I wasn't able to get excited about GTA5 so I didn't buy it, but to be honest I don't think I've ever truly been a fan of the series. Back when I had my PS2 I never owned San Andreas or Vice City, I only ever played them when I was at a friend's house and even then I wasn't very excited about them. I got hyped for GTA4 and bought it at launch just because every body else was so excited about it, and there was nothing else coming out around that particular time.
I ended up not liking anything about that game, I couldn't get into any of the characters and I didn't like the driving, shooting, and the mission design. It was a huge beautiful simulation of New York city but once I explored it I felt like it was just a sweet tech demo and a testament to the art department. I appreciated GTA4 from a technical art perspective but the actual video game was boring and I never finished it. The city was pretty desolate and anything mildly interesting was spread far and wide. If you were standing at any given intersection in Liberty City you were surrounded by hundreds of buildings in the surrounding few square blocks, but they only served as geometry and texture work, and if you were lucky maybe you'd find 2 interactive places, and at best those would be the mediocre missions, at worst they were just temporarily neat novelties like a dart game or internet cafe. GTA4 took my breath away initially with the technical work and scope, but once I got to the point where you unlock all the islands I had seen all I needed to and quit.
So I couldn't get excited for GTA5, but I'd like to get a look at it from the technical side someday. I watched the streams of the Giant Bomb guys playing the game and the textures look amazing and the world is packed with artistic details. I also was shocked by the immense scope of the city, and how it streams in so effortlessly. I'll probably buy an eventual GOTY edition a couple years from now, when said edition is around $20-30, and play it for 10 hours or so until I can get a good look at all the work they did building the environment and the effects they can do with the Euphoria engine, then quit. The fire and explosions I saw in the stream were pretty stunning.
An interesting thing to bring up now that you know how disinterested I've been in GTA gameplay and