Does Grand Theft Auto Have an Identity Crisis?
From gritty and grounded to outlandish and over-the-top; where will Rockstar Games take GTA VI?
Just to be clear from the very beginning, I love Grand Theft Auto V. I also enjoyed GTA Online for a while, but I haven’t properly played that in years. The single-player campaign was, and still is, an absolute joy to play. Now, it’s true that I do have some issues with the characters, the story and how it’s told, this post is by no means an attempt by me to turn anyone off by saying it’s a bad game. It’s a great game. In fact, other than Shadow Of The Colossus, it’s the only game I’ve purchased on three separate occasions.
When first playing the game way all the way back in 2013, my friends and I came to the similar conclusion that it was essentially a high definition remake of San Andreas, offering many of the same freedoms that the 2004 classic introduced into the series. Over the course of the three PS2-era games, the GTA series had been introducing more and more outlandish, over the top gameplay and story elements, culminating with the protagonist of San Andreas starting off as a street gangster, ending up managing a world-famous rapper who pulls off heists of Mafia-owned casinos.
Wedged somewhat awkwardly between these games is GTA IV, a game that removed all the silliness and the over-the-top escapades of its predecessors for a much more down-to-Earth tale told in one very grey and rather drab city of towering concrete. The story follows Niko Bellic, an Eastern European lured to Liberty City by the lies of his cousin, who was in debt to several criminal organizations due to his gambling addiction, dragging Niko back into a world of crime and violence that he had long left behind. What follows is a story of betrayal, loss, and revenge that felt much darker than anything seen in the GTA universe up to that point.
In the short term, people loved the game, and rightly so. It’s my personal favorite of the series, mainly due to the more realistic take on a familiar style of game. But over time, many fans began to voice their disappointment at the lack of “fun” available in the game. There were no VTOL planes to steal, no jet packs, no casinos to rob, and no city-wide riots to fight through. There’s just a rather fragile Eastern European man who flies through the car window if you crash too hard, and gets regular phone calls from his cousin who wants to go bowling. The story itself wasn’t a happy one and didn’t exactly end on a good note, serving only to teach us that revenge can and will consume a person, taking everything they care about and leaving nothing resolved.
As you can see from the expertly crafted and incredibly scientific graph above, GTA IV doesn’t follow the pattern of the series in terms of tone and realism. But what if we were to consider other open-world, crime-based games that Rockstar Games have made to this graph?
GTA IV was released in 2008, and two years later the world was graced with the masterpiece that is Red Dead Redemption. The game was sometimes referred to as Grand Theft Horse and other similarly hilarious names, but these comparisons were wholly justified. This was GTA in the desert, cars swapped with horses and bears and rattlesnakes keeping you alert in the wilderness. The story was similar to that of GTA IV, in that an ex-criminal is forced back into a life of crime to protect his family. This time, however, the government is holding protagonist John Marston’s family hostage until he can track down and kill his former gang members. The story ends with John being betrayed and killed by the same government agents that sent him on this task and ultimately results in his son starting down the same path of crime and violence that John had done his utmost to keep him from.
Red Dead Redemption 2’s story wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, either. Some early missions see you collecting debts from struggling families, with one such interaction resulting in protagonist Arthur Morgan catching tuberculosis. Towards the end of the game, the effects of the disease are tearing his body apart, mirroring the story beats of his gang, his family, tearing itself apart from the inside, leaving Arthur to make amends wherever he can before he drops dead. This games’ story was incredibly well-received, with particular praise being showered over Arthur’s characterization as having his deep loyalties pushed to the extreme.
When boiled down to very basic levels, the main stories of these three games feature reluctant criminals trying to protect their families, and ending up in a pretty bad place, whether that be literally dead or just dead on the inside.
Now let’s compare this story template to GTA V. Franklin is a gangster who wants to go straight, but ends up befriending an ex-criminal who pulls them both back into the life. Michael is said ex-criminal who is ultimately bored with nothing to do, acting on impulse after impulse to wrap him and his new friend into a dangerous lifestyle. And Trevor is a nutter who eats people. By the end of the game, despite being blackmailed into pulling heists for the US government and stealing trains with helicopters, the characters end up pretty much in the same place that they started. The story is just an excuse to do cool stuff, and the characters are just there so that the players have some way to interact with the cool stuff.
Like I said at the start, there’s nothing wrong with that, and part of the charm of the game is that it doesn’t take itself seriously. But if you were to make a similar realism chart to the one above, and now only included GTA IV and V with Red Dead 1 and 2, suddenly GTA V is the massive spike away from realism and towards absurdity before RDR2 brings Rockstar back to its expected pattern.
It seems that Rockstar Games wanted to move away from the absurdity that they were embracing with San Andreas and bring their games back to a more grounded, realistic atmosphere. After all, the Saints Row series was quickly adopting a more comedic, over-the-top style to its games, and Rockstar didn’t get where they are today by following trends. It could be that GTA IV was their attempt to mature the series somewhat, which it arguably succeeded in doing, but this is not what the people wanted. People wanted San Andreas but with better graphics. People wanted a player character that cracks wise and says funny things. People wanted to fly military jets and beat people to death with giant dildos. From this perspective, the argument can be made that GTA V was a direct response to the criticisms of the previous game, and certainly feels more like a sequel to San Andreas than GTA IV.
Once again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does raise the question as to whether this is the way Rockstar envisioned the series going when they started work on GTA IV. Do you think they ever predicted a future where they would be introducing flying cars and Tron motorcycles to their online mode?
Though I can’t help but wonder how GTA V would have looked like if they had continued down the path they started with GTA IV, or how Red Dead Redemption 2 might have turned out if people were clamoring for a more off-the-wall cowboy adventure.
Perhaps Rockstar will dial up the realism whenever they decide to finish the heavily-rumored, but as of yet, unannounced Grand Theft Auto VI.
