Grand Theft Auto 5 re-review: Returning to Rockstar’s open-world epic

Discussion Grand Theft Auto 5 You need to start with the scale. It contains sales data, not the size of the world, weapons, vehicles, or people. Since its first release in 2013, on all platforms Grand Theft Auto 5 Sold something in the area of 165 million copies World wide. It’s a number that’s hard to understand. A little less than 40 million people live in California.For a copy of Grand Theft Auto 5 If it were people, the total number of copies sold would be commensurate with the population of Bangladesh.The game divides the brain big In its influence and its range.

That number just keeps creeping up now Grand Theft Auto 5 Released on the latest game consoles (and now GTA 6 Appeared reportedly). I’ve been playing the game slowly on the Xbox Series X for the last few months to get an idea of ​​exactly where this 2013 artifact will land in almost 10 years.

After all, it teeth Artif. The Grand Theft Auto franchise always serves as a commentary, talking directly to popular culture elements, freely borrowing plots from films and eras of various criminal genres, trading heroic soap opera, and stupid violence in these worlds. Infused. Vice City He played the nostalgia of the early 2000s for the coke-fueled party scene of the 1980s and its visual and music industry. GTA 4 We traced the story of immigrants to the deeply commoditized culture of glyphers and planners. Each of them spoke to both time and place in a particular way, parodying the popular culture of those times. become Dominant popular culture in the early 2000s.

We have been away since 2013 and it is clear from here Grand Theft Auto 5 I was wrestling with this paradox: what does it mean to stick to a man when you are a man? How do you keep flipping birds in monoculture when you are a marker that measures all other open world action games?

The solution Grand Theft Auto 5 I think the solution to this has to do with the decade-long sustainability of both single-player and multiplayer games. This was to create a very robust driving and shooter skeleton and dress up with interesting ideas.What is impressive about playing Grand Theft Auto 5 How happy 2022 is to be unfocused, take players to strange routes of robbery, kidnap cars, take down freighters, and play entire torture mini-games. (I’ll talk more about this later). In both online multiplayer mode and story-focused mode, this willingness to move on to random ideas is always ensured by the game’s willingness to return to its safe and solid core. Players know that there is always something in the center waiting to catch them.30 second loop“Driving and shooting in new situations” will eventually come back. Get out of trouble, drive away, and explode the people who are chasing you, and everything will be solved. We all know where it’s heading, so the game can be as weird as you like.

The Xbox Series X has a very solid core of shooting and driving. Having played games on both console generations before, I didn’t think there was much room to impress or surprise me with this edition of the game. Surprisingly, the high fidelity of the graphics and the increased frame rate really did something in the sense that the whole world changed to go my own way. Throw the game in performance mode, tool the world at 60 frames per second, and randomly fight enemies who have legally crossed my path. Played It was better than I thought it was possible.It was pretty weird to play this game as soon as it was completed Cyberpunk 2077If only the reason Grand Theft Auto 5 I continue to feel like a living world full of people with places and things.It’s aggressively lush thing compared to Cyberpunk 2077Night city.The neighborhood and its people seem to be completely present of Grand Theft Auto 5..Even in the face of games like, it somehow remains the norm for the sense of real place and space. Assassin’s Creed Valhara It tried to achieve a similar goal.

Image: Rockstar Games

However, the look and feel of the world Grand Theft Auto 5 Notable and impressive, the context in which it was created, and the commentary on the world of 2013, has a strange tone in 2022.

The core cast of Michael, Franklin, and Trevor lives in an eternal world of early concerns, such as the Great Recession, the stimulant epidemic, and the problem of stepping into the door. American idol The hypocrisy of the liberal government, which has become a parody and relies on the war on terrorism, has been blamed, and Los Santos social media is not a desire to consume everything, but just an element of life.

