game design ever since. And, I'll be honest, I've never played RDR2, but I've heard that a lot of missions in it are painfully linear, and for an open-world game I consider that bad game design, since the replayability of the game is significantly reduced this way. I'm doubtful we'll return to open-ended mission and narrative design in GTA 6, unfortunately.Z

 

 

1 hour ago, slimeball supreme said:

i do get this in all honesty. ive tried to write around it and even in the games often they substitute real references or brand references for generic stuff: they say "get me a tissue" instead of "get me a cleenex/COMERAG™", brian meech only opaquely references "the movie with the giant boulder" on the way to buy a huge f*ck off crack rock. its a trick they pull pretty frequently and it works pretty good, often better than just namedropping either a brand/event or an in-universe equivalent

 

however i honestly dont mind it. in fact i even like it, in a sort of 'this is set in a dystopian world where the soviet union lost' kind of way. gta's brands are one of the only ones visually interesting enough for me to remember them all, and there's a real attention to making those equivalences matter. my thinking is that its somewhat of a parody of product placement and generally just synonymous for the vulgarity of advertising period. walking into times square and seeing all of the logos and bright colors cynically pushed in your face should make you roll your eyes, hearing someone talk about their favorite commercials or what brand they like is gross in a sense. especially when it worms its way into stories, and you see characters plugging stuff and showing off the logo to the camera. it just becomes literally crass in this case. a vandalization of the greater american love of materialism: and no this isn't pretentious, they say sh*t like this in the games all the time, dan houser is the pretentious one!

I personally see no problems with the NAMES of the products, since something like Pisswasser could be easily explained as "cultural differences" like how in Australia "golden gaytime" is a name for a meal while in America it's an utterly weird phrase. What I do have a problem with, is rather how these products are advertised, their satire within essentially. And, once again, Pisswasser is a good example here. In GTA IV, the advert for the beer made fun of beer commercials by being "honest" and whatnot. It still manages to get a chuckle out of me to this day, and it's thematically consistent. Compare that with GTA V's sudden change to being a parody of right-wing ideas, for some reason, and a pretty bad one at that, with most of the jokes just basically being low-hanging fruit that don't really make fun of anything in an interesting way or say anything meaningful, other than things everyone already knows about. And, to me, it's really odd that a beer company would air a right-wing themed commercial in California (San-Andreas), it having nothing to do with beer and being unpopular with the populace.

This in general makes me ask a question: Why is the writing in GTA V much worse than GTA IV all across the board? I don't want to sound like some contrarian or anything, as I do like certain aspects of V, but after watching some TV shows and comparing it against them and GTA 4, it really does seem a step backwards. This probably deserves it's own thread, though.

[Americana]

I mean, we need to assume that even www.babiesovernight.com is a real service in the world of Grand Theft Auto - which is... weird.

Edited July 17 by Americana

[LucidLocomotive]

5 hours ago, olzhas1one said:

Regarding GTA 5, it's really, really hard to actually assume what would be the canonical death count since the game's mechanics are so jank. When I tazed every hostage in the Paleto Bay heist, the game still acted as if I shot all of them to death.

Speaking of which, do we count the possible alternative outcomes like that? We can write off cop-killing in mission design, but what about executions/deaths that characters can react to, but are not forced to happen?

 

Coming back to this post:
 

This reminds me of Blood Brothers in GTA 4. It makes perfect sense why nothing happens after Derrick's death, but when Francis dies, what @slimeball supreme described for some reason doesn't seem to happen at all. All I remember is a Weazel News report and a website article. It's something I see in general as a big problem of GTA's modern world-building - the impact of your actions is severely reduced. It doesn't matter in which order you complete missions or story arcs, nobody reacts to them anyway. Though, realistically, you'd think that with Francis' death, Niko should've faced a lot more repercussions, narrative wise and perhaps gameplay wise too. I feel this might've been the direction Rockstar wanted to take, since the way I see it, GTA 4 was testing the waters for a changing narrative and story choices, but for whatever reason, they did a 180 and have been downgrading their game design ever since. And, I'll be honest, I've never played RDR2, but I've heard that a lot of missions in it are painfully linear, and for an open-world game I consider that bad game design, since the replayability of the game is significantly reduced this way. I'm doubtful we'll return to open-ended mission and narrative design in GTA 6, unfortunately.Z

