I saw them as an experiment in "What would killing a buncha dudes really require."
The answer is lots of blood.

Trip report with ~potential spoilers~
NOTE: THANKS TO THIS BEING AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE I CAN ADVISE EVERYBODY THAT FROM HERE ON OUT SPOILERS ARE ACCEPTABLE IN THIS THREAD.



Observations thus far:
Jesus goddamn the world is HUGE, it's really unimaginable how big, and detailed, it is unless you play it for yourself. The city feels like it's from Midnight Club, the Country from Red Dead Redemption, and everything is incredibly dense and detailed.

Animals on the road are hilarious and a really nice touch. I swerved to avoid a deer and ended up dying when I hit a ****in' explosive tank. Later I hit a coyote and, somewhat disbelieving I just made roadkill in a grand theft auto game, I got out. Four more attacked and killed me.

The world is full of fun things to do and see, even standing still or walking down the sidewalk exposes something interesting. People talking, some guy getting dumped on the phone, a police shootout with yokels in the general lee, it's all gold.

Ingame cinemas are totally done by the guys behind the Max Payne TV shows.

The cars handle way better and the damage physics are much more rigid. I compare it to Vice City v San Andreas, in that Vice the cars would often fall apart quickly and then explode, vs San Andreas having more detailed damage.

The whole "Cars slowly get dirty" thing really does add a lot in my opinion. Nobody else has ever quite got the feel of the vehicles that GTA always had.

Every single thing I didn't like from GTA4 is gone. I always hated the cramped city with it's poor selection of vehicles and lack of aircraft. All of those things are gone, replaced by the opposites of them.

The old "Cars are the same type you are driving" thing that's been in place since GTA3 to save memory is dead and gone.

420 make an uparmoured Mini and ram police cars with it every day.

Robbing a gas station in an orange dodge charge look alike, and escaping the cops with Convoy playing was pretty great.

Sounds good.

Just checked, I have 7 friends online, 7 are playing GTA V. I'm so pissed off that I can never afford to buy new games.

5 technical classes this semester + other commitments on weekends do not leave much time to play this game

I don't know, I find it kind of interesting in that they made a pair of games that are quite so graphic. There aren't many games that do those levels of violence without making it cartoonish.

Most cars feel like they oversteer way too much, but that may be because I recently finished Saints Row 4 where driving is stupidly easy and everything handles like it's on rails.

I can't say I've noticed that unless I'm daft enough to try a handbrake turn.

Usually once I get re-acclimated to GTA-style handling, handbrake turns are how I take every corner.

Yeah, that's the thing. I thought they felt like the devs had thought "so they think the GTA games are violent? SUCK ON THIS, MEDIA!" or something.

Normally I would, but I tend to brake just a second too long.

No, if you want to see what happens when devs make the games they want to play, get Saints Row 4.

Alternatively, just get Saints Row 4 anyway. It's like GTA5 except with less plot, more fun, and more Roddy Piper.

do it in the ocelot jackal... that thing handles handbrake turns really well... last time i grabbed one i just went around sliding around every corner like some pro stunt driver... then ended up trying to launch it off a ramp and hit a tree

SR4 is mediocre and rushed.
Here's the trick though, you're allowed to like both. SR4 and GTA5. I never finished SR4 but it had potential.

one weird trick discovered by a [city name] mom

EA hates ​her

Say what you will about SR4, but I have no idea how you can say it was rushed​.

I haven't played SR4 so I can't comment on its quality but it does seem that it's development and release was relatively quick (well quick for game developers, ~2 years since SR3 release).

It's really more like a big "Superheroes and Aliens" expansion to SR3 than a new game. A lot of assets are heavily reused (the main setting is basically the city from SR3 except you climb more stuff now and there are random alien buildings mixed in). It's really more comparable to Crackdown, Prototype, Infamous, etc. than GTA. It was fun, but not as fun as SR3 was, and nowhere near what GTA5 is just in my first few hours into it.

Almost 100% asset reuse, almost 100% engine reuse.
You can go ahead and argue. "But who cares, it works.", that's fine. But had 2K not died to do stupid business decisions SR4 would have been far better.

Or play both, because they both set out to be two rather different things?

SR4 is like, crazy insane video game **** taken to it's logical and really fun conclusion, even if I think that it got dull really fast.
GTA5 is a more realistic, but still fun, open world game with a neat 3 protagonist mechanic and the largest most detailed game world ever.

what a fun typo

assuming you meant 'due to'

I think I originally put in "do to" and then autocorrect helpfully reversed the word.
I'm not editing it.

Other than the basic city layout, there's almost no reuse? Sure they left stuff they made before in the game, but they also added way more. The city itself isn't even where you spend most of your time in SR4, despite what the trailers show. Almost all of the missions take place outside of the city, about 3/4ths of the sidequests as well, and more. Hell, even the engine itself was revamped like crazy to handle all the new superpowers, shader effects and gun effects, on top of the usual generational improvements any game sees between iterations.

