@iamllamapie @YIGIF I see, your more into games with a more loose playing style like the classic GTA games, well to each his own. To me they fell into the pitfall of focusing too much of their design on competing with sophisticated systems of other AAA titles, it demolished the core mechanics and style that made the past iterations great.
As for Niko, his character had more depth than Tommy and Carl but that was at the cost of less freedom in my opinion.
In all if I could recall what I believe Sam Houser said about the GTA Universe when the question of whether old characters would be recurring, it was something to the extent of "The past GTA universes are the past, separate, and in no way intermingle with each other", well I think after this they will be going back on that idea in order to keep the series vital nostalgia.
First off let me say, I don't like reviewers and they don't like me, period. Even if they said something I liked, still don't like 'em, you get no pass from me. If you are a reviewer reading this at glance, you're not a part of the solution, you're part of the problem.
So, the beauty of GTA was that all of my favorite criminal cousins played this cheesy top down game in a well lit dirty basement during re-ups, being a suburban boy with a prevailing addiction to games, we played in turns as a game of timed survival. GTA has us all hooked and I was present when they unwrapped GTA 3, ecstatic to say the least, but I digress.
No, the real beauty of GTA was its freedom from reality, it was as if the Crank movies, Pusher Series and Willy Wonka had a threesome, now it seems they've fallen victims to their own success and have adopted reality as a platform, adding restrictions to the criminal underworld that truthfully, in reality, do not exist. They need to stop idolizing Michael Mann and Gordon Gecko and get back to idolizing the full spectrum of underworld criminal insanity, for that's what's brought us all here.
@iamllamapie The story was definitely not as impactful as GTA IV, those three stories evolved tragically and I think they stayed with the player pretty well after completion. This time though, even though they are great characters, for some reason, and maybe its just me, I cared less about them. Without a doubt Niko is amongst my Top 5 characters in the GTA Series; remember though too, it was the lack of things to do that brought that game down not the characters and now the same thing is apparently going on here.
@EmphaZima Totally agree, this game doesn't embody the criminal lifestyle as much as it should. The missions should have branched into open recurring mini-games or side missions, giving the player the ability to pursue and maintain multiple endeavors of their choosing. Stock Market mechanic of the game should have been condensed and geared towards online capability to make room for many of the memorable side missions and mini-games of the GTA Series. Not everyone will enjoy playing the stock market for big payouts and I don't think they realized how much money is made on the street by simply Boosting Goods, Lone Sharking, Racketeering, Point Shaving... now that I think about it all of the American Mafias favorite money making schemes would have sufficed.
@Whiskey3romeo Definitely much better solutions to making money than the stock market, the mere implementation of that component seems quite pompous on their part. What happened to the mini-games from GTA Chinatown Wars? Wouldn't those have been better alternatives than the over glorified Stock Market mechanic?
@mick1500 I agree, the option to Play Loose(GTA 3) or Play Tight(GTA IV) should have been available but I'm not sure how much more data would have been needed to make this an option, cool idea though.
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