People get mad when I say it, but I honestly think Grand Theft Auto IV is Rockstars most pretentious title.
Dan Houser and Leslie Benzies literally stripped all the fun out of Grand Theft Auto in order to make the movie they always wanted to make.
the seventh generation of vidya consoles was the beginning of the end for my interest in gaming as a primary hobby, and GTA4 was one of the titles that really cemented what a mistake it was for me, as a kid, to have expected so much better from the industry. i remember being first in line at gamestop during the midnight release of GTA: San Andreas on ps2 and playing that all day and all night. my parents thought those games were hilarious and my mother loved a lot of the music in Vice City.
then GTA4 happened, and it's the most anti-GTA game ever - it's GTA in name only. i have never understood where the appeal comes from. Rockstar is just one of those few companies that apparently can do no wrong and suffer no backlash despite scores of evidence to the contrary. they're a lot like Nintendo, Acti-Blizz, etc in that regard, propped up by legions of drones.
there are no side activities in GTA4. money is worthless. there are no customization options for vehicles. there's basically no clothing to wear and the game forces you to wear a suit for many missions anyway. the shooting and gunplay is about all the positive there is to it but that's also the critical downside to GTA4 and every game after that Rockstar developed: the autistic focus on hyper-realistic movements, and the complete death of the power fantasy in what was the ultimate power fantasy game. to this day it fucks with me that people think the game is a groundbreaking masterpiece when there's nothing of value to be found as a video game. except for the "world interaction", or whatever the robotic shills on boards like /v/ continue to extol it for. it's an open world game that absolutely did
not need to be open world because there is
nothing to do. GTA5 was even worse in this regard; GTA4 took the franchise behind the shed, and GTA5 pulled the trigger.
GTA5 is the most pretentious shit on the planet and even more wildly popular than GTA4, a distinction i cannot fathom. the open world was even worse, the wanted system completely broken, and even more uniquely GTA things were excised from the final product. the vast majority of missions don't award money (not that it's useful anyway) and i sincerely believe that the Rockstar team thought they were being funny, endearing and clever in how much of the player's time they waste on the sheer amount of mundane, tedious faggotry in the game for absolutely no meaningful payoff whatsoever (yoga, collectibles, etc) while marketing the game on a big lie about masterminding criminal heists. i'd sperg out about GTA: Online, which has always been a massively insecure and dangerous platform that Rockstar still hasn't suffered severe consequences for, but that ship has sailed, and i don't want to be reminded of how much money they rake in year over year.