 

 

I personally see no problems with the NAMES of the products, since something like Pisswasser could be easily explained as "cultural differences" like how in Australia "golden gaytime" is a name for a meal while in America it's an utterly weird phrase. What I do have a problem with, is rather how these products are advertised, their satire within essentially. And, once again, Pisswasser is a good example here. In GTA IV, the advert for the beer made fun of beer commercials by being "honest" and whatnot. It still manages to get a chuckle out of me to this day, and it's thematically consistent. Compare that with GTA V's sudden change to being a parody of right-wing ideas, for some reason, and a pretty bad one at that, with most of the jokes just basically being low-hanging fruit that don't really make fun of anything in an interesting way or say anything meaningful, other than things everyone already knows about. And, to me, it's really odd that a beer company would air a right-wing themed commercial in California (San-Andreas), it having nothing to do with beer and being unpopular with the populace.

This in general makes me ask a question: Why is the writing in GTA V much worse than GTA IV all across the board? I don't want to sound like some contrarian or anything, as I do like certain aspects of V, but after watching some TV shows and comparing it against them and GTA 4, it really does seem a step backwards. This probably deserves it's own thread, though.

I completely agree. I gotta say though I laugh my ass off at the line from the song in V:

 

“yeahhhh we gonna keep them illegals out

 

yeahhhh that’s what the party’s all abouuuuut!”

 

it’s just so absurd and funny to imagine people believing that a party is made even more fun by implementing legislation to prevent illegal immigration 

[Homicidal Hipster]

That's why I double tap them 

[Americana]

The Paleto Score is ridiculous, awful. We have this cool The Jewel Store Job and then... this ridiculous, over-the-top crap. 

 

In my opinion every heist should be like The Jewel Score Job, The Big One (Obvious) and Three Leaf Clover.

Edited July 20 by Americana

[Cyper]

Any kind of action that causes an NPC to lay still on the ground means the NPC is dead. Using non-lethal weapons such as tazers or knockouts are lethal because they are treated as kills in the stats menu. Further there is no ''medical treatment'' in GTA V; medics can't heal anyone except the player.

 

We can use our imagination, sure, but what is canon is inconsistent with the stats in the game anyway. I doubt Rockstar intended that all the cops you killed with your minigun in the Paleto Score were supposed to make it out alive. It's not RDR2 or even GTA IV we're talking about here. I don't think there is any complex thoughts behind all the kills you do in the game.

[universetwisters]

3 hours ago, Cyper said:

Any kind of action that causes an NPC to lay still on the ground means the NPC is dead

 

But what about IV when some people you kill just get up and limp away holding their stomach like they ate some rotting fish and washed it down with spoiled milk?

 

I'm not saying that as a "GOTCHA" moment, I'm just mentioning it because its just really weird how Rockstar programmed that in. Like is it really confirming that people you "kill" are actually alive and survive whatever you did to them?

[Dr. Robotnik]

On 7/16/2022 at 7:44 PM, LucidLocomotive said:

Wow you and I do think and approach these HD games very similarly and I have been THIRSTING for these types of discussions.

Same. Any conversation that takes the story seriously is gold for me, and I love meeting people who write fanfiction.

 

And I do agree that what's happening in-universe and what's happening in gameplay are very different things (I've never had any particular desire to see gameplay and story integrated to begin with, and I very much prefer to play a strong protagonist against a crowd of enemies as opposed to a more fragile protagonist up against a handful.) The in-universe body count in V is probably quite low; no higher than the "several" casualties mentioned in news articles, at least for cops (gang warfare is more likely to be tolerated, and perhaps even tacitly encouraged, by the authorities, especially when it occurs between hated demographics). I think Michael and Trevor are much better understood, story-wise, as in-and-out, hard-and-fast raiders who won't stay on the scene for long even if they have to bring down a chopper and plug some NOOSE officers to open up breathing space, although Trevor, obviously, is a lot more eager to silence witnesses and kill pigs than Michael. On his own, I think Trevor is closer to a serial killer than a spree shooter; he's been in his share of bar brawls and vehicle accidents that have turned bloody, and he relishes a good firefight, but he still knows how to bury a body, clean up after himself, and stay off the grid.

