The Grand Theft Auto series by Rockstar Games, with its immeasurable impact on the video game industry and medium, is quite possibly the most important game franchise of the 21st century. Unfortunately, elements that plagued the earlier games but were easy to forgive then continued to fester, and in some cases, the series' towering influence caused them to spread to other titles.
The single-player experience
- Grand Theft Auto III was hardly the first violent, M-rated video game to raise eyebrows; Doom, Mortal Kombat, and Duke Nukem have it beat on that front by several years. However, it was the first such game to become a mainstream pop culture sensation on the level of Pokémon or Super Mario Bros. It was both acclaimed by critics and railed against by Moral Guardians for the then-unprecedented freedom it offered to gamers, which included all manner of violence and debauchery. Ignoring the many direct ripoffs that came out in the early-mid '00s, the success of GTA III has been pointed to as a Medium Original Sin, responsible for the proliferation of Rated M for Money attitudes among both developers and gamers at the Turn of the Millennium who demanded more 'mature' (i.e. "rated M for Mature") content in their games.
- Lazlow, a Talk Show host featured on the games' radio stations, started out in GTA III and Vice City as the Only Sane Man (albeit of a larger-than-life sort) amidst the chaos around him, serving as an anchor for the games' warped satire of Americana. Starting in San Andreas, however, he began turning into the Butt-Monkey of the series, a pervert who is constantly abused by the guests on his show. This characterization grew with subsequent games until, by GTA V, he had become a jerkass Reality TV host who tries to bang Michael's daughter and gets his ass kicked for it, having gone from a figure who commented on the madness of the GTA series' Crapsack World to one who'd been fully absorbed by it. Without the only sane man, the satire and social commentary that used to be a hallmark of the GTA series slowly came unmoored, turning Denser and Wackier with each new installment until most of the minor characters had become one-dimensional caricatures.
- The collectibles that first appeared in GTA2 could be argued to be one for the entire Wide-Open Sandbox genre. There were a number of collectible items scattered around the map that granted players free money, as well as other bonuses if they found enough of themnote . While the Gotta Catch 'Em All mentality that this produced wasn't too bad in GTA 2, GTA III, or Vice City, San Andreas went overboard by inundating players with gang tags, snapshots, horseshoes, and oysters to find. GTA IV toned things down by having only one type of collectible (the "flying rats", aka pigeons), but GTA V went overboard again with the letter scraps, the spaceship parts, the submarine parts, and the nuclear waste (the latter two of these being made worse by requiring the use of a submarine that handled poorly, was slow, and initially did not have radio, and the underwater part being dark and murky, making searching for these a boring experience, as opposed to other collectibles who at least had the upside of sightseeing going for them). Worse, thanks to the GTA series' massive influence over the genre, the use of collectibles to pad out the length of an open-world game through busywork became a trend in many other such titles (games made by Ubisoft especially grew infamous for such), driving players to frustration as they scoured the map for that Last Lousy Point.
- The latest installments have similarly gotten flak from long-time fans for having activities that are different from the crime sprees the series is associated with, and that they waste space that could have been used elsewhere. The inclusion of darts and bowling in GTA IV and of yoga in GTA V were often singled out for such criticism. San Andreas, however, had an arguably greater roster of weird side activities that didn't seem to fit with the main game's focus on Gangbangers and street crime, including triathalons (which returned in GTA V), truck driving, dating (which also returned in GTA IV; see below for more on that), schools to learn new fighting styles, and a system that tracked your character's fat and muscle mass. None of those, however, were ever part of main story missions that you had to play through. Furthermore, they went hand-in-hand with side activities that did fit the game's criminal theme, such as vigilante missions, burglary, spray tags, car theft, and pick-up street basketball.