I seriously doubt you even played the game based on your analysis. If you're basing it on the trailers, they intentionally did not show most of the game.

I spent most of my time there, I got 7 odd hours in before the damn thing somehow deleted my save. I had a little fun but not enough to want to start over.

Hah same thing happened to me with Sleeping Dogs.

Hi.

Asset reuse is not a sin, especially not in a modern game built with modern tools, both mid-to-late generation on the longest console cycle ever. On a modern game you should be able to produce higher-quality content by reconfiguring your build. Not that you would, because it has to run on the Xbox 360.

The "engine" of a game is the reusable software component. Of course there was 100% engine reuse; the parts they didn't reuse aren't in the engine.

Also not parts of the engine.

Yeah but man, cars, the city, the guns. All reused. Your point about engine reuse makes sense though I just fart out posts without thinking. SR4 is far closer to an expansion pack then a full game.
Saints Row 3: Steelport: Throne of Bhaal

I don't even know why, but this made me laugh.

Just Cause 2 for me.

I like how Rockstar chucked in a dig at the Edinburgh tram works in some of the news stories on the radio.

They did? I didn't notice anything.
I did notice a story about missing hikers... bigfoot???

I really hope there's a GTA: Snowy Midwest expansion in the works, for online at least.
Also I really like a lot of the OST but can't find any of it, just a ****load of the radio music ugh.

There's a story with something to do with needless transit going overbudget and shutting down busy city streets for years. The Edinburgh trams have gone to like twice their budget and should have been done years ago, and they go right past Rockstar North. They're a complete and utter shambles.

That's like saying GTA reuses cars because they're the same style and name. Of course they are, it's the same area. It wouldn't make sense for them to replace all the cars. They HAVE been updated though, and there are several (At least 10 not counting the alien stuff) new models and way more customization available for most of them.

The guns... not even. All the previous guns are there, yes, but there's at least twice as many guns as there was before. And that's not counting the extra models (like the guitar case for the rocket launcher).

Spoilers below:

I didn't want to mention it before but I'm not surprised you didn't notice how little you spend in the city since you only played the beginning. It's about a 25 hour game depending on how much you unlock everything. I'm sure GTA5 is longer but hell, it's hard to fill time when you can move around so quickly. You go to places from Saints Row past, you go into a completely 2D world, you go into the 50's (as you saw at the beginning for a bit), you go to the "real world" several times, and many others. None of that is the city.

Anyway, I feel like your major beef with the game is that it's in the same "city". Yep, that's a thing. But considering it's been modified, you don't spend most of your time there, and the way you experience it has changed, it's hard to care. I don't think if it took place in Los Angeles or something that it'd suddenly be a better game.

--
BTW, if your saves are deleting themselves, it's probably Steam Cloud. Steam Cloud can get really, really aggravating if it loses sync with your system. I've lost Skyrim saves before as well, through no fault of the game itself.

So I understand that this game is some type of strip club simulator.

All this hype actually made me want to try out Sleeping Dogs instead (after all, a sandbox game set in Hong Kong is more or less FGR heaven) but... I just can't seem to be able to get myself to even run modern games once these days! OY

I loved and enjoyed both SR4 and GTA 5, however if I HAD to choose between the two, it would definitely be GTA 5.
Fortunately for me, I don't have to choose, so bite me.

So I got some GTA 5 time in on my nephew's xbox (yes he's far too young to be playing M titles, but not my fault blame his mother) and it is quite fun. I love it when a game set's up the 'rules' and then plays by them no matter what. In my short time playing I've seen 'bad guys' accidentally shoot each other, deer killing 'bad guys' during chase missions, and as I was killing off a gang of bikers I was randomly mauled by a mountain lion (at first I thought it was a pet dog).

The vehicle physics are quite unbelievable, its much shorter route to take a Lamborghini and drive over an 80 degree mountain face than take the winding road around it. But then this wasnt meant to be super realistic, and it is fun.

Also, can't wait for PC version so aiming would be fun rather than just relying upon the 'snap to target' console gaming. It does make it pretty easy to kill a large amount of 'baddies' tho.

The one thing that really really sucks about seeing the snap to aiming is that I feel like all the missions in GTA games are oriented towards the lock-on feature, and thus aren't very engaging for mouse play. To the point where some of the indoor sections of the game feel broken on PC while looking really cool and slick with lock on. I'm playing through Ballad of Gay Tony and it seems like the idea is to overwhelm the autoaim with a large number of enemies that are all visible instead of placing enemies in interesting locations. I have slowly begun to recognize the lack of vertical gameplay in console to pc ports, in general. The more difficult shooting missions that aren't wide open and full of enemies are instead claustrophobic and I'm fighting the camera and other quirks about the engine more than the enemies. I sure hope there's a little more variety that carries over to the pc version with the cool window-sniping we see in the trailer.

Sleeping Dogs is absolutely brilliant and you must play it.