Rockstar Games Grieving Thread

[Climaxing Sunset]

I want to talk about Rockstar Games and what I perceive to be the decline of the company. Growing up my first Rockstar game I’ve owned was Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix on my PS2. It was among the best arcade racing video games and it easily surpasses any NFS game of that era with its content like introducing motorcycles, Trucks, and SUVS alongside other traditional performance vehicles like super cars, tuners and muscle cars you’d find. Seriously clocked in hundreds of hours into the game and Rockster pushed the envelope of what racing games could be (as my anecdotal example demonstrates)

Many other people have fond memories of the 2000s era with Rockstar video games. GTA: San Andreas, Vice City, Bully, Midnight Club 2, and Manhunt are some I can name as excellent video games. Even the transition into the HD era with seventh gen consoles, Rockstar brought us GTA 4, with its phenomenal storyline + the best DLCs ever released (Lost and Damned + Ballad of Gay Tony). 2008 also brougt us another excellent racer by Rockstar in the form of Midnight Club Los Angeles which really incorporated the online racing aspect into the game and is still among the best arcade racers of the seventh gen

Even going to 2010, R* gave us the excellent Red Dead Redemption which was a Wild West version of GTA to a degree but had its own unique identity. Max Payne and LA Noire were other solid Rockstar titles that brought more of a linear approach to gaming but still had a solid gameplay aspect to it. Then the hype came with GTA 5 and for the time (2010-2013), GTA 5 was the shit. Even for the late seventh gen the game was solid and initially hyped but after 2014-15, things went downhill. No new games, and only GTA online updates. GTA 5 DLC was cancelled and Rockstar totally forgot that Bully, Manhunt, and Midnight Club existed which is sad.

Then in 2015-2019 you have Leslie Benzies leave the company, Dan Houser being ousted out (the writer of many of the critically acclaimed games), and Lazlow Jones, the musical aficionado who selected and even organized some musical soundtracks for a plethora of Rockstar’s games also left the company.

Now in the present day (early 2020s) things look bleak. GTA online continues to fuel R* greed and it’s been nearly a decade since R* has released a new GTA game. So I’ve decided to make a grieving thread and I hope there’s other people who agree with my assessment of Rockstar’s decline as a company.

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

>you will never get a Bully 2
>GTA 6 will lose all soul due to greed and money
>you will never get another Manhunt game
>you will get a GTA IV remaster that will get rid of everything that made that game a classic
>Red Dead Online is still dead

I could name a lot, but the day Tommy Vercetti went into the video game afterlife, a part of me realized that this is no longer the same Rockstar Games that I remembered waiting to hear what games they have up next.

 

[NigKid]

I always forget how fucking funny and good gta v actually was, fucking shame that well not see anything like that again for a long time

 

[Climaxing Sunset]

>you will never get a Bully 2
>GTA 6 will lose all soul due to greed and money
>you will never get another Manhunt game
>you will get a GTA IV remaster that will get rid of everything that made that game a classic
>Red Dead Online is still dead

I could name a lot, but the day Tommy Vercetti went into the video game afterlife, a part of me realized that this is no longer the same Rockstar Games that I remembered waiting to hear what games they have up next.

What sucks is Rockstar cancelling the Midnight Club series

It was superior to NFS and it always innovated and pushed for the best features of arcade racing video games

I heard 2K might take over the dormant franchise but then again I’m not sure I can have my hopes up if they can do the franchise justice if they do reboot it from the dead

 

[Maurice Caine]

Midnight Club 3 was the best racing game of all time and it's insulting that to this day only MC2 made it to PC. Now for GTA? Forget it, it's dead.

 

[Trans Fat 41g]

The original Red Dead Redemption is still beautiful, give or take the age, it still holds up damn well and even feels like a decent dial-back from RDR2, which can sometimes feel like a slog. That game is beautiful too but was born to get whored out by a now-terrible company. BULLY will always be the swan song of classic Rockstar to me, it was the last game from them that kept anything simple in that goofy ps2-era personality.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Yeah, it sucks to think the "real" Rockstar games is already a thing of the past, it sucks that they didn't even make it to 20 years post GTAIII.

They didn't even quite make it to 20 years period, the first game that got the actual Rockstar branding was GTAII in 1999, the final "real" Rockstar game is RDRII first released in 2018.

They hit such massive highs that it's crazy they weren't even able to make it last longer, the fact that GTAO is a license to print money from retards should mean us getting the most lavishly produced, "Oscar bait" games with brilliant writing and characters, instead GTA6 is likely to be online only games as a service with no real story, the more money to be made, the more parasites show up to bleed things dry as opposed to make art.

It's sad they we couldn't have got just one last real GTA from Houser and Lazlow as a swansong for the real Rockstar, though RDRII wasn't a bad note to end, on, but it's a shame we never got a Bully 2 either.

But yeah, Rockstar was one of the few western publishers/developers to have that same special magic that a Capcom or a Konami has/had to me.

 

[Drkinferno72]

Who needs any other game besides San Andreas?

 

[Divine right to rule]

I liked Rdr2 way more than 1.
GTA online is scummy, sure, but no reason to doompost quite yet.

 

[Kiwifarmsname]

I always forget how fucking funny and good gta v actually was, fucking shame that well not see anything like that again for a long time

I feel like 5 is seen as worse than it really is due to the online tumor strapped to it. But as it stands a 300gb tumor isn't worth downloading to play a game that was like 5gb on the ps3 with the near same experience.