- In San Andreas, CJ could get into romantic relationships with various women, who would unlock a number of special perks and vehicles. At the time, this was seen as a fairly meaningless but fun distraction that didn't really intrude on gameplay, with even the ones that were involved in the storyline not getting in the way too much (Denise is rescued in a story mission to introduce the mechanic, but actually dating her is optional, while Catalina's "dates" are the next few story missions). IV expanded this into the friendship system, which very quickly became a Scrappy Mechanic as Niko would constantly find himself interrupted by phone calls from friends and romantic interests asking him to hang out, with "Niko, it's Roman, let's go bowling!" becoming a Memetic Mutation. Rockstar wisely de-emphasized the friendship system in IV's expansions and in V.
- The "Impossible Trinity" for GTA IV. Rockstar had always intended for IV to have two single-player expansions, The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony, which introduced, among other things, two new Player Characters in Johnny Klebitz and Luis Lopez with their own stories happening concurrently with the main plot of IV. It worked here because, while Johnny and Luis crossed paths with IV's protagonist Niko Bellic and each other at a handful of key moments, their stories were otherwise kept separate and self-contained. Furthermore, Johnny and Luis' side-stories were just that, secondary to that of Niko; their games were always meant to be standalone expansion packs rather than the main attraction, and they were priced accordingly at $15 each. For V, Rockstar attempted to replicate this system on a grander scale, with three protagonists who would regularly interact with one another as a heist crew and who could be switched between during free roam and at key points during missions. This became the root of a common complaint about that game's story: Franklin and Trevor felt like supporting characters even though V was as much their game as it was Michael's, whose story eventually became the main focus at the expense of the other two protagonists.
- A cross-franchise and meta one. In the wake of V's monetization and Updated Re-release, there have been people talking about Rockstar's "golden age", when a game had everything included in it. However, one of the best-received games released during this "golden age" was Bully, which actually has a very similar situation with GTA V. Not only did the "Scholarship Edition" released on Xbox 360, Wii, and PC have bug fixes and graphical improvements, it also had extra content not available in the original. While it's hard to deny that monetization of Rockstar's games became worse and worse over time, there were hints of it already before GTA V.
- Many will lament the Gameplay and Story Segregation of the HD games, where the carnage the player can cause is extremely at odds with how the characters are presented by the narrative. GTA IV's Niko Bellic is said to be running away from his past as a killer but has no qualms about killing people for a quick buck, while GTA V's Franklin Clinton and Michael de Santa are unambiguously reasonable people trying to move away from a life of crime but also get into heists, do crazy stunts for money and achievements, and go on rampages. This originated in San Andreas with Carl Johnson. All of the series' protagonists up through GTA III's Claude were blank ciphers with no personality or voice (hell, Claude's name wasn't even revealed until San Andreas), while Vice City's Tommy Vercetti was a hardened ex-con and Card-Carrying Villain Protagonist ready to do anything to advance himself. By contrast, Carl was presented as decent person who had successfully moved away from the gang life prior to the beginning of the game only to be drawn back in by family, friends and circumstances (making later protagonists Franklin and Michael something of Decomposite Characters of him). Even Michael has something of an excuse, being presented as just barely reformed, addicted to the criminal life, and bored living in Stepford Suburbia. The difference is that Carl has his hands forced into doing a good part of the game's reckless/criminal acts (either to try to get the respect of his brother back, try to protect his family and friends, or having people come after him for his association with other people), he stuck to his characterization for the entire game (barring the sort of open-world mayhem that the games make a point of never acknowledging in-story), and the Denser and Wackier story of his installment made his antics much easier to swallow than when the series tried to tell similar stories in the more "realistic" worlds of IV and V, where the out-of-character moments became impossible to ignore (especially when there were achievements, missions or dialogues referencing them).
