GTAV's Characters Are Just Bad

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

GTAV's Characters Are Just Bad

No-one's playing it for the story? Nobody would have said that if the story had been good.

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[theETG]

Just for the record, umbrellas actually don't sell very well in Seattle. Exposing your head to the dreary sky is a point of pride for many of us, and those who don't never forget their own umbrellas, and rarely seek new ones.
Sunglasses, on the other hand, do. Who can remember where we put our sunglasses from last year when the sun only comes out once every three months?
Stupid sun. Making us squint all the time.
Curse you life-giving ball of fire!

 

[tmande2nd]

Brace yourself for the incoming storm of fanboys howling in rage they you did not fall to your knees and worship their game.

I watched a lot of GTAV as my friend played it.
I kept saying "Wow what a bunch of aholes".

 

[Cowabungaa]

A player, released in the sandbox and free of consequences, is reckless and whimsical, not cruel. They might kill someone if they're in the way or because they fly off in a hilarious manner, but prolonged and calculated torture isn't the same.

Someone hasn't heard of the The Sims community it seems.

 

[gambler778]

These are GTA protagonists we're talking about here, right? Most of the time I agree with you, but in this case I cannot. Did anyone go into this game expecting these three to be holy beacons of morality? I sure didn't. But that doesn't mean that their "motivation" isn't there. All three characters have very defined arcs they go through.

Michael is a retired thief who was pulled back into the game by a younger man looking to make some money. When he gets back in, he remembers how much he missed doing jobs and making loads of cash. He is also haunted by what he did 9 years before the game, especially when he realizes Trevor lives close to Los Santos and eventually finds out what he and the FIB did. Michael is ready to move on with his live, but Trevor wants to keep the good old days going. He isn't ready to move into the present, only to embrace the past for the rest of his life. And Franklin wants to break into the business but needs Michael's help to find work. All of them have a reason to be there, and it's just as thrilling to watch as Niko Bellic's story.

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

I dunno. The GTAV torture scene made me profoundly uncomfortable. But I believe games are truly art and the fact that it managed to illicit that response from me was powerful. Not saying Yahtzee is wrong or anything. I just liked that a game bothered to try and draw out any emotion other than raucous glee. Any other developer would have had that scene tossed out after the first focus group.

Of course I haven't played Spec Ops: The Line yet. I got it during the last Steam Sale though. So maybe that does "uncomfortable" better than GTAV and I just haven't been enlightened yet. Time will tell.

The GTA protagonists are reprehensible, this much is true. But part of me likes that Rockstar just did away with the pretense. CJ acting like a good person in cutscenes while mowing down passers by in gameplay is incongruous. Michael, Trevor or even Franklin doing it... it kinda seems in character. Even if that character is unpleasant.

 

[shrekfan246]

A player, released in the sandbox and free of consequences, is reckless and whimsical, not cruel. They might kill someone if they're in the way or because they fly off in a hilarious manner, but prolonged and calculated torture isn't the same.

Someone hasn't heard of the The Sims community it seems.

I laughed, but it's still not the same. And I'm not necessarily sure how much the communities behind The Sims and Grand Theft Auto really overlap. And I'd hope it's not really any sort of majority of people who play the game just to lock Sims into rooms with no doors, or to never let them sleep or eat or use the restroom. Contrarily, most of the defense of Grand Theft Auto V has been that people don't play the series for the story, or that the characters are supposed to be terrible because that's what the average player is like anyway.

If Rockstar's continued focus on narrative is anything to go by, people most certainly do play the games for the story, and I imagine that many people don't act like a complete jackass just because they can. I, for one, don't find Grand Theft Auto very engaging as a franchise precisely because driving around running pedestrians over in stolen cars only remains entertaining for so long, and the writing and characters tend to be too tedious for my liking. When I played Saints Row The Third, I didn't spend all of my time running down the streets whacking people over the heads with The Penetrator, just because it was funny; That's not really the type of "gamer" that I am. EDIT: That's not to say I didn't do it at all, of course, just that the novelty wore off fairly quickly and the game had plenty else to offer to keep my interest held.

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

A player, released in the sandbox and free of consequences, is reckless and whimsical, not cruel. They might kill someone if they're in the way or because they fly off in a hilarious manner, but prolonged and calculated torture isn't the same.

Someone hasn't heard of the The Sims community it seems.

He has.

And he denounced Sims 3 as an evil game because a)you enslave the sims to do your bidding and b) the game enslaves the player to keep on playing through faux-responsibility.

