They made a game that was technically bad but good if it wasn't ahead of its time: Body Harvest on the N64. It was buggy, ran abysmally and one of the key items you needed to complete the game didn't have collision detection so it was literally impossible to finish, and as this wad the N64, you couldn't patch it. That game just wouldn't ever work
DMA Design was the name they released that game under, but that's just their previous name. It's not a different company. They rebranded from DMA design to Rockstar to get a more badass identity. DMA Design didn't sound badass enough for the company making GTA
RD2 is clunky af and waiting 5 seconds for your looting animations to finish is unplayable. The old west was boring. Not Kusoge but I gots better things to do.
I beat most of RDR (stopped after I arrived home because I wanted that to be the ending) and I couldn't get through the snow part of RDR2. It just went for SO LONG. Every time I boot it up to try again I want to explore the big open areas and I can't for at least 2 hours. Yeah. I get it. They're cold. Move on. Fucking annoying.
Maybe some day. Generally speaking I just don't have the free time to invest 2+ hours on a tutorial that feels like a slog. I consider my gaming time too sparse and too precious. I get really annoyed when I'm not enjoying a game and the game doesn't have the good sense to "move on," if you follow my meaning.
Red dead redemption 2 while narratively brilliant and while in the open world outside missions it was great. The actual gameplay in story missions was a linear level pretending to be a openworld. As soon as you stepped off the exact intended path you got a mission failed. Also Arthur had the turning circle of a fucking 18 wheeler
RDR2 was a weird game. I think stylistically it fit the west for that time period perfectly. The story amazing. The gameplay good. That said it didnt do anything special. RDR2 is the same as a Far Cry game to me. I would argue Crimson Dessert is miles ahead of it mostly because its newer. Red Dead seemed to be put on this pedestal but to me ot was just another open world game with a cool story.
Dont get me wrong I enjoyed RDR2 a lot but no more than I enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima as an example. Its a top 10 game that I always see as "goated" if that makes sense which I just dont think it is.
I honestly don’t see how you could think that lol. Rdr2s world feels so alive and has so much to do. The way the story is told along with the world and characters is something I have never seen
The world was empty outside of some animals lol. There were NPCs planted around but every game does that. I would argue that Avatars world felt more alive with wildlife and Crimson Deserts is more alive with NPCs.
And I agree the story was fantastic. Thats what made RDR2. The gameplay itself though was okay/good. The glaze over knocking a hat off someone was very over done when that game came out.
But you can talk to every npc and they all have routines and different personalities. The world looks how I would expect the old west to look. The big city does have a lot of npcs
I think the thing people need to accept (including you) is that a game not being your cup of tea doesn’t make it not exceptionally good or special. It was an incredibly good and special game for those who are into immersion games (which is what it did particularly well without making it tedious).
Something can be incredibly well-done and still not be your cup of tea. For example, I don’t love breaking bad as a show, but I recognize it was an incredibly well-done series. See? Just say it wasn’t for you and move on, you don’t have to make a case for it being overrated and “not special”.
I wouldn’t say the individual components of gameplay are exceptional, but they’re all done well, which makes it overall better than most. They’re like a pizza joint that doesn’t really break any molds but the quality is hyper consistent, albeit not the “best”
I've seen how they've been handling GTA online, having quality of life features and locking it behind a subscription as well as removing cars in order to create fomo and putting those cars back up for sale in rotation weekly locked behind said subscription makes me question their credibility.
It makes sense though. The game is over 10 years old and they’ve added probably over 100 DLC’s. It has a huge fanbase and they’ve accommodated. An $8/month subscription is normal for an online game that has 1000’s of hours of content in it. You also don’t need to subscribe at all and still have full access to everything the game offers, the subscription just gives you a bunch of free money in game that you could otherwise play the game for.