- PC gamers will often treat Grand Theft Auto IV as if it's the franchise's sole example of a Porting Disaster, in no part thanks to how much DRM has been implemented and how poorly it ran on 2008 computers. At the same time however, two Game Mods which are now considered essential for playing the 3D Era games on PC tell a different story: SilentPatch
and SkyGFX are available for all three 3D Era games that've been ported to the PC, and San Andreas needed a lot more things fixed/restored than its predecessors, especially its frame limiter, which needed to be turned on to prevent glitches and didn't even let the game run at 25 frames per second. It's more like the series took small steps into Porting Disaster territory, rather than one giant leap, and certain things about San Andreas's visuals on PC could instead be interpreted as a different art direction. - Fans of Vice City and San Andreas's licensed soundtracks lament how IV's is not an example of Nothing but Hits, but in reality, neither were those former two games: Vice City's Flash FM, for example, features several songs that could only be considered hits in Rockstar North's native UK (ironically, IV features an Electric Light Orchestra song that'd be more familiar to Americans than "Four Little Diamonds", "Evil Woman"), and Radio Espantoso is a sharp contrast to the game's association with 80s hits. Meanwhile, San Andreas avoided the most obvious choices for N.W.A songs, "Straight Outta Compton" and "Fuck Tha Police", and San Fierro Underground Radio is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, underground music. IV just makes it more obvious Rockstar doesn't solely go for the most popular songs by featuring more radio stations dedicated to niche genres, and not having the small budget that'd make it necessary for previous Liberty City outings to focus on obscure songs/ones composed by Rockstar themselves.
Online multiplayer
- Grand Theft Auto IV introduced online multiplayer to the series. At the time, it was seen as a nice bonus for players who'd done everything there was to do in the single-player story and wanted to get violent with friends in the game's world. No harm, no foul, right? Come Grand Theft Auto V, and online multiplayer has expanded to encompass half the game, a borderline-MMO experience with in-depth customization, missions on every street corner, high-level raids (in the form of heists), and a steady, rapidly-growing supply of new content... very little of which trickles back to the single-player experience. Many fans of single-player have noted that, while GTA IV received two massive single-player Expansion Packs released within eighteen months of the original game, with brand new stories and characters along with new multiplayer modes, weapons, and vehicles, the only new single-player content GTA V has seen over four years after it came out (barring vehicles, weapons, radio stations, and customization options carried over from multiplayer, and even then modding is required to use weapons/vehicles from Heists onward and stations from The Cayo Perico Heist onward) has been a handful of side missions included in the Updated Re-release on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. As such, Rockstar has often been accused of resting on the Cash-Cow Franchise that GTA Online, with its lucrative Shark cards, had become. The later Updated Rerelease for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series Xand S makes this even worse, as the single player experience is mostly the same while all its exclusive content is exclusive to Grand Theft Auto Online, not even updating the single player traffic with cars from Online updates the same way the 2014 rerelease did.
- In general, as laid out in this article by Angelica Cataldo for Kotaku, GTA Online was a harbinger of all of the exploitative monetization practices that would plague gaming during the Eighth Generation. It was the first AAA, $60 retail game to employ microtransactions in a big way for its online economy, a model previously restricted to free-to-play mobile and browser games, and other developers, taking note of how lucrative this model became for Rockstar Games, adapted it for their own online games. The difference was that, unlike corporate giants like Electronic Arts and Activision, Rockstar had carefully cultivated an image as the scrappy, rebellious, punk-rock underdog in the AAA gaming world even as they, a subsidiary of another corporate giant in Take-Two Interactive, became one of the most important and influential developers around, an image that, for a time, bought them leeway from fans. Furthermore, at launch the main attraction of V, as with prior games in the series, was its incredibly robust single-player mode, such that, even though it took months to fix the server issues that plagued Online, few people cared because they still had an enormous game to play through that was worth $60 by itself. It was only around the time of the Updated Re-release, which added very little single-player content but plenty of online content, that fans started to wonder where Rockstar's attention lay. It is because of the experience of Online that many fans of Rockstar were very nervous about Red Dead Redemption 2, especially given the statements from Take-Two regarding the monetization of future titles, and while that game's single-player story was still up to Rockstar's standard of quality, the multiplayer met a mixed reception. To quote James Tyler of Cleanprincegaming:"Like it or not, the game was breaking new ground. Unfortunately, they broke that ground directly over Hell."