 

[Makabriel]

Frankly I'm enjoying the version of GTA. It's actually the first that has held my attention long enough to make me want to finish it. I can see the inconsistencies that Yahtzee mentions. It's pretty obvious. But the story in itself is pretty interesting. I agree with gambler's assessment. '

So, in reference to the torture scene. Before that mission popped up, I switched to Trevor and his "intro" scene was him in the middle of the road in only his underwear. I got in his truck and took the call for that mission. So my first thought was ... "Need clothes". Well, when I got out of my truck to buy some, it switched me to the scene for the mission.

So that whole mission, Trevor was going through the motions in just his tighty whities. Talk about surreal. But in all honesty, It reminded me of the scene in Payback, with Gibson's character getting his toes bashed in.. *shiver*.

 

[Steve2911]

Honestly, the three protagonists are one of my favourite things about the game. All of them are complete cunts in their own way, and all of them are constantly entertaining (especially in the back and forth they have with each other).

So yeah, a strong disagreement on this one. They were a real treat that I wasn't expecting going in (considering I thought Niko was awful and every protagonist before him has been a bit of a blank slate villainous sort).

 

[Covarr]

This is my favorite GTA story. Not because it's good--it's really not--and not because the characters have any depth to them. What really does it for me is that I find myself laughing constantly. Michael may not be a shining beacon of character development, but he's got some decent one-liners. Franklin may not be anything at all, but he brings a genuinely hilarious piece of dumbass luggage with him named Lamar. Trevor's antics (when they're spur of the moment, anyway) are indeed humorous if you're able and willing to turn off your moral compass while you play.

In many ways, this game acts as an antithesis to Grand Theft Auto IV. While GTA IV aimed to be deep, this aims to be a bit goofier. While GTA IV had a gray and gritty world, this one is bright and colorful. I kinda suspect that Rockstar intentionally didn't give this game as "good" a story as their last romp, for this very reason. If anything, the game was meant to act as a massive tutorial for GTA Online, with a story there simply because it needed one. To that end, it was quite successful.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Casual Shinji]

It's like Rockstar didn't want to tie the audience down with characters that had a solid arc, so we get three characters who's arc don't go anywhere.

By the end of the game there's no conclusion to Trevor's, Michael's, and Franklin's story. They're exactly the same as when we first met them, except slightly richer. With Michael there seems to be not even one ounce of difference; He's still an unhappy asshole with an unhappy asshole family. Trevor is still a sick fuck in his trailer, and Franklin is alone in his big villa.

So what was the point to all of this?

 

[Acton Hank]

I love it how this article manages to state my big problem with so many games: The lack of motivation that I can relate to.

Exactly why is having lots of money a hard motivation to relate to?

 

[AldUK]

This is exactly the reason why I couldn't watch any of the streams on Twitch for this game. (I couldn't play it myself at all, since I don't have a console past the PS2) The characters and the story just killed it, I felt uncomfortable right from the beginning and switched over to other things after 10 minutes.

 

[PsychedelicDiamond]

I think one of the things that GTA Vs Story lacked was a decent villain. In GTA IV we had Dimitri Raskalov, he betrayed Niko fairly early on in the game which gave us a motivation to find and kill him. He constantly kept trying to kill Niko and his associates so that motivation was never lost. Once you got to the ending of the game you actually wanted to be rid of him. Th closes GTA V had to a villain was Agent Haines and while he was a thoroughly horrible person he barely actually antagonized you throughout the game. The other characters that were set up as villains either barely factored into the game like Stretch or that triad boss or only actually antagonized you at the very ending of the game like Haines and Weston. If they would have been established as antagonists early on and were an actual threat throughout the game you'd have actually had a motivation.

I know that GTA V was the better game but it's undeniable that GTA IV had the better story. And part of me is sad to know that the only reason GTA V didn't have a better story was everyone complaining about GTA IV being to serious...

 

[Thanatos2k]

GTA 5 is not a bad game by any stretch, but it is definitely not a 97 as metacritic claims it to be.

 

[mattaui]

That's funny, I always thought GTA was about pornographic levels of vehicular mayhem and extreme violence, with increasing amounts of sex thrown in for good measure. Would it be improved by stellar writing that ended up with the three character arcs tied together in an enlightening denouement? Well, maybe, but I sure don't require it. It's the same way I feel about Saints Row - I definitely didn't go into that demanding solid, believable characters or complex motivations. They're both games about extreme violence and gratuitous exploitation.

And I didn't play any of the other GTAs because of the story, and the only reason I ever progressed the story missions at all was to unlock other parts of the game to do crazy stuff in. It was all pretty unmemorable stuff as far as I'm concerned, but GTA 5 definitely doesn't have that problem.

