Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC is the first version of Grand Theft Auto 5 I've played. That's one of the reasons I've been assigned to the review—I'm coming at it as an open-world action game released in 2015, not a long-awaited port of a game everybody rinsed clean a year ago. The following details my first impressions of the game, with our full scored review scheduled for Monday.
I've played fifteen hours of GTA 5 since yesterday morning and I feel like I'm still in the tutorial—or, at the very least, I'm still encountering new stuff at such a clip that it feels like a beginning. Launch-day problems aside (for which we've rounded up a number of fixes here) this is an extraordinarily expensive-feeling game. Like anybody who has been playing games for long enough, I'm sensitive to the amount you can normally expect a developer to spend in either time or resources to achieve a particular effect. GTA 5 breaks those expectations constantly. Few game series have been this lucrative for their developers, but even fewer demonstrate where that money subsequently goes. There is a richness to the game's world and feature-set that mirrors the wealth of the studio that created it. In every sense, this is a game about money.
That being said, I was cool on it when I started playing. It took me an hour to get the launcher to load, and I had to manually install the Rockstar Social Club application from the game's install directory when Steam failed to do it. Then, sometimes, the game simply wouldn't load. I'd click the icon, my Steam profile border would turn green—indicating that I was in-game—but nothing would happen and eventually the process would end. I am still getting this issue, intermittently, and the only solution is to keep clicking and hope that the game boots up. Not ideal.
I also don't think the singleplayer campaign begins particularly well. The opening is a linear tutorial heist sequence that plays out like any other third-person action game might, but the game's way of imparting instructions is irritating—a prompt in the top-right that pops up whenever you do almost anything new, and every time a new feature is introduced, which is almost all of the time. Something like it is necessary—this is a complex game, with a lot of small interactions to learn—but I found its implementation distracting from the off.
The second is the structure of the plot itself. Since the beginning, Rockstar open-world games have placed you into the shoes of a newcomer to a city or region that will one day be yours. Niko Bellic arrives by sea, John Marston arrives by train, the protagonists of GTA 3 and Vice City arrive by air. These introductions served to deliver the world to you in segments that you can chew over one by one.
I can understand the desire to break from the template, but I don't think GTA 5's beginning quite works. There's a twist involved that won't make sense until much later, and a jump in both time, location, and then character. Switching between initially two and then three protagonists on the fly is a clever technical trick, and delivers a couple of cool set-piece story moments, but I found it distancing from the off. Even now, many more hours in, I still don't feel the same attachment to these people—Michael, Trevor and Franklin—as I have done in the past. They're not me, and their goals aren't my goals. For the first time in a GTA game, I'm not particularly sure who I am—a flying ghost, maybe, leaping from mind-to-mind to steer criminals into cutscenes.
In focusing on the critical path for the first couple of hours, I think I uncovered all of the game's biggest problems all at once. I'm yet to really care about any of these people or their dreams. Rockstar has always had a problem with its cinematic ambitions crashing into its game ambitions—GTA 4 is, after all, the gritty story of an underdog immigrant destined to ride motocross bikes off sand dunes while firing rocket launchers at helicopters—but GTA 5 smacks into that disconnect straight away. The 'eighties action movie body-count' is brought up as a joke, an attempt to humanise characters by hanging a lampshade on the very thing that dehumanises them.
Rockstar's skewering of American culture returns, which lends some credibility to the feeling that everybody you encounter has no idea why they're doing anything that they're doing—this is, after all, a game set in an analogue for Los Angeles. In fact, while I've been piecing my thoughts together I've realised that I need to figure out whether a given problem lies with Rockstar's writing or whether it lies with actual L.A.
I need to play more before I say more about the story, but this does bring me to the game's first standout success. Los Santos feels like a real city in a way that no open-world game since GTA 4 has done. The attention to detail is absolutely extraordinary. Play in first person and it feels like a game from the future: a world as detailed as the majority of modern shooters, but far, far larger. The physicality of the game's third-person animations is applied to the first person, too, leading to a strange sense of presence. The first time I crossed the road in first person I was hit by a car and fell down. I started back in real life, momentarily stunned, an experience I've only otherwise had in an Oculus Rift.