- The Orbital Cannon introduced with the Doomsday Heist update proved to be The Last Straw for many players in terms of Rockstar's reliance on microtransactions to support the game, as well as what was seen as their pandering to griefers, such that Adam Wears of Cracked cited it as purely a tool for rich jerkasses and cheaters to ruin people's games with. This weapon was merely the culmination of issues that had been building with the game's business model for a while by that point:
- The rising prices of DLC items, which were inevitably superior to those that came before, first became a noticeable problem with the San Andreas Flight School update. Before then, new vehicles and weapons tended to be expensive, but not outrageously so; even the most exotic vehicles like supercars, monster trucks, and classic cars typically cost no more than $500-750,000, with most of the content costing significantly less (often less than $100,000). Flight School introduced three aircraft that each cost well over a million dollars, but even then, these were aircraft, so it made sense that they'd be expensive. It made less sense for the Technical added in the Heists update, an old pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the back that nevertheless cost almost a million dollars even with a discount. Before long, vehicles that cost seven or even eight figures were the norm for new updates, while vehicles that cost less than a million dollars grew few and far between. In fact, by converting in-game GTA dollars to real money based off of Shark cards, one can find that certain vehicles cost more than the price of the game itself. Yup, 60 dollars for the entire game, another 60 dollars for a car in the game.
- Starting with the Offices in the Further Adventures in Finance and Felony update, the game also began introducing new, expensive, specialized safehouses that were required to access many new missions, the prices of which very quickly ran into the millions of dollars. The Orbital Cannon is essentially a mega-purchase that costs at least $2.65 million worth of in-game currencynote just to fire once, which is earned through either hours' worth of grinding or by purchasing a Whale Shark card (worth $3.5 million in in-game currency) for $49.99 in real money — or by taking advantage of exploits, which honest players don't like one bit. And on that note...
- Trollish weapons and vehicles. As mentioned above, the Flight School update added purchases over a million dollars, but hey, all it came down to were a few aircraft that, due to lack of weapons, made it a nice tool to cruise around the map with at best. It first became a problem when the Heists update allowed players to purchase the Hydra fighter jet. The Hydra very quickly replaced the Rhino tank as the vehicle of choice for griefers, much to the annoyance of everybody else, but it was possible to counter the Hydra and shoot it down with the homing launcher. Later weaponized vehicles such as the Ruiner 2000 (a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of K.I.T.T.), the Vigilante (a Serial Numbers Filed Off version of the Batmobile), the Oppressor (a jet-powered motorcycle with wings allowing it to fly some distance), and various attack helicopters became an even bigger pain. The growing number of new missions that required working in free roam, rather than in a separate instance, also afforded griefers the opportunity to derail other players' mission progress by attacking them with one of these overpowered weapons, such that many fans suspected that Rockstar was encouraging griefers in order to push other players towards using the aforementioned microtransactions to get around the grind. The Doomsday Heist update brought the anger to a crescendo with the Orbital Cannon, the only use for which is to troll other players; it can only be fired from a fixed location inside the player's Facility (so you can't break it out as a superweapon while on a mission), and it inflicts a One-Hit Kill Death from Above attack that can wipe out entire groups of players and is virtually impossible to avoid unless you're hiding in your safehouse or playing in passive mode (which blocks all damage from and physical contact with other players, but locks players out from using weapons and participating in free-roam missions). As the icing on the cake, the Doomsday Heist update also introduced the Deluxo, a flying Delorean lookalike that can have machine guns and homing rockets mounted to it.
- To Rockstar's credit they've finally recognized that much of what's listed above makes quite a few people not want to play the game and have made adjustments, starting with letting players do anything they want in invite-only sessions. Prior to that any kind of serious money making activities had to be done in public sessions and at the mercy of the griefers, unless you managed to glitch yourself into a solo session (and the outcry to that glitch getting patched in 2021 is probably what led Rockstar to lift the restrictions on private lobbies.) In addition several easy and quick money making schemes were added like drug dealing and exporting mixed cargo, and nightclub income was increased 5 times over. It's still a grind if you don't want to shell out real money, but that grind is a lot easier than it used to be.
