With that in mind, almost two years ago GTA V was a tough game for many to like. It wasn’t clear how juggling three protagonists would repair the disconnection between implied narrative and an authored, personal experience. It was hard to believe that that Rockstar North, quietly one of the more socially-progressive developers around, would deny a female main character in one of GTA V’s three starring roles. GTA V’s position in a post Saints Row The Third world, where a lurid imitator suddenly brought the open-world paradigm to its creative knees, was tough to place.
I had dozens of reasons to root against GTA V, and the first ten or so hours played right into my biases. Why was I wasting time moving cranes around at a dock? Who thought it was fun to train a dog, and why wasn’t the app I downloaded to my real-life phone working correctly? Do I really have to play tennis and do yoga to progress the narrative? GTA V felt loaded with inherited idiosyncrasies, a product born of either tradition or sheer ignorance of the last five years of open-world design progression. I was performing marginally different (though beautifully rendered versions of) the same tasks I had been doing decades earlier. It was obviously built to impress, but the preferred audience didn’t appear to include any version of myself.
While I concede that Stockholm Syndrome might have been the reason behind my eventual about-face, a more likely scenario claims responsibility; GTA V began to endear itself to various sensitives (some realized and others unexpected) and I grew to appreciate it more and more. The gargantuan achievement of San Andreas, a sprawling rendition of Los Angeles and its accompanying country backside, presents scale and scope unrealized by any available peer. The variation between the citizens that populate its confines, visual exclusivity fueling every street corner, impressive technical performance on (then) seven-year-old hardware, and the will to weave it all together into a functioning, and (usually) fun-to-play game was simply marvelous. GTA V is the expected result of five years of development and an astronomical budget, but it doesn’t make any less impressive as an interactive showpiece.
GTA V’s artisan tapestry was a gateway to engaging its mechanics. The latent screw-around factor with any open-world game was at an all-time high. I worked like hell to drive a tour bus up a mountain. I tried and tried to break into the airport and steal a plane, and finally did after half a dozen deaths. Taking to the skies and colliding with a helicopter was the next obvious task, a feat I accomplished around an hour after I thought of it. I think most of us are past the GTA III zeitgeist of picking up a bunch of stars and surviving merciless onslaughts with police, but the means GTA V provides to indulge in and explore Los Santos presents an entirely new series of improvised objectives. The de-facto campaign is mostly fine, but on a personal level, walking up Mount Chiliad at night or enjoying an evening stroll down at the Del Perro Pier proved to be a greater draw to my personal tastes.
GTA V only fell short when it came to challenging the player to solve its problems. Heists, GTA V’s signature contribution to the open-world paradigm, left plenty of room for player-authored decisions but neglected any sort of agency inside of them. You could choose binary decisions in the planning phases (a garbage truck or a tow truck!), but the route to victory was always one and the same. Actions and possibilities, while enjoyable enough, felt rigidly defined or predetermined before you got there. The classic example of doing it right lied in GTA III’s Salvatore assassination, where the game left an antagonist’s demise completely to your own devices. Stand on a car far away and snipe him? Block off the entrance to his mansion with cars? Barrel through his motorcade and go for a straight-up assassination? Liberty City was yours, and while parts of it were fundamentally broken as a result, senses of satisfaction and discovery reached unrealized highs. GTA V, on the other hand, only allows for tested instances of failure, leaving little room for an improvisational mind.
Not achieving perfection isn’t exactly a demotion, and it wasn’t something I held against the entirety of GTA V. I liked the implied dichotomy between its characters, and while their unique “powers” were a bust, I made their behavior consistent with their character (meaning Trevor’s psychotic tendencies were responsible for most of my free exploration time). Strangers and Freaks, seemingly random missions populating throughout Los Santos, were usually a trial of unexpected insanity. Characters, be it the objective protagonists or the freak shows populating their lives, were a strong point in GTA V, or more specifically the sharp-witted nature of their dialogue set against increasingly hostile circumstances usually made for entertaining cut-scenes. It certainly wasn’t a game where I would check my phone as soon as proper control left my fingertips.
Smaller touches also did well to impress the player. Lazlow Jones, GTA V radio personality and one of the few connective threads holding the post-III era together, made for an enthralling appearance, cashing on the older-dude creepiness that comes with the seedy (and comically tragic) Los Santos underground. GTA V’s treatment of Lazlow was actually endemic of their entire cast; traces of personality were here and there, but a priority seemed to be placed on criticizing the hilarious excess of American culture. Some of it, like Weasel News, continued to be a little too on-the-nose and mean spirited. Others, like Jimmy De Santa’s exceptional rendition of the shitheads populating online shooters, are delightfully metatextual.
Finally, there’s the nature of using GTA V’s endowments in the manner that bests suits persona taste. A few years ago I found myself in Los Angele’s Palisades Park and the nearby Santa Monica Pier. I took a bunch of lovely photos. GTA V’s depiction of the exact same area is uncanny, to the point where I was trying to line up some of the exact same shots (and I got pretty close! Real Life / GTA). You can use GTA V as a fairly competent arcade flight game, elusive nature photography simulation, car modification indulgence, try to engage animals in hand-to-hand combat, attempt to perform the opening scene of Top Gun, take creepy selfies in front of strangers at the beach, perform a doomed helicopter landing on a wind turbine, or role-play the closest allowable approximation of Crank. When the provided content isn’t up to snuff, GTA V leaves room for your imagination to fill in the gaps.
