How GTA V Fumbles on the Easy Stuff

[RandV80]

Hah, always a bit rage inducing when you're playing a good well-put together game suddenly then hit an inexplicable point of bad game design.

I finally got around to downloading and starting Valkyria Chronicles on Steam after Christmas, kind of cheesy but I was enjoying it... then I hit chapter 7 and just stopped playing for two weeks (just got back to it last night). Things had been going smoothly with the game, getting a good enjoyable tactical challenge out of the missions, then I hit this god awful level where they just throw all sense of strategy out the window.

It starts as a basic 3-point mission where you have to stop a giant tank in some desert ruins. Wide range one-shot kill front and back cannon, 6 destructible anti-infantry turrets, and after about every 3 turns it pops up 3 exhaust units that you have to destroy one at a time before you can finally start denting its hit points. Also comes with a squad (6 maybe?) of infantry units at the start that you have to clean up.

A hard enough mission in its own rights, probably the toughest challenge yet in the game to this point. It would be perfectly fine on its own, but where the game designers simply drop the ball is when they decide that after you destroy the 2nd exhaust port an entirely new squad of infantry shows up lead by a character that may as well be the bloody final boss of the game. Indestructible, extremely mobile, massive damage, sniper range monster, whom you have to survive another 3 turns until the final exhaust thingy on the tank pops up. If you've been following sound tactics to this point, you're squad is probably well positioned for a quick annihilation.

Only way to win is to have pre-knowledge of what's going to happen and where, have your infantry units placed in about the only safe-ish place on the map beforehand, and your own tank in a rather illogical position to distract the enemy god unit via exploitation of the games AI, then save scum to make sure it all goes right. I wasn't even aware you good save scum until that point, so bravo to whoever thought this level design was a good idea.

 

[Scrythe]

It's funny you mention Arkham Asylum, because I just wrapped up another playthrough of Arkham City, and it has similar problems to what you just mentioned.

Now, I will say that Arkham City does a great job explaining the controls and how you do your gadgets, so that's not the problem here. The problem is with those Riddler trophies. Oftentimes, they require the player to know how to exploit or utilize certain quirks with the game's engine in order to complete them, and oftentimes those quirks are learned through trial-and-error. This isn't completely a bad thing, but the problem I've run into are very specific incidents where a certain gadget trick or quirk was need that's used no where else in the game and sometimes leaves you thinking "Oh, I didn't know this gadget could do that."

This is made even worse when compounded with all of the things done right with Arkham City. Too many times I felt that the only real reason why I progressed through certain challenges was because I've already done them already, leading to a bizarre situation like in The Mummy with Hamunaptra, a place that apparently can only be found if you're been there before.

 

[Apl_J]

I think this matters more for older players. I'm in my thirties, have a baby daughter and a job that takes 50+ hours a week. I end up with very little time to play games and if a game does not get me proficient with it quickly, I'll walk away from it after thirty minutes. At this point in my life, even spending that thirty minutes on a game that is going to be a pain in the ass to learn is already too much time. If I was single and childless, I wouldn't blink an eye at the time investment, but as is, I just can't be bothered.

Oh definitely. I think more experienced gamers tend to internalize hitting a fail state more than new or inexperienced gamers. In this example in particular, I bring up myself versus my brother.

When my brother plays, failure is a part of the learning process, sort of like those tougher roguelikes. Unlike a roguelike, however, the controls and goals are pretty easy to grasp. Just trying out all the buttons will eventually net you a win if you have half a brain, even if it does take a few failures.

When I play, on the other hand, the fail state is just that: failure. As an experienced and wide ranged gamer, I should have a solid grasp on essentially any game I pick up simply because of my experiences, especially in a game like GTA where functions are pretty derivative of just about any other AAA title. When I played, it took me a few seconds (and car crashes) to learn the buttons, but I completed the mission first try. A good tutorial could have extended that by about a good minute or so, which sure, isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but as a designer, you don't want to bore the player.

I've always assumed that Rockstar makes their tutorials like this on purpose to cater to both sides. New players don't care about losing, and Experienced players typically don't lose and/or are smart enough to get it on their own. GTA games are all about the world, spectacle, and doing crazy things. I suppose Rockstar puts that before trying to teach the player functions that, nine times out of ten, they know how to perform already or are simple enough to figure out.

Bringing up this particular mission/game again, shooting while driving is just about the most complex function the player can perform, aside from maybe a sneaking melee attack, so it really doesn't get much harder than that.

