L.A. Noire is great. Really cool, even. A welcome breath of fresh air for a medium that hardly ever cares to take itself seriously. But for me? Personally? It’s a teaser. A bone to gnaw while preparing the main course in some mystical laboratory where video games are born. That main course is Grand Theft Auto 5. GTA3 was the first game I played on the (amazing) PS2 console and I’ve been holding video games to a higher standard ever since. It broke down all the walls of mainstream gaming (figuratively and literally) and pushed the bar for third person perspective and literally created the open world genre.
Fast forward to today. Grand Theft Auto 4 has been out for over 3 years and despite the critical and commercial successes of Red Dead Redemption and now LA Noire, I find myself poised for the next GTA. Even though it may still be a year or more away from its actual release, there have still been the typical signs and rumors that it might already be in development. And with E3 just around the corner, I think it might be the right time to pose the question: What do I want from a new GTA?
modern multiplayer
There’s nothing wrong with GTA4’s multiplayer, so to speak. Competitive multiplayer was fair, fun, and worked. Free roam mode is a dream come true for fans of the series. With or against players online, it allowed you to explore the rich details of the world and try to achieve completely absurd and arbitrary objectives, such as “How many vehicles can fit in this fast food restaurant?” or “How long can we survive locked up in this bank against the police?” and the fan-favorite “How can I screw up what everyone else is trying to do by running them over?”. The possibilities are, for lack of a less clichéd description, endless. It’s fun, but it’s not perfect. The matchmaking and basic online UI was not as intuitive as it could and could be. Unlocking more appearance pieces was arcane and poorly explained (if at all).
So will GTAV’s multiplayer be any different? Of course he will. It will likely adopt the same infrastructure that made Red Dead Redemption such a success online. But I think leaving it in oblivion is a mistake. Gives that extra bit of functionality. Let the creator of a free game dynamically and seamlessly dictate the rules of the world. Let them summon all players to one location – these simple add-ons speed up the process of setting up those awesome moments. The cash-for-appearance system shouldn’t completely go away, it should just be overhauled. Going to a store to buy hard-earned money (through competitive multiplayer) on products for avatar spawning? People eat those things. Each subsequent DLC release improved multiplayer, but I could see that multiplayer was missing out on those who didn’t bother to delve into its capabilities. Remember those clever RDR trailers focused on multiplayer? Let’s have some of that.
Variety of missions
GTA’s single player mode is lost on those who don’t have a certain amount of patience. The main game can get quite repetitive: go to this place and kill this or that, bring this person to this place and avoid the inevitable encounter. Most of the time, it’s “blah, blah, and oh yeah, kill something.” However, this was not the case with The Ballad of Gay Tony. The missions featured were some of the most inventive and theatrical I’ve ever seen. This was because the story was shorter and more condensed. I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that we’d rather have a shorter, more memorable story than one that’s longer and drawn out. Will this happen? Probably not. GTA is one of the biggest IPs in the industry and when people shell out their $59.99 they expect a certain amount of content, an invisible threshold that justifies their purchase. So a more practical request might be to increase the archetypes of the quests you run. Instead of 4 different mission variations with a different coat of paint.
Import/Export Garages
The Import Export garages were a cool feature only present on GTA3. They were kind of a side quest that asked players to find and deliver cars from a list. Once all the cars were delivered, the player had access to any of the aforementioned vehicles by visiting the garage. It’s a very simple concept that asks for an arduous task for a cool reward. Why this feature never returned to any of the following GTAyes, I don’t know. And why stop there? Enable free roaming import/export garages at the discretion of hosts. Allowing players to manifest any because they want (with a reasonable cooldown) given that they’ve completed the work to do so in single player could allow for some really fun and easy functionality in a free roam environment.
System of relations (more or less)
Both GTA4 with its quirky online dating service and The Ballad of Gay Tony with its redundant and pointless “booty call” side quest (if you can call it that) have entertained the idea of a relationship system, but not even in a level of parody ‘not going to happen’ (like many things in GTA), but at a level that required some consideration. Now, I’m not suggesting that since GTA4 dove into the dating subgenre, its successor has a full relationship mode, but instead includes some kind of leveling system of progressive affiliation with any type of entity.
In GTA4 there were many instances of “off, back on”; this should be expanded. Instead of doing ‘x’ number of quests to get ‘y’ reward, mix up a little story and make the reward less transparent. Take, for example, the little named quests in a game like Oblivion or Fallout 3. You join a group/club/faction of so-and-so, do quests that affect it, rank up, and gain access to its resources. This almost extends to the quest variety request, but for side quests. Perhaps, like club management in TBOGT, there could be no real ending, just a unique way to make money. To best summarize, they are more elaborate side quests.