- Joined
- Feb 1, 2023
That's just as true for GTA as it is for people who want to fantasize about going to war without actually going to war so they fire up CoD or who want to learn to fly a plane without going deep into debt so they buy MS Flight Simulator. It's fun to be the bad guy once in a while and do all those things in pretend that we would never do in real life. I mentioned it in the Bully thread but Rockstar used to have a game called State of Emergency. You're supposed to run around in the middle of a riot and shoot security forces, and were penalized by killing civilians but you could put in codes and get stuff like unlimited ammo, bulletproof, etc. I worked in retail when this came our (2001-ish) and it was such a stress relief to run around a mall and just mow masses people down with a Gatling gun. I would never even think about doing that in real life, but it was fun to do at the end of the day after dealing with customers all day. Just like stealing a car and driving over pedestrians or shooting down airplanes in a stolen attack chopper or driving a boat up on a beach to hit as many sunbathers as I can or you get the idea.
I think there are three real problems:
1) We know Rockstar isn't going to be edgy or a humorous look at culture like it was in the past. It's simply too easy to offend and God knows we wouldn't want to do that. So it will be boring without that tongue in cheek humor we used to know GTA had in spades. It doesn't help that because of the politics of today you just can't criticize non-whites or women or the Alphabet Brigade. In the past GTA could and did treat everyone as fodder for jokes and social commentary. Now, how can they possibly poke fun at anyone that isn't a WASP hetero male without being destroyed in online and in the press? While there is no such thing as bad press there is such a thing as gunshy companies that don't want to hurt their own sales. It will end up costing GTA half of what made it great: the atmosphere of the game.
2) So many of the people who made GTA what it is are gone. The Housers and Lazlo for example. How do you have the radio station hosts and banter without Lazlo's hand in it? What is the background of the people replacing them? Are they able to capably step into those shoes? It remains to be seen, but given the whole "let's go out of our way to hire women and minorities and recent university grads who don't know how to make a joke out of fear of offending" I'm not holding my breath.
3) Miami of 2023 is boring. Yeah it's full of blacks and Hispanics but what else does it have going for it? And going back to point one above, there is only so much they can do with the setting because of the fear of offending. You have poor blacks tweking on stolen cars, rich Jews in God's Waiting Room, drug dealing Hispanics, redneck whites, and what else? What else does the setting have that it can use? One of the real criticisms about the GTA and RDR games is that they are so linear and that there isn't much to see or do outside of missions and what is there gets old quickly. I don't just mean pastimes like stealing a plane or sightseeing, but what else is there for flavor to distinguish it from other games in the series? The radio stations are likely to be a mix of rap/Hispanic/pop with little else, something that GTAV deservedly was criticized for. Other than what we've seen in the trailer of an east coast version of Lamar and friends, it doesn't seem all that different than what we found in GTAV.
Personally, I can live with a female protagonist if it's done right and not just GIRL POWER and YAS KWEEN. I would have love to have seen a version of mid-80s Vice City writ large with a hooker who climbs the ladder to become La Madrina, a Redneck smuggler who specializes in square grouper, and a dirty cop who all end up having to work together to take down the city.