 

[JohnnyDelRay]

People throwing around the term 'hand holding' here don't really understand what the term refers to...
Hand holding got nothin' to do with a damn tutorial! It means guiding you nicely through the game the entire way telling you where to go and what to do at each and every turn, not providing you with a nice set of tools, showing you how to use them and then telling you to just go forth and discover. Yeah GTA does have crappy tutorials, but I managed to get through it all without any grief. Having said that, it couldn't hurt for newcomers to the series to have a gentler introduction to the various mechanics, especially aiming, shooting and driving which makes up 99% of the game.

I didn't have as much grief with the tutorial insofar as actually trying to do that section, while having all these messages popping up all over the place and not being able to read them, I know you can find them all after digging through menus afterwards but really? You want to give me all this info NOW, when people's freaking LIVES are on the line?!

 

[Xman490]

At least the game gave you a glimpse of a tutorial with failure meaning being sent back 1 minute.

As Yahtzee mentioned, one mission requires you to land a plane safely... after flying halfway across the map... after a playable character leaves another for dead... after the excitement of the opportunity to rob their world's "Federal Reserve" vanished.
As I was saying, the plane mission doesn't even tell you to use landing gear, let alone how. After losing the mission twice because the plane parts fell off, I threw the game out, half-thinking "I HATE THIS!" and half-thinking "screw it, I'm probably getting the PC version and just going online there anyways."

 

[silasbufu]

To me it felt like a fresh breath of air, after all those games that try to hold my hand and not let go.
Also, you can find everything in the Controlls setting.

 

[Verlander]

My beef with GTA V tutorials is that they give you 5 minutes to learn something that you'll not encounter again until a few hours into the game. As someone who plays it maybe once every 2-3 weeks, it's made it pretty difficult. I'd not played GTA since GTA London...

 

[Leviathan902]

The thing is, GTA games are loaded with bad design. Rockstar are peerless when it comes to developing worlds (modern urban landscapes anyway), but completely clueless when it comes to developing gameplay.

Every mission is still "do this mission in the exact way we have envisioned it being completed or fail and do it again, stupid". I'm a stuntman in a movie who doesn't get to read the script first.

Compared with something like Saints Row or even Far Cry or anything that allows you to tackle problems in any way you choose and GTA comes up short in the fun gameplay department every time.

I would love to see the GTA worlds combined with the Saints Row gameplay. That would be the PERFECT open world game.

 

[maninahat]

All GTA games had that problem. Admittedly I don't notice it anymore, status quo and all that, but yes, it is a problem all gta games have.

However, the game DOES tell you everything you need. It shows you the buttons, tells you what to do with them, and then tells you to get good. I can sort off respect that type of tutorial design, even if the practice of it falls a bit flat to new players.

And not just GTA. Previous Rockstar games like LA Noire and Red Dead Redemption have a habit of giving tiny, complicated instruction boxes whilst simultaniously introducing a new game mechanic that demands all your focus. To this date, I still don't really know how exactly the duelling game play works in RDR, as the instructions on how to do so appeared once, and only whilst I was actually in the middle of the god damn quick draw.

 

[maninahat]

My beef with GTA V tutorials is that they give you 5 minutes to learn something that you'll not encounter again until a few hours into the game. As someone who plays it maybe once every 2-3 weeks, it's made it pretty difficult. I'd not played GTA since GTA London...

That's a thing all games should have by the way: if you haven't played the game in over 2 weeks, it would be cool if the game realised this and popped up with a little prompt that asks you if you'd like to see which buttons do what. I have to re-learn everything in The Last of Us every time I get around to playing it once again.

 

[BananaWare]

In the next-gen version of GTA5, they changed the controls for shooting while driving, almost certainly due to the first-person mode. When I discovered this in the game, I immediately changed it back as to how it was on last-gen. My friend couldn't for the life of him figure out to shoot while driving and I told him to switch it back. The reason the font is so small is because the menu had to be redone on next-gen, they looker nicer and more detailed, as what happens when you convert text from 720p to 1080p. Instead of pointing out the other things the game got wrong, you spent an entire article complaining about a small segment of the game.

 

[svenjl]

Aye it seems like GTA rarely gives you the opportunity to gradually learn the game via sequential missions. It's as if they expect every single player to spend a good 20 hours robbing, fighting, killing, drive-by shooting and exploding everything before taking the game more seriously.

Of course tutorials can often feel too controlling and breaks the immersion of the game but the most clever game designers teach you without you realizing.

Well said. I could have done with more hand holding regarding the stock market and those assassination missions. Sure, you can Google anything, but I don't want to sit with my iPad while m playing a game. There were just a few mystifying gaps in learning the game.