Back in the early 21^st century the gaming industry was going through a craze about injecting realism. That was also the time period of GTA 3 and Vice City and they particularly stood out because they threw realism out of the window. Now that the craze of realism has slowly died down, it seems the bug of realism has bitten the GTA franchise.

All the Little Things:

Don’t get me wrong, I did thoroughly enjoy GTA 4 when I played it. I was particularly impressed with all the little nuances such as getting spam in your email, to actual television channels and the various mini-games available. I did not really spend time taking part in those activities but I appreciated their presence.

It wasn’t until I played DMC4 and the Condemned series right after GTA 4 that I realized I did not actually have as many thrills as per the amount of time I had spent playing that game. The question that comes to mind is if all the little things that GTA 4 developers included in the game made them side step and take the concentration away from making the campaign missions more exciting and fun.

Some of the missions were a lot of fun, but a lot of the others were just mundane and simply involved “get from point A to point B and shoot some random people” with a bit of “get to point C before going to point B” thrown into the mix.

Character Whining:

In order to make the game more realistic, Rockstar realized they could no longer have a violence hungry protagonist. The only viable solution for Rockstar was to make the character condemn violence. But then this did not really fit well with the game’s core, which basically is to break the law every second.

The only viable solution Rockstar could think of was to make it seem that violence was the only way the character could be free from it – an anti hero of sorts. Although I appreciated the story of Niko Belic in GTA 4, the same character reasoning used in both DLCs became boring very quickly. For me, this character complaining quickly turned to a form of drama queen-esque whining.

I could not understand why these characters that did not like the violence or their company could not simply travel to another country and disappear for a while. Instead they convinced themselves that killing half of the people in Liberty City was the only viable solution. It was for these reasons that I actually did not have fun playing the characters in the two episodes and found them a little annoying.

The Problems with Realism in GTA:

Fortunately the GTA franchise partially redeemed itself in The Ballad of Gay Tony as they introduced some crazy characters and had plenty of over the top missions. These were well supplemented by a large supply of cash to beef up the personal armory.

But the game also made apparent the problems and conflict the GTA roots has with realism. In trying to be realistic Rockstar wanted to have more character development and they did this through a lot of dialogue. The dialogue used was too long and was again very annoying as it stalled the momentum of the game. The dialogue would not have been annoying had it been remotely funny, unfortunately the focus was on being dramatic and GTA had started taking itself all too seriously.

In addition, for an arcade game, it felt that the cars took too long before they gained some real speed. The car handling was made particularly annoying with the exclusion of ABS, which meant you could not turn while braking. This is especially intriguing because even most racing games have ABS enabled.

The Final Word:

The thing that makes the GTA franchise great is the over the top non realistic gameplay: being able to drive carelessly, its absurd characters and its ridiculous missions. It is this over the top absurdity that gives GTA a soul. For without it GTA transforms into a game whose driving becomes mundane, shooting mechanics are clunky and historic, and with forgettable characters that have been assembled out of clichés.

Unless and until Rockstar can convince me that the GTA franchise will stop trying to win an award in the category of drama and reminds itself that its not another expansion pack for the ‘The Sims’, the franchise, for me, has been downgraded from ‘must have’ to ‘I’ll have a look’.

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