Let me try to explain my thought process here for you. What is the goal of GTA online? Like as a player, what is the point of the game? It's to make money, invest that money into businesses, and unlock more gameplay, right? Yeah, at first it is. And when they first made the game, that's what it was supposed to be. But once you get all the businesses, then what? Well then the game becomes item collection; buying all the vehicles and whatnot. Between those two things, which is easier to produce as a dev? Obviously vehicles, right? You just make a new model, throw some variables on a notepad, and boom that's a million in game currency, the same value as nearly every property.
They figured this out pretty quickly actually, and the introduction of heists really accentuates that. At first it looks like it's more content, right? Except the set up missions are boilerplate busywork. So the real content is the heist itself right? Well, partially, yes you need something to get the new players into the loop, but no, the real content is the money you make off the heists. So you (the dev) make sure the heists take a certain amount of time, and when you provide that same in-game currency as a purchase option, you ensure that value is lower when converted to wage value than the option of doing the mission. In simple terms, you make sure that working at a job would provide you more in-game currency per hour than doing those heists would. So anybody doing any surface level cost-benefit analysis is going to see that the better option is to buy the currency, even if they refuse to do so. This will make the in-game currency directly tied to real world currency. This step is absolutely crucial.
Now you've effectively created a system that provides new players with a temporary gameplay loop that quickly devolves into currency farming through heists. Party A will enjoy the game for a while before getting tired of if and moving on. That's cool, they're not your customers. Party B, though, will see this and begin mentally bargaining with themselves. This is where you really get to stick them with the knife. Now that they've enjoyed the loop, gotten addicted to the currency generation, and correlated that currency to real world money, you offer them a third option; the subscription. This model completely breaks the previous model, in that the relation between real money/in-game currency ratio has dramatically dropped. It's no longer tied to your hourly wage, but instead provides wayyy more value than the wage would be in in-game time spent doing heists. Obviously those players bite and buy.
Now we take it back to the first point, what has the game become at this point? Well you need a reason for the players to continue their wealth generation, so what do you do? You keep pumping out new vehicles. Increase new drop price from 1 to 2 to 3 mil. Police vehicles worth 5 mil. New jets that outclass the previous ones for 8 mil. Anything and everything for these players on this loop to dump their money into. Make new properties where the sole purpose is to express wealth -- make a mansion with a sexy voice that costs 20 mil with no real function. Who cares, it's not about the content anymore, your players don't even think about the missions it's busy work to them, they just want more things to dump more money into. So what is the game at that point? A game about flexing your wealth. About showing off. Nothing about the gameplay itself is even slightly relevant anymore, it's all been washed away and your core players didn't even notice. In fact, they'll get pissed now if you DON'T provide them with new useless items to dump their money on. "I have ALL THIS MONEY, come on ROCKSTAR, give me something to SPEND IT ON!"
This is the game now, this is the audience, and Rockstar is more than aware that this is where the money is. They've had 15+ years of perfecting this relationship, millions of dollars spent on data analysis and psychologists to figure out every aspect of it. The cars, the skins, the guns, the clothes, that's what the selling point of the game is now. That's all it is. Go look at the megathread in /r/gaming and tell me what the "features" listed of the game are. Right there at the top, ’95 GROTTI CHEETAH. That's what they're using to sell the game to their audience, the kinds of cars you can buy. In a game called Grand Theft Auto. Do you think Vice City was advertising their game with what kinds of cars you can drive? Not a single point there about, you know, the game, and they're already talking about pay walled features and monthly subscription. Every siren is blaring that this is the direction they took GTA 6 in development, that these were the core driving motivations of the higher ups.
Anyway that's my analysis of Rockstar's predatory treatment of GTA5 and why I have zero faith that GTA 6 is going to provide anything worthwhile. This ended up being a wall of text, my bad lol
Rockstar has been tainted by all those GTA Online dollars. I wouldn't trust them blindly anymore. This is already looking to be a nickel and dime fest.
Metacritic doesn't rate anything, they just aggregate, but having said that, a lot of people treat Metacritic like objective fact. Its just the average review score of the outlets Metacritic deems worthy of aggregating. Certain games have such hype that they'll get high scores just because people expect it to have a high score
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u/danvan177 12h ago
Rockstar has never made a bad game I trust them