Grand Theft Auto V
 

Trailer

Looking to be a return to Los Santos and the surrounding countryside. I'm pretty excited! Kind of wish they had bucked the trend and redone San Fierro, though, as that was the funnest city to drive around in while playing San Andreas. But I'll take what I can get!

Trailer lacks arabic numeral 5 to explain to people what the fuck V and Five mean. Because if I didn't have this top-notch edumacation I don't know how I would've figured that out.

Yeah, I never played a 3D Liberty City game, enjoyed the shit out of San Andreas, though. So maybe I will be slightly excited about this game once I get over the fact that you need to be a genius to figure out what the hell those weird symbols after "Grand Theft Auto" mean.

Also, I wonder if I will be able to touch GTA again after Saint's Row, which I liked to describe as GTA only really good.

The trailer served its purpose for me, I am intrigue.

there were talks about a female protagonist for this one, anyone heard anything about it?

Not sure how I feel about GTA really. I mean since the 3rd I've pretty much gone out and immediately bought them all day 1, no hesitation, because the ps2 games were awesome. But then 4 came along, and things didn't go so well. I lost interest with the story, got fed up of the phone calls and damnable minigames with everyone all the time, never actually finished the main missions, and there was less fun stuff to do on the side.

If 5 is sticking with 4s formula, I'm gona call it a miss on this one. If it goes back to the ps2 era games, then I might get intrigued later. Kinda need to see more of what it's like right now though.

A simple patch with a "Turn Off Phone" feature would have solved so much. But I never found GTA4's phone calls to be NEARLY as annoying as the Internet whines about them. I mean, you could hit like....B/circle to cancel them immediately, right? Or maybe it was the D-pad, it's been a few years. Suffice to say, it was a button press. If you actually weren't interested in them.

The main missions were pretty bleh though. Niko Bellic was just a completely unrelatable, fresh-off-the-boat (literally), murdering psychopath, and I just didn't care at all one way or another what happened to him or anyone around him for that reason. The multiplayer was really fun, though. Cops n' Crooks was the shit, the co-op missions were fun, and most of the other modes were good too.

I think an ideal GTA V probably takes a lot from San Andreas though. I would like to see that level of customization return.

Well yeah, you could just cancel them, but I'm the kinda guy that likes the extra goodies and perks that a game can give me, but in order to do that you had to keep them happy as fuck and it got really old, really fast.

Never did play the online though, my PS3 wasn't connected at the time.

It would have been nice if the friendship perks just stayed once you attained them, even if their friendship dropped back down. Or maybe only went away when it dropped down to some critical level instead of 75%.

I'm sure Rockstar got the message, though.

Haha, relax, dude, it's supposed to look like the "Five" on a Five-dollar bill.

Here's a close-up of the logo:

http://img94.imageshack.us/img94/315...ovjpg627x1.jpg

Personally I thought it was pretty cool the first time I saw it.

Why would you need a patch when the game already let you turn the phone off by just going in and turning it off? I turned it off when looking for the pigeons/secret packages and so on, for example, or when I just wanted to screw around. You only HAD to have it on when you had run out of missions from people and had to get a call to open up a new mission string.

I think it dropped down much slower than it went up, though? Like you could make it go up five or ten points at a time whereas it dropped like, 1 point every time you didn't answer the phone (I may be misremembering) I mean yeah it was kind of a stupid system in many ways but it wasn't any more annoying than the girlfriends in San Andreas and was entirely optional besides. I think the only friend power really integral to the game was Jamaican dude's gun shop in his trunk, as I used that all the time. The others I could take or leave, though I used Roman's taxi quite a bit and made use of Dwayne and Packie's powers at least one or twice in actual missions.

ABOUT GRAND THEFT AUTO V:

It's not going to be the whole of San Andreas from what I can tell. It's going to be Los Santos and the surrounding area. Which is somewhat disappointing because a more fully-realized San Fierro would be completely awesome (it was the funnest city to drive around in in San Andreas). I guess they want to avoid the "dead space" that was in San Andreas but then again I had a ton of fun screwing around out in the mountains and desert and stuff, so why leaving in pretty optional things like the countryside is bad, I dunno. BUT there is going to be quite a bit of countryside apparently so I have some pretty high hopes for this game. Maybe they can just artificially add San Francisco-esque hills into their Los Angeles equivalent to get the best of San Fierro (unless the real Los Angeles has plenty of hills and they just decided to mostly ignore them in San Andreas, with probably the poorest equivalent of the Hollywood Hills one could come up with!).

EDIT: The possibility of expansions/sequels to this arc this time that take place in more fully-realized San Fierro and Las Venturas (similar to the Grand Theft Auto III arc) would be pretty cool though. I could quite easily see a Grand Theft Auto V trilogy revolving around this structure, games set in the whole of San Andreas.

I actually really liked 4 - I think they tried to actually have some character development here and there... except for the, y'know... "HEY, COUSIN!"

Well, Roman certainly was a character, with his penchant for rambling on and on about "BIG AMERICAN TITTIES!"

But yeah, Niko was one of the best developed characters in a video game. Just the fact that you could choose whether or not to kill Darko Brevic, the man you want revenge on, with zero actual impact upon the game's plotline unlike all the other choices in the game, was pretty unique.

Thing I learned: If you accept, then immediately call them back and cancel, it resulted in no relationship drop. A bit of a chore, but it worked.

4 killed all interest in GTA for me, especially with SR 1 and 2 in existance.

Also this.

I occasionally get the impression when I talk to people that I am the only one in the world who actually liked GTA 4. Saint's Row 2 was usually more fun, but I also didn't always want the SR sort of feeling in my open-world crime-ridden sandbox game, and am glad I had two distinct types of titles to satisfy that desire.

So, looking forward to this.

What killed it was that it was boring and gray and brown and mostly generic feeling and bowling.

Bowling bowling bowling.

It was like Rockstar sold the colorful, vibrant world of GTA games and the less-than-subtle humor and goof of it to Volition, Inc.

It didn't really feel like a GTA game.

That might have been my thing then. The first GTA I ever played was 4, and I had no interest in any wackier elements of the series after I picked up Saints Row.

I preferred The Ballad of Gay Tony to the game proper.. More of that please.

I've played pretty much all the GTA games, and IV felt like a natural "evolution" of the series from the "III Generation". They wanted to try something new with it, not quite the same level of ridiculousness inherent in the "III Generation". I think they managed it pretty well. And really, the setting was still pretty silly, what with the radio stations and TV shows and so on. There was still a lot of the humor in there.

Also I loved the gameplay, especially targeting/driving in comparison to the past games. I think I too might be one of the few who felt they made it better controlling than the old games...

So it's not as over-the-top as Saints Row, but they were purposefully trying to not be as over-the-top as the "III Generation", at least in the main storyline. I think they succeeded pretty well in accomplishing that.

V might be different from GTA IV in tone. It already seems less melodramatic, since the protagonist is the kind of naive goofball criminal who thinks he can start over in a new town with a new life. It's like he's never seen the vast majority of crime films where everytime you want out, they suck you back in.

Just the the far more callous attitude he takes towards crime is a change from the melodrama of Niko.