 

That being said, I've always thought that GTA V was underrated as a stealth game; there should've been more of an effort to incorporate subterfuge into an open-world environment. I've never understood the hatred for Scouting the Port; it's important to show that even Trevor's capable of going undercover and blending into the background when he needs to. In missions like the subtle approach for the Bureau Raid and the set-up for the Jewel Store Job, you see tantalizing hints of something very different than a typical shoot-em-up, and it's a shame the developers couldn't have found a way to exploit that more. GTA V's shootouts are thrilling, but it's very refreshing when NPCs are treated as obstacles to be avoided rather than meatbags to be blown through. There was clearly room to make NPCs more diverse in their behavior; for those who don't care for stealth, why not take shootouts to their logical conclusion and make the cops as beatable as any other enemy? If anything, I think Blitz Play deserves some credit for programming the police to fall back for once rather than mindlessly charge into the player's gunfire. Have cops run for their lives or surrender when they've taken sufficient damage. Gangbanger NPCs are really fun to engage, but there's not much you can do with them before the cops show up and your options immediately narrow to "flee" or "last stand."
 

[Yinepi]

Haven't you all heard? All the NPCs go back to the hospital and get charged 5k.

[LucidLocomotive]

WARNING: BREAKING NEW DEVELOPMENTS

 

Hello guys. I recently came across some deep and true development upon this topic. Recently I was playing LA Noire and did the chop shop mission in which we as Colbert Phelpley murder many, many men. I’d have to say we as he pull the trigger upon upwards of ten to twelve males inside the chop shop. LA Noire is another game where enemies can NOT become injured visibly, unlike the great grand theft four.

 

yet despite this, when reaching the top floor? Colbert comments “there are at least four men dead in this chop shop”. Four? Huh? But we shot more like 10! So this could mean that in the mind of some of the guys at Rockstar studio (the game-makers) enemies that lay down out of consciousness after getting hurt by a bullet or more (three or even four) are not NECESSARILY passed AWAY, but could instead be passed OUT and truly injured. 

[universetwisters]

On 7/24/2022 at 1:39 AM, LucidLocomotive said:

“there are at least four men dead in this chop shop”. Four? Huh? But we shot more like 10! 

 

You do know what "At least" means, right? There's a minimum of four people dead

 

On 7/24/2022 at 1:39 AM, LucidLocomotive said:

So this could mean that in the mind of some of the guys at Rockstar studio (the game-makers)

 

Rockstar didn't make LA Noire though. Team Bondi did, Rockstar just published it.

[LucidLocomotive]

1 hour ago, universetwisters said:

 

You do know what "At least" means, right? There's a minimum of four people dead

 

 

Rockstar didn't make LA Noire though. Team Bondi did, Rockstar just published it.

About team bondi- yes I do know that. About at least? Obviously yeah but the number you shoot is certainly far above 4. “At least 10” would have been more logical in this case. It’s very obvious that Cole knows he shot more than 4

[NyanNeko]

On 7/13/2022 at 2:26 PM, LucidLocomotive said:

In daddy's girl mission, when Michael pops the f-word haggler on the jetski, he mentions maybe he's only injured, and not necessarily passed away. I wonder if he could be onto something here. Like for instance, in the missions like Blitz Play, or the Paleto Score, is it your belief that every officer who we get the red "X" for, who goes down, is truly dead? Or, do you think the majority of them are simply put out of the fight where they will later receive medical treatment and make it out alive? At least in GTAIV, injured people would be visibly alive and injured and finished fighting, but in V we have to use our imagination. Now keep in mine im talking in terms of canon here. In this universe, truly, did the trio really kill all those cops with ZERO injuries, all deaths?
 

 

With the number of goons I mow down on a daily basis playing this game I'd say no, LS has obscene futuristic medical care where as long as the remains can be brought to a hospital they can glue you back together.  That's my headcanon anyways. 

 

Murdering someone of course, is still possible, we don't stop to give every merryweather goon a shallow grave so someone scoops em up.