L.A. Noire is great. It’s really great, even. A welcome breath of air in an industry that hardly ever takes itself seriously. For me? Personally? It’s an advertisement. A bone that you munch while the main meal is being made in a mysterious laboratory in which video games are created. This main course includes Grand Theft Auto 5. GTA3 was my first game using my (great) PS2 console, and since then, I’ve held video games to a more excellent standard of quality. It smashed down the boundaries of the classic games (figuratively or literally) and raised the limits of 3rd person view, and in turn, created an open-world genre.
Today is the day. Grand Theft Auto 4 has been in development for over three years, and despite the commercial and critical success in Red Dead Redemption and now L.A. Noire, I am pumped for this year’s GTA. While we might be a year or two away from its release, there are typical indications and rumours the game is in the process of development. With E3 just close to the mark, I think it could be the perfect time to discuss the question of what I want from the new GTA?
Modern Multiplayer
There’s nothing wrong with GTA4’s multiplayer, so to say. It was fair and enjoyable and worked. Free roam is an ideal that has come real for all fans of the series. Playing against or against online gamers, it let you explore the vastness of the world and even try to accomplish completely ridiculous and undefined objectives, like “How many cars could we fit into the fast food chain?” or “How long can we stay being trapped in this bank, battling police?” as well as the fan-favourite “How do I stop the good work that everyone else is trying to achieve by crashing them into the ground?”. Possibilities are, for want of a better definition, endless. It’s fun but not the perfect solution. Matchmaking, and even the primary interface online, was not as simple as it should be and could be improved. The process of unlocking additional appearance items was a bit shady and not well explained (if any explanation was given).
What is GTAV’s multiplayer different? Sure, it will. It’s likely to use the same system that helped make its online release experience a huge success. However, I believe dropping it by the sidelines is not a good idea. Give that extra bit of function. Let the organizer of the free-roam game determine these rules to the game quickly and easily. It is their responsibility to bring players to one spot. These easy additions speed up the process of creating those memorable moments. The system of money-for-appearance should not be eliminated entirely. However, it must be redesigned. Is it shopping in a shop to purchase hard-earned cash (via the competitive game) on items to improve their avatar’s appearance? The people eat the stuff up. Every subsequent DLC release has enhanced multiplayer. However, I could see the multiplayer becoming a mystery to players who didn’t take the time to look into the depths of its potential. Did you see those cool multiplayer-focused trailers RDR had? Let’s see if we can recreate those.
Mission Variety
GTA’s single-player experience is lost to those who do not have a certain level of patience. The basic gameplay can become somewhat repetitive: go to this place and kill and so, take the other player to this spot and stay clear of the inevitable confrontation. Most of the time, the message is “blah the blah, and oh yes you do something to kill someone”. That wasn’t the case in the Ballad of Gay Tony, however. The mission introduced were among the most imaginative and dramatic I’ve ever witnessed. This is because the story was short and more compact. I believe I’m speaking for many people in saying that we’d prefer to be able to have a more straightforward, more memorable story than one that is long and drawn out. What happens if this happens? Most likely not. GTA is among the most extensive Ip’s within the world, and when users spend $59.99, they’re expecting to receive a certain amount of content- an intangible amount that justifies their investment. A better option could be to expand the archetypes of missions you can run instead of having four different tasks, each with an extra paint coat.
Garages for Import/Export
Garages for exporting imports and Imports was a fascinating feature that was only available in GTA3. They were a type of side task that required players to locate and transport cars from an inventory. When all vehicles had been delivered, the player could access any of the vehicles mentioned through the garage. It’s a straightforward idea that requires a difficult task to earn a fantastic reward. The reason this feature didn’t return in any subsequent GTA’s, I’m not sure. Why did it stop? Let import/export garages be available for free-roaming at the host’s discretion. Players can use any vehicle they want (with some sort of cooling down) provided they’ve completed the required task in a single-player mode could result in an enjoyable and straightforward function in a roaming environment.
Relations System (kinda)
Both GTA4 with its zany dating site and the Ballad of Gay Tony with its stale and unimportant “booty calls” part-mission (if you want to call it that) have thought about the concept of a relationship system but not at a “not gonna occur’ scale (as most things do in GTA) However, it was at a point that demanded some thought. It’s not my intention to suggest that because GTA4 has dipped its toes into the sub-genre of dating that its successors will have a fully-fledged relationship mode, but instead, it should have an advanced affiliation levelling system for any kind of organization.
In the game GTA4, there were many “put out, return” scenarios. This is something that should be further developed. Instead of completing an x number of missions for one reward, add a little story to reduce the transparency of the reward. Consider the small named quests that are part of a game, such as Oblivion and Fallout 3. You join a particular group, club, or faction and complete missions that affect it, climb the ranks, and gain access to the resources of that group. It’s almost like the mission variety request but with secondary missions. Perhaps, like Club Management in TBOGT, there’s no ending to this, only a unique method of earning money. To put it in a better way these, they’re more complicated side-missions.
