Actually Excited for GTA V!

I read this month’s issue of Game Informer, one of my many outlets for getting my gaming news, and found that they had a decent-sized chunk of information on Grand Theft Auto V.

Now I’ve never particularly gotten hyped over any of the GTA games. I enjoyed playing them as a mindless game when I just wanted to kill some time by doing some crime. I’ve never enjoyed their stories–I found Nico’s story in GTA IV to be rather bland and a touch annoying. The game mechanics were what I expected, poor driving and crazy amounts of me dying while in a chase sequence because of it, and the same old quests from San Andreas rehashed with different people. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever finished the main story in a GTA game, and I’ve been playing them since 3. Let me skip forward, past the rest of my dislikes of the previous titles, and jump into the purpose of this opinion. 

I am actually excited for GTA V. I have been following it, not too closely, since its announcement, and the recent GI article has made me really excited for it. Let’s hop to a list and I’ll point out a few things I’m pumped to see in action.

The Characters

In the GI article, and other articles I’ve read, they mention that you play as three characters who are all involved with each other due to pulling off heists of varying levels of difficulty. It also mentions that you can, during specific missions and leisure time, swap between them at will. This excites me because it allows for people who resonate with certain types of people in games to have three options to choose from. I didn’t particularly care for Nico in IV and Marston from Red Dead Redemption just didn’t match the way I played him in the cut scenes. Allowing for the diversity of multiple characters allows people to play as one character they love most of the time and find to be a great character to play, or they can hop between all of them just to see what type of lives these people are living while they’re playing someone else.

Story

I’ve never been fond of Rockstar’s stories. As I’ve mentioned, I thought GTA IV’s story was bland. I also didn’t get attached to the story in RDR because the cut scenes and how I played John didn’t coincide; it felt like he had a bi-polar disorder. Nonetheless, I am, in fact, excited for the story in GTA V. Having three unique characters and seeing three different perspectives on the way things unfold is going to make things more exciting and dynamic. Don’t like the way Franklin reacts to a situation? Switch to Michael and see what he thinks of the events that just transpired. I think that this will make the story more involving and add a certain sense of depth that the story of the past games have been missing.

The Heists

I saved this one for last because it is the one that I am most pumped for. I really enjoyed playing “Payday: The Heist” with some of my buddies but I wished they had a portion where you could plan every detail before heading in. The information that has been shed on this aspect of the game has me revved. I can’t wait to sit down and discuss with the other characters about what we should do to get the most money out of a job.I had heard about this feature before and that there will be several heists throughout the storyline, but the article in GI gave me more information to salivate on.

The first is that there will be side missions that are based around smaller heists, which will give you the ability to do heists whenever you want, I’m assuming. The other tidbit, which they only said a little bit about, is that as you hire “experts” (i.e. hackers, getaway drivers, etc.) to do those jobs in particular heists the better they get at their job. So I’m guessing that if you hire a cheap hacker in an early small-scale heist, and keep using him throughout the game, he’ll be a pro by the time you get to the final heist. That’s my hope at least. 

As more news comes out and it nears its release date of September 17th, I am continually getting more and more excited and am looking forward to seeing some gameplay footage, hopefully, at E3 in a month.