@Hailinel said:
@HandsomeDevil said:
I love the animation, but I disagree with the point that Rockstar will be influenced in any way by the children making Saints Row. The 10 years of magic Rockstar has done with GTA shows they are actual game makers, not 4th graders who got to design a game.
I'd rather take Saints Row's fourth grader mentality over whatever it is that GTAV has become. Saints Row shows a willingness to just let go of any notion of being serious; its a madman's sandbox of a game, whereas GTAIV was, as stated in the Bombcast, a contradiction in terms. They want to have their cake and eat it, as well, in the way that they took the series in a more serious direction while retaining the juvenile attitude of the earlier games around the fringes. From what GTAV appears to be, it will be more like GTAIV than anything; maybe it'll allow for some of the more absurd activities like flying a plane and skydiving; it's hard to tell. But the point is that for me, the ship has sailed on Grand Theft Auto.
And this isn't an overnight thing, either. The ship started leaving the harbor while I was playing Vice City. Funny atmosphere and goofy parody of 1980s pop culture? Yes. But the gameplay in Vice City is terrible. The mission design utterly broke my desire to finish the game when I was only about halfway through. Saints Row took that structure of open world game and was the first to make mechanical improvements to the gameplay that GTA desperately needed when Rockstar was content to add superfluous weight-gain mechanics and a much larger land mass to San Andreas instead of addressing any of Vice City's glaring flaws. Then, when GTAIV decided to go the self-serious route, Saints Row 2 took the ball that Rockstar dropped and ran with it. And it appears that, with Saints Row: The Third, they have finally taken that ball all the way tot he end zone. Saints Row: The Third appears to be the sort of game that fans of San Andreas would love; pure, utter madness in a game that looks and plays far better than San Andreas, with all of the silly superfluous things like character customization taken to a ludicrous extreme. And it is unapologetic about its insanity.
Rockstar, on the other hand, has yet to prove that they can create a GTA game with a protagonist that doesn't either behave like a complete sociopath or a hypocrite. One of the most aggravating things about Niko is his apparent desire to turn over a new leaf, yet he murders people left and right. Combine that with the player's ability to run around the city and murder indiscriminately, and you've pretty much broken the character.
I just can't see how people can consider a random mishmash of disjointed filler a competitor to GTA. And of course, the age old "Rockstar Protagonist Syndrome" argument, once again trotted out despite the fact that it has no merit considering the true nature of Niko, and all GTA protagonists. They all want something, and are doing what they can, and what they know how to do, in order to get it done. Jeff made the point that he thought everything Niko had to do to "ice that motherfucker" was tearing him apart inside. Besides, none of the other GTA protagonists wanted to turn over a new leaf.
You may say that GTA games play poorly, but at least they have the stories and atmosphere to back up the somewhat poor shooting (driving has always been great).
But hey, Saints Row has dildos so I guess it's all good.
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