 

[Climaxing Sunset]

I feel like 5 is seen as worse than it really is due to the online tumor strapped to it. But as it stands a 300gb tumor isn't worth downloading to play a game that was like 5gb on the ps3 with the near same experience.

I liked 4 more than 5. As a stand-alone game 5 isn’t a terrible game but I enjoyed 4 far more. Maybe it’s the nostalgia factor or maybe it’s the better storyline idk

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

GTA V is fun when it's fun, and it's really boring when it's boring. I'm pretty bi polar with it depending on what part I'm playing/remembering.

GTA IV I feel has a cool style to it, but at the same time gets super repetitive. Missions play out the same, you're stuck doing the same handful of activities with friends, the map feels pretty grimey everywhere. It gets exhausting IMO.

 

[Bussy Catalog]

I’ve never been a fan of GTA or R* in general but it seems like they’ve fallen into the same online service hole that Bethesda is in, but worse. GTAO might make a lot of money, but they’ve become so shackled to its success that it seems like they’re paralyzed in terms of doing anything else. They don’t make smaller, less monitizable games like Bully or Midnight Club anymore. And even RDR2, as many copies as it sold, has basically disappeared from view due to its online component flopping. At this point they may as well just rename themselves GTA Studios, because their sole outlook for the future seems to be farming that game for micro transactions.

 

[Dom Cruise]

GTAIV left me cold, bought it on 360 and I still remember that awful feeling of stepping out onto Liberty City's daytime streets and my first thought is "wow, it looks like complete shit!"

It's been so long ago but does anyone remember the horrible looking shadows on the 360 version? The overall drab, dreary, not impressive look the game had, at least on consoles.

The 7th gen frequently had that issue where you'd see trailers and screens of the game that were not even close to being representative of what you actually played.

But beyond that the story didn't grab me, also too drab, too dreary, too serious, the "wacky" characters meant to lighten things up were more annoying than amusing, at least to me.

Gameplay didn't feel as fun, my whole reaction to the game felt very muted despite some impressive moments here and there, everything was brown, black or grey, the overall tone was dark, it encapsulates basically all the major trends that defined 7th gen games, what was going on? Post 9/11, post Iraq invasion funk?

I've been meaning to replay it but the game exists as a disappointment in my memory and I'm not sure I simply care enough to give it another chance.

GTAV on the other hand I feel is very underrated, they brought back the lighter tone and color palette, it felt like the GTA of the PS2 games, just much more advanced.

I also like how much the game rebukes the sheer massive idiocy of what American culture had become by the early 2010s... and then the Fire Nation attacked Woke nation attacked and now we miss that era, now GTAV feels as much a period piece of a bygone era as Vice City and San Andreas were.

I think that's part of what went wrong, America went so absolutely fucking insane that suddenly the idea of parodying the American landscape became something absolutely terrifying instead of funny, so they just bailed out because they literally didn't know what to do and who can blame them (higher ups also probably didn't like the idea of them side stepping the issue by making it a period piece, the attitude probably was "GTA is a our modern day series, Mafia is our period piece").

 

[Hazel Motes]

I only wanted The Warriors 2.

 

[mensch]

I feel they haven't lost their quality yet (GTA6 pending), but the quantity of their releases has surely suffered in the transition to HD.

 

[NigKid]

I feel like 5 is seen as worse than it really is due to the online tumor strapped to it. But as it stands a 300gb tumor isn't worth downloading to play a game that was like 5gb on the ps3 with the near same experience.

gta online has become a drug for rockstar, theyre making 800 million a fucking year from the currency purchases alone. who fucking plays that shit? and why arent they in psychiatric hold?

 

[RandallBoggs]

I feel they haven't lost their quality yet (GTA6 pending), but the quantity of their releases has surely suffered in the transition to HD.

View attachment 3427258

Might be an unpopular opinion but if every game they release is RDR2 quality I wouldn't mind that long gap between new releases. I'm personally waiting for GTA VI to get a definitive conclusion on whether the company is beyond the saving or not, because it's a bit unfair to judge that based on outsourced work from some Chinese shithole. That was entirely management circlejerking, not actual R* creators displaying their skills (unless I misunderstood the situation, I only followed the basics of the story because I don't care that much about remasters)

 

[Kulee Baba]

I feel they haven't lost their quality yet (GTA6 pending), but the quantity of their releases has surely suffered in the transition to HD.

View attachment 3427258

It's amazing to me that Rockstar/Take Two's money men have clearly concluded that it's not worth their several studios time to make smaller games. In between the GTAs I had so much fun with Max Payne 2, The Warriors, Manhunt, and Bully. Hell I probably would have bought the Rockstar Ping Pong tech demo if I had 7th Gen consoles at the time of the game's release.

To give credit where credit is due they've greenlit Remedy to remake the two original Max Payne's.

I wish they'd remake LA Noire, such a good concept for a game that was bogged down because the writers didn't know what they were doing. You really need someone who can write like Raymond Chandler to get that style. Not to mention the concept was flawed with the game wanting you to read character facial emotions when it's a game with 7th gen graphics and it's not like any of that game's performances would be worthy of an Oscar.

 

[BrunoMattei]

>you will never get a Bully 2
>GTA 6 will lose all soul due to greed and money
>you will never get another Manhunt game
>you will get a GTA IV remaster that will get rid of everything that made that game a classic
>Red Dead Online is still dead

I could name a lot, but the day Tommy Vercetti went into the video game afterlife, a part of me realized that this is no longer the same Rockstar Games that I remembered waiting to hear what games they have up next.

You forgot that we will never get a Body Harvest remaster and/or remake.