Alternatively, you can ignore the entire single-player component of GTA V and get your money’s worth out of the multiplayer-focused GTA Online. Similar measures are often enacted for Call of Duty, and GTA V, despite its excess of content, isn’t immune to catering directly to specific social interests. Up to 32 players can engage in straight death-matches, races, cooperative missions, four-player heists (which, along with adversary modes are relatively new to GTA Online), motorcycle races approximating Road Rash, or the general free-mode tomfoolery associated with doing crazy things in a huge open world. It feels a bit unusual to treat GTA Online a sideshow to GTA V-proper (and in full disclosure the bulk of my time in GTA V has been spent in the enjoying the latter), but it’s a massive world out there in search of the right audience. Unlike other games, where the multiplayer community dies on the vine, GTA Online arrives with the recognition and general interest to keep it all neatly populated.
Up to this point, most of this review could have been employed to describe either GTA V’s original release. Its debut on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One last fall arrived with a considerable suite of new features, and the current PC release brings ever more to the table.
Most obvious and most fundamentally game-changing is GTA V’s dalliance into first-person camera options. A more immersive perspective offers meaningful changes to the way GTA V is absorbed, including but not limited to perceptively different sensation of driving, visceral feelings of weird regret concerning combat’s increased realism, requisite nausea experienced when ejecting through the windshield of a car and battle-rolling to safety (or death), and the intangible freedom of experiencing everything from a more authentic point-of-view. GTA V compensates nicely with a wealth of control options, including a seamless switching between controller and mouse + keyboard, and several choices dealing with auto-aim and completely free-aim. Pushing around a character in first-person with a controller felt a little mushy and off-kilter, but a keyboard and mouse setup felt almost identical to a typical first-person shooter. It’s one of the most comprehensive modifications to GTA V’s systems, and it’s just a camera angle.
There’s also the matter of content added to GTA V. 162(!) new songs were appended to existing radio stations, an entirely new station was created, and some talk-radio personalities even recorded additional segments. Best of all, the PC release supports (albeit in a cumbersome manner) custom music straight from your computer, meaning I can finally live out all of those night time Drive fantasies properly. Joining the additional music are a slew of new vehicles, races, weapons, exclusive late-game missions for Michael, plagues of cats, cockroaches, whales, and other terrifying wildlife. GTA V wasn’t exactly lacking in content, but it’s impossible to say these new additions made it any worse.
Exclusive to the PC version of GTA V is a new Director Mode. It’s basically in-game editing tools designed specifically to make gameplay captures appear more cinematic, a feat which GTA V supports with a myriad of options. Adjusting depth-of-field for some sweet bokeh effects, manually adjusting camera placement, inducing slow-motion, adding a slew of post-processing options simulating everything from oversaturation to some sort of acid-induced neon nightmare, and custom text and in-game music. Director Mode isn’t just messing with clips, and can also (theoretically) be employed to stage entire films within GTA’s universe. Imagine Red vs. Blue with serviceable editing tools and a hell of a lot more personality, and you’ve begun to scratch the surface of what Director Mode has to offer.
As expected, GTA V’s technical presentation really shines on capable PC’s. My two-year-old machine was able to maintain 60 frames-per-second at 1080p resolution without breaking a sweat, although I couldn’t push shadows too hard and had to keep textures at high. GTA V certainly allows you to push past that, boosting the resolution up to 4k (!), offering higher textures, world-population sliders, and other visual options that would instantly melt my video card. As it stands the game looks tremendously better than its original (and current-gen) release. While blood spatter on the windshield, smoke effects from a tailpipe, insane draw distance, and grass shadows don’t necessarily mean a lot individually, GTA V is a stunner when they’re all working together. As an emissary from the last generation learning what’s possible on modern hardware, GTA V serves as a menacing goodbye to (relatively) ancient technology. And, unlike GTA IV’s disastrous PC debut, GTA V plays quite nicely with most rigs.
GTA V delivers an insane amount of content. Less a submission to hyperbole and more an observance of simple facts, its base level content and thoughtful additions serve only to make what was already an incredible (though accurately budgeted) achievement so much better. It’s impossible to dislike, as its shortcomings—and there are many—feel so effortlessly wiped out by its strengths. Failures in the narrative are corrected by extraneous dives into the diversity of its environments. Lack of desirable improvisation is corrected by agency inside the world of San Andreas. An inability to focus on anything in the campaign is remedied by incredible multiplayer options. A lack of engagement in that could be solved by directing your own short (or long!) film via the game’s Director Mode. Whatever your grievance, GTA V is prepared to offer a solution. It’s not the unrepentant violence, the implicit freedom, the conspicuous satire, or any of GTA V’s attention-grabbing headlines, but rather the need and necessity to, for once, appreciate the fruits of years of labor and money without the usual cynicism. GTA V, of all games, earns the respect to stand outside of those lines.
