I do think GTA V's wanted system goes a little too hard at times, and RDR2 carried over some of those aspects too. Like I get that they want the police to be a serious pain in the ass in GTA V to up the tension and intensity of chases, but they do outright suicidal shit to get you and they're so all-encompassing and omnipresent that after a while it really just starts to get irritating. GTA IV on the other hand felt more realistic and it really felt like the police in that game used actual tactics and were a bit 'restrained', like real police would be because no real police officer is going to ram full speed into your car head-on, follow your vehicle off of a cliffside, or continue to just run in a single-file line at you after 50 of his buddies have been killed. It was also more proportional, if you got into a fistfight in GTA IV, every cop in a 5-block radius wasn't going to rush you shooting like you're fucking Clyde Barrow or some shit. Plus just the fact that you can take someone into the middle of the desert, behind bushes, shoot them in the head with a silenced weapon and and leave the scene immediately, somehow a fucking coyote nearby calls the police on you.
At least some of the omniscience makes sense in GTA V because obviously modern police forces have radios, air support, traffic cameras, gunshot sensors, etc. It's still way too fucking OP and overbearing. But that doesn't even make a lick of sense when it comes to RDR2. How in the hell can you stab someone in the ass end of nowhere in RDR2 and all of a sudden every lawman and bounty hunter in the state knows who you are, what you're wearing, how long your beard is, what you did and your exact coordinates? The best they could do in fucking 1899 is send a fucking telegram or maybe there was a rare, odd telephone in the mix but there's no fucking way they would be that omnipresent. As it stands it's like they all either have walkie talkies or the power of telepathy and remote viewing. Hopefully GTA 6 has a better way of going about it, assuming Rockstar paid any attention to the complaints.
It also pisses me off that cheat codes are a dying artform, and that there's no 'never wanted' cheat in GTA V unless you use trainers or mods. As far as I can remember every prior game had that and other fun, amusing cheat codes you could use to fuck around in the sandbox. Now they probably don't include any of those because it's yet another avenue they can eventually monetize. Flying car cheats, aggressive traffic and riot mode cheats were the shit in San Andreas. Most AAA titles now have an allergy to random, organic fun it seems, which carries through into the incredibly strict missions because they want the mission to play out like a movie and if you go a different route or use a different car you fail. The one that really chapped my ass was the mission in RDR2 where you have to sneak into Cornwall's oil refinery and steal something, and there's no real definitive route mentioned. So you try to climb up on the roof, and go down through an open window, mission failed you went the wrong route. So you go around the building to see if there's another way less obvious than the front fucking door, mission failed, you went too far off the path. Finally you resign yourself to just stroll in the front door like an asshole. The whole thing is really at odds with the type of organic chaos you can create in the open world, yet if you take a wrong turn or some shit within a mission, you fail immediately. The missions are basically on rails and there are few choices you can make, you can't come up with your own plan and approach the situation differently because it might fuck up the next cutscene or ruin 'immersion'.
