There are times once I look at Los Santos and think'why would you even think to build that?' This is, appropriately, a thought I frequently have about Los Angeles. In GTA 5 case, the tone is different: baffled wonderment as opposed to baffled,y'know, despair. Rockstar have generated one of the most extraordinary game surroundings you'll ever visit. I look at it and I wonder at the huge cost of work necessary to render every trash bag in each back alley just so. I marvel at the maintenance clear in San Andreas' stunning sunsets, in the way that sunglasses subtly change the colour balance of earth, in the artfully-chosen choice of licensed music designed to accompany your own experience.
Everything about Los Santos shows the extraordinary quantity of love and thought poured into it by hundreds of developers over several years. This is the most beautiful, expansive and generous GTA sport and also, by some distance, the nastiest and most nihilistic. GTA 4 Niko Bellic did some terrible things, but he had a downtrodden charm that helped you enjoy him as you chased him throughout the underworld. He had been surrounded by people who were mythical but finally, under the surface, individuals. Grand Theft Auto 5 does away with all that, intentionally but to its detriment. Franklin is a young hood, supposedly principled but willing to do anything for money. Trevor is a desert-dwelling, meth-dealing psychopath with a homebrew morality that sits uneasily alongside his capability for savage cruelty and sexual aggression. The campaign explores their connection through a string of heists and misadventures as they clash with every L.A. stereotype you may imagine--the bored Beverly Hills housewife, the tainted fed, the bottom-rung fraudster, the smug technology exec, and so on.Against this backdrop, it is only Michael, Franklin and Trevor that appear to possess any sort of internal life.
I get the impression that this is deliberate, a part of the game's relentless skewering of southern California and indicative of Rockstar's waning interest in romantic anti-heroes. Trevor's introduction, specifically, amounts to some specially explicit'fuck you' to the personalities and themes of Grand Theft Auto IV. GTA 5 is heartless in that way, and as a result I found the story difficult to care about. It's rough, well-performed, and the production values are extraordinary--but it's also derivative and brutishly adolescent, set in a world where the line between criminality and the rule of law is blurry but where it is always humorous that somebody may be homosexual .
The campaign's best moments come when your cigar-chomping master strategist, mad former military pilot and talented driver come together, and when you're given the ability to choose how to use each of them. All these heists are set-piece missions where you pick an approach and perform set-up tasks in the open world prior to setting out on the job itself. In the very best of these, which happen later in the campaign, it really does evoke the gratification of owning a plan come together. Perhaps you place Trevor on the high-ground using a rocket launcher, then Michael on foot using a stealth approach, and Franklin in an armoured ram-raider. With a button press you can flick between both, dynamically orchestrating a crime caper on your own terms.It's also in these minutes that Rockstar's most ambitious storytelling occurs.
Your choice of character, crew, and even certain in-game activities have subtle effects on the dialogue. In a young heist, a crewmember dropped part of the score but, as Franklin, I was able to recover it--a side-objective that I'd set for myself but that was then reflected in a later conversation between him and Michael. This is just another illustration of Rockstar's extraordinary attention to detail, and if the rest of the campaign respected your agency in this way it may conquer its weaker moments.
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