And yes, the torture scene is extremely uncomfortable, but that's because you're forced to slow down and consider your actions. Meanwhile, the hundreds of other people you've mowed down, shot, beaten to death or otherwise brutalized just don't seem to register as much.

 

[Kolyarut]

In many ways, this game acts as an antithesis to Grand Theft Auto IV. While GTA IV aimed to be deep, this aims to be a bit goofier. While GTA IV had a gray and gritty world, this one is bright and colorful. I kinda suspect that Rockstar intentionally didn't give this game as "good" a story as their last romp, for this very reason. If anything, the game was meant to act as a massive tutorial for GTA Online, with a story there simply because it needed one. To that end, it was quite successful.

I haven't played any of the GTAs, but an outsider's perspective - it seems to be that, since Saints Row dropped any pretense of seriousness and dialed the meter all the way up to (literally) super-crazy, the natural thing for GTA to do would be to push back in the opposite direction, and really blow people away with a fantastically told serious story.

One reason I've been staying away from GTA (and why, before 3, I stayed away from Saints Row) is that I picked up kind of an undercurrent of "hah, yeah, we're joking, but actually we're not", like the creepier moments of Family Guy. That's quite possibly unfair, but I'm getting really strong vibes of it from what I'm reading about GTA5.

 

[MaddKossack115]

Y'know, while I admit that GTA V's characters are "inconsistent" for the reasons Yahtzee stated, I still somehow find the thing as compelling as all the other GTA games (maybe not as much as GTA IV and it's DLC episodes, but at least on par with Vice City and San Andreas).

It's certainly a lot better than most of the "spunkgargleweewee" crap where you play an emotionless soldier gunning down foreigners/alien monsters (with frankly little difference in characterization between the opposing forces) and committing "gritty" war crimes (such as the part where you shove a glass shard into a victims mouth, and punching it around the inside of his gums), and still told you're the good guy because you "fight for the good guys", or "all the guys you're shooting are EEEEEE-VILLLLL!!!", without giving legitimate motivations for why you're good, and why they're evil, apart from stock political talking points.

In a sense, I think Rockstar was deliberately trying to badly motivate the GTA V characters, as a sort of hipster-ish "ironic" jab at how other Triple-A games have main characters with even worse motivations - the difference being that the GTA V heroes, for how badly they're motivated, at least consistently admit they're badly motivated.

I personally think the actual plot is better digested as a "TV serial" kind of deal rather than a single, cohesive story. The episodic stories are brief, the main characters stay largely the same, but the situations they face and enemies they fight are radically different for each episode. The main draw isn't how the characters evolve over the series, and more on how they'll pull off this next job, and/or fight this new set of bad guys.

For example, the "Prologue" mission would have been the pilot episode for the GTA V TV Series, or perhaps the grand finale of a previous season of the GTA show. The first "episode" of the GTA V TV show is Franklin and Lamar doing repo jobs for Simeon. The second episode would be around when Franklin tries to repo Jimmy's car, and is ordered at gunpoint by Michael to smash up Simeon's dealership. The next few episodes would revolve around Franklin doing favors for Michael, hoping he could pass on some expertise to him, before culminating with when he helps Michael tear down the house of a guy sleeping with Michael's wife - and both of them end up owing $2.5 million to a ruthless drug cartel lord. The final episode of this "arc" would have been planning and executing the Jewelry Store Job, and paying off the drug cartel lord... only to "reveal" Michael's old partner Trevor is still alive in Blaine County, and now knows that Michael is back in the game.

Then we have the episodes of Trevor wrapping up his business in Blaine County before going to Los Santos, then the arc where Trevor forces Michael to work with him as repayment for the job gone wrong in the Prologue, and then the arc where the FIB men that gave Michael witness protection see he's getting out of line, and force him to do dirty work for them 'lest they expose him to the world at large, and so on and so on until the last mission, which is the "Grand Finale" of the whole game/TV season.

True, TV has proven there are shows that can have consistent and conclusive character arcs over the course of the show, and there are shows that suffer from not having consistent motivations for their characters, but GTA V is kind of in that sweet spot of having characters that are interesting enough to bounce all kinds of crazy scenarios off of for a game about as long as a TV show season.

 

[Darth_Payn]

I blame more of that "realism" that's stinking up the place. Rock Star tried making GTA, a series meant to be a cartoonish power-fantasy of crime, more "gritty and realistic", and forgetting that crime in the real world is far from enjoyable. It's gruesome and horrific. It's like they can't decide if they want to make us feel bad about the stuff they make us do in their game, or indulge in our inner guilt-free maniac.