Especially considering how soft and unrealistic the games about these three protagonists are, it all feels old-fashioned and quaint. They are driven by capitalism and each is trying to find their way in the world. They bring together family, mentors, or friends, all engrossed in a complex story that fosters corrupt government agencies, private military companies, and wellness gurus. You may also zoom out to the historical situation of the world. Sometimes we have to do yoga. It’s all treated the same: more bullshit for these characters to get through their drive for success and self-expression. When the game was first released, I called it conservative how it longed for the old days, preserving the value of the old way and aggressively plundering every part of life that it didn’t respect. .. Now I would call it non-contact — even in the era when it was released.

What was revolutionary Grand Theft Auto 5 It was a commitment to large-scale shared open world gameplay in the form of GTA Online. It’s so robust at the moment that it makes up its own independent game that happens to be on sale. Five.. In the hours I went online, I found it harder to get in than it was about five years ago when I played consistently on Xbox One. Online games begin with the bunker-based gameplay of the 2017 Gunrunning update. This hooks me into a less interesting smuggling mission and takes you into a world of fairly complex activities. Like many live service games, the new player experience seems to rely almost entirely on identifying external sources such as Reddit threads and Discords. Maximum space for what is possible..

Image: Rockstar Games

Especially in the previous console generation, getting into a playlist of weird things people made in the game was a very easy task, but additional layers of gameplay seemed to make it more opaque. rice field. What you can do if you understand it.Seems online Indeed, it has driven some of these millions of game sales. We’ve also moved to a play community that isn’t as publicly accessible as it once was. It takes a little more effort to actually dig into an online game with others. player.

It’s also fun to play this game in the post-Red Dead Redemption 2Motivated by many of the same ideas as Grand Theft Auto 5, But we are not content with the inherently frictional attitude towards cynicalism and popular culture. RDR2 It just doesn’t wholeheartedly devote itself to the Western genre and its emotional traps, blinking soap opera, or showing any kind of wrinkled attitude to the genre taking it too seriously. In contrast, Grand Theft Auto 5The most attractive part of cool commit.

For example, a well-discussed torture scene in which a player acts as a torture torture someone at the request of a malicious FIB, plays jokingly on the camera, and serious meditation about what Trevor can do and he follows it. Stupid way.I feel like I’m aiming for the impression of a blonde, but I don’t have the courage to do anything. Reservoir dog He will make it fun by giving us someone who is very accustomed to torture. Instead, Trevor sold a moving scene of taking the victim of torture to the airport and abandoning him. This shows that our player character has a golden heart compared to the federal agent who told him to tie all the loose ends. And, by the way, the entire mission goes along with another mission in which our other protagonists are assassinating civilians at the request of the agency.

Image: Rockstar Games

Here in almost 10 years Grand Theft Auto 5Life, it’s a fully mapped object. We know what we are trying to get, and the ability of the system and story to create novelty and wonder is now minimized. Instead, it’s a slow-motion, changing time capsule that offers 2013 with each progressive console update that retells a single-player story with a higher level of fidelity and urban density.At the same time, there is a constant expansion of online And that strange and ever-growing festival is a kind of side show that has become the main attraction of hundreds of thousands of players.

Grand Theft Auto 5 At this point, it feels like a taste of the game’s infrastructure, offering the same action of driving and shooting, and making you feel comfortable where you want to play. It seems like it was added in 2017 when novelties appeared, like when I was driving overnight and playing Burial’s “Hiders” on the in-game radio, which really stands out.But playing Grand Theft Auto 5 Today is generally not a practice of new experiences for millions of us. This is a return to the familiar known entity, and these new generation versions of the game offer repetition with subtle differences. If it’s what you’re fishing to get out of your time in 2022 Grand Theft Auto 5 I have it for you.

Grand Theft Auto 5 Re-released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X on March 15th. The game was reviewed on the Xbox Series X using the download code provided by Rockstar Games. VoxMedia has an affiliate partnership. These do not affect your edited content, but VoxMedia may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links.Can be found Click here for additional information on Polygon’s ethical policy..