Wandering off the critical path, I played a decent approximation of tennis for an hour and went to the cinema to watch a five-minute long parody of Italian art cinema. I went home and watched TV, where an amount of work equivalent to the cinematic budget for an entire game has gone into providing entirely optional comedy asides for the benefit of the player who wants to take a break without actually quitting the game. I've got mixed thoughts about the actual content of this stuff, which I'll get to in the final review, but the amount of effort expended on this game makes my head spin. At some point, GTA stopped being 'GTA'. I've only stolen a handful of cars. This is something else: a life simulator, subtly but persistently weighted to simulate the life of a dick.
That said, there have certainly been moments when the spell breaks. When you sink into the game, it becomes increasingly apparent that the things you're actually doing are very simple. Drive to a place. Press a button to trigger some beautiful, bespoke, never-to-be-repeated animation. Drive to another place. Shoot a man. Watch a cutscene. Despite the extraordinary world, there's no escaping the fact that the critical path presents a rudimentary play experience, one lumbered with tricky controls (both on pad and on keyboard/mouse) that betray the difficulty of packing all of that rich worlds' many activities into a system that a human can actually interact with. I was making progress, I was saying 'wow' a lot, but I realised ten hours in that I wasn't actually having much fun or making many decisions for myself.
I switched to multiplayer, at that point and holy shit. My understanding is that it didn't really work on the consoles for a long time—it can't have done, otherwise I'd have expected to hear people rave about it sooner. My time with Grand Theft Auto Online so far has blown my experience with the singleplayer game out of the water. I absolutely cannot wait to get back to it.
The structure is very simple. You're introduced to Los Santos as a silent character of your own making and you can then participate in races, missions and other activities both in instances (with players joining from your friends list or via matchmaking) or out in the open world. You can own vehicles and property and level up your guy by doing the things you want to get better at. It's the most fun I've had with an MMO in years.
Every so often, you have an experience with a game that feels like a magic trick. I've had a run of them so far. When I started, I was dropped into a street race that I assumed was a tutorial, race-the-AI deal. I won, but the guy who came second was a real person. After that, we were dropped into a mission and he wordlessly hopped into the passenger seat of my car for the ride. We didn't speak, but I was playing in first person—looking over, and seeing somebody's avatar looking back at me in a game rendered with the fidelity of a AAA singleplayer experience felt like gaming in the future.
Fairly quickly, I was asked by a friend to join his heist team. I'm not high enough level to initiate heists by myself yet, but I can join others—and I strongly recommend it. Heists are a run of set-up mission that culminate in a finale, each using a team of four in different ways. I adore co-op games that introduce asymmetry, and GTA Online does it brilliantly. Even though there are only five heists total, the one I played took a whole evening and I can't wait to play it again because my experience felt so specific to the people I was playing with and the roles I was placed in. I've driven a sportscar off a container ship while my friend covers me from the passenger seat. I've evaded cops by hiding a bus behind a moving train. I've waited in the pilot's seat of a light aircraft, nervously idling on a desert runway, praying that the other half of the team make it on time.
Heist missions can be punishing. The team shares a stock of lives, and when you lose them you're back to a distant checkpoint. But the coordination it requires elevates the game's otherwise-simple basic mechanics, and it taps deep into the magic of watching your friends do something awesome. There's a cutscene, at the end of the first one, where your squad clink champagne glasses and cheer. That's how I felt: the take represented more money than I'd ever seen in the game, and I actually felt like I'd somehow cheated at life. I bought a house, and we all went and got identical commemorative tattoos.
Folded into that experience were connection issues, occasional bugs, and lag. Ultimately, they didn't thwart my enjoyment—and I expected far worse from the game's launch day. But it's a factor to be considered, and I'd hope to see steady improvement in performance after this point.
Regardless, it takes active effort for me to load back into the singleplayer game and continue the story. GTA 5 is now, for me, a game about my silent multiplayer character and his dumb heist tattoo. It's heartening to know that when the cinematic stuff is pulled back and GTA is allowed to be a game, it's a really, really good game. There's so much more I'd like to share: the way actual player cop-chases are shown on TV for everybody else to spectate. The time my friend got drunk in the desert and I gave him a lift home. The ceaselessly entertaining selfie function.
This is the stuff that sticks in my head when I quit the game, and—I hope—the stuff that will form the basis of my final verdict. There is heart to be found underneath that pile of money, and based on my experience so far I would recommend anyone put off—as I was—by Rockstar's unrepentant desire to make a movie to ditch singleplayer and treat GTA as a game you play with friends.
