Support NeoGAF

[Tatsumi Oga]

SP DLC not existing is the real missed opportunity here

But it was to be expected after the interview Rockstar gave before GTAV came out.

 

[davepoobond]

i thought overall it was a fine implementation. i agree that there were some moments where it shouldnt have been disabled, but it was all very deliberate. they wanted to tell a story a certain way, not let it be more free base.

 

[Seven4sses]

The only crime here is that Chop was only part of the Character select once and never seen again. They could have done something cool with him at least.

 

[Horns]

There were a couple of times that I felt they missed, but I recall those were for narrative reasons. The real missed opportunity was not making the 2 and 3 character missions co-op. Not that that's an easy task. I would love to play some of the SP with friends.

 

[keltickennedy]

GTA V's has a few major missed opportunities.

Not using Max Payne 3's movement and shooting was a bad move. The combat would have really benefited from that combat system.

Another one was the heists. Only half of them followed the formula laid out by the first heist mission, and the other half break the rules to a point where they are basically just missions.

Compared to those I didn't have as much of a problem with character switching. It was lazy as far as game design went but character swapping didn't seem like something the game was concerned about having as one of its pillars of its missions; it was there more to avoid having the player do tedious parts of a missions because the character they are playing would have to, and less about freedom of player choice.

I wonder if it was due to the memory constraints with the older consoles. Maybe they just couldn't do more complex character animations and behaviors in a big open world with all the other systems they have going on at the same time.

I was also hoping they would of had close quarter executions like in Red Dead and Max Payne 3.

There were a couple of times that I felt they missed, but I recall those were for narrative reasons. The real missed opportunity was not making the 2 and 3 character missions co-op. Not that that's an easy task. I would love to play some of the SP with friends.

GTA Online my man!! The heists are up there with some of the best missions in SP i think. The new Lamar missions also have a few that are more involved than the standard Contact Missions.

 

[BinaryBear07]

I think limitations in technology played a role in that decision as well.

 

[doofy102]

In Rockstar North's defence, they are trying.

I live near their offices in Edinburgh, have friends that work on the GTA games, and encounter members of the development team quite often.

Honestly, straight-from-the-horses-mouth - they try. One time a R* North dev asked me what I'd improve about GTA, and I told him all this stuff about the flawed mission structure, the lack of dynamic structures (even if the world is dynamic), the mediocre gun combat, and he just said:

"We know."

He explained in very loose terms that they have been trying for years to improve all this stuff, but every time they try, it breaks, because the thing they're making is so massive that adjusting one thing in a big way impacts everything else. So, to prevent the games breaking, they keep iterating on how it was done in the past.

Which is fair enough. It'll just take a longer time for improvements to come.

Oh man. I'm jealous.

One of my favourite decisions in GTAV was not putting the jet in a mission. Everyone seem to have their own "How I stole the jet," story.

 

[KyanMehwulfe]

yeah I think it was probably based on the tech... cuz most missions do let you switch....

almost every shooting mission does. even the OP reference I think, sounds like a reference to the chase scene at the end of Marriage Counselling. You can switch in that mission too but it locks after a minute, maybe for tech reasons as you approach the cutscene at the house? whether you're F or M has unique scene based on your results, so there could be a tech reason why you can only switch at the start and then it locks cuz it needs to evaluate your performance so the other character can comment on it.

 

[autoduelist]

The reason is because they needed to create difficulty.

Think about it. How easy would every driving mission be if you could just be Franklin, all the time. You put the character who isn't so good at the thing in the drivers seat to create difficulty and tension with in the story and with the player.

This, to some degree.

That's bad game design.

If they couldn't figure out a way to balance their own characters, then they need help designing missions and ai more than I thought. Why even bother having abilities if you can't balance them? That's sad. Your ai not good enough?

It's not like the skills are an unlimited resource. It was limited. You had to do stunts (near misses in car etc), get kills to refill the bar.

That's not 'bad game design', it's the simple truth. If every character has certain skills, people would just switch to the appropriate character -- driver skill for driving missions, etc.

It has nothing to do with 'balance' or 'bad game design', it's the natural effect of having differently skilled characters -- and we wouldn't want all characters to be the same.

 

[dr_rus]

Not once I thought having 3 characters made ANYTHING better. Going back to a single character wouldn't have diminished a thing, imo. Sticking with a character and having the other two appear in cutscenes or in game dialogue would have had the same effect on me, personally.

Nah, I can give you a couple of points:

1. After you've passed a mission you can just switch to a different character who is likely to be closer to the new mission than your previous one. This makes the flow much more dynamic as it basically cuts out most of pointless driving between markers.

2. Several missions which are presented from different perspectives definitely benefit from this. Like the mission where they've hit the truck or even the first mission of the game. They could've kept this without the free switching capacity though and just switch the player to different character automatically.

 

[CyclopsRock]

They did implement that in some sections, so you have to think that the idea of doing it during all missions did occur to them - I assume they had a reason not to go with it, though I dunno what that reason is. Perhaps, for story reasons, there are certain things they need Character X to see and you, as the player, needs to be in control when they do it so that you see it too? I dunno.