Grand Theft Auto has always been a popular game series. And maybe it's because it has been around for so long, but GTA V has been especially popular. It felt like almost every time I went to someone's house when I was young, you could find someone playing it on a TV somewhere.
GTA V is still popular today. I constantly see people reference it online, and if I play a song from the soundtrack, everyone asks "isn't that the song from GTA"? Epic Games released the game for free for a limited time on the store, and so many people rushed to pick it up that the store crashed.
Despite it's popularity, I haven't actually played it until about 2 weeks ago. I have wanted to for awhile, it felt like a load bearing game to me. Everyone probably has a copy of the game somewhere. I just have it downloaded on my Xbox 360, likely from forcing a friend to sign into their Xbox account and then downloading all their games.
Whenever I tried playing GTA in the past, I couldn't. For some reason the game doesn't let you save unless you have internet, even if you're playing single player. This combined with a long intro mission made it so I couldn't really play the game. My Xbox 360 couldn't connect to the router, so I couldn't become online either.
However, recently we got a new router, which meant the Xbox could now connect, and I could now save the game.
Now that I'm actually playing it, I can see how this is the second best selling game of all time. The world is so detailed (although a little boring outside of the city, the mountains are just really lame) and there is so much random stuff to do. Even the underwater areas have detail, which was unnecessary in my opinion.
The story has been whatever so far. I haven't been paying attention, but there is a nice variety in things you do. I will say like 60% of the story is just driving, but I personally don't mind that. I was shocked at how little killing you actually need to do. Granted, you do need to kill a lot of people, but half the missions I've completed so far require none of that.
One thing however is I can definitely see why game stores were warning parents about this game. Killing is whatever, we're desensitized to violence no matter what. Swearing is whatever, I can see how that is a problem. But the big thing is sexual content.
For a game this popular, I wasn't expecting this much sexual content. There are a lot of sex jokes in the writing, which is whatever. However, there are also sex scenes in the story. Not implied sex scenes, full on sex scenes, where you're watching everything happen right in front of you. I thought you could just not go in strip clubs if you wanted to avoid that. Also, I don't have a problem with that, it was just a little shocking to me.
Despite being a game named after a crime, I don't really do crimes in the game much. I have yet to even shoot a person outside the story, and I try to avoid crashing into people when driving. In similar games such as Saints Row I don't avoid hitting people, and I shoot random people all the time. I think the main difference is the police.
In GTA V, the police seem like they actually try to stop you, swerving in front of you and stuff like that. On top of that, the police sirens are also very loud, something that overwhelms me. I think the main reason is because I just enjoy driving without distractions. A lot of my time not in the story is spent hijacking a taxi and doing random orders. There are sometimes where I drive to a random location, and I'm so lost in driving that I keep driving past where I need to go without even realizing it.
With that being said, I don't think driving is perfect. My main issue is that it feels like you're spending most of your time looking at the minimap, or radar as it's called in the game. You can set it to blips mode, which hides the map itself, but you will still be looking at it, and this hides your health. So much important information is on the radar, such as where police are, how loud you are, or instructions on where to go, and other stuff like that.
You can disable the GPS and use the minimap as a compass, but this doesn't work well when you don't know the map. The map shows what your next turn is as a prompt, but this is basically decoration. A better thing would of been adding GPS voice prompts, or making it show the distance until your next turn without the rest of the map visible. I want to look at the city, not a map of the city.
Finally, you cannot talk about the driving without talking about the radio. There are so many radio stations, and they all have good songs. So many songs that play on these stations seem to have become really popular outside of the game. Having stations in a game is genius because it exposes people to new music, and they also associate that song with the game, giving the game a greater emotional connection.
However, I think there are too many stations, and some of them could be merged. This would be nice because although there are about 500 total tracks in the game, each station only plays 20, so this would add more variety to each station. 20 tracks only lasts for about an hour (assuming each song is 3 minutes), not including in game advertisements and news reports (which are awesome). This is a little bit of a nitpick, as you can just change the channel.
Overall, they should make a game where you drive a car. That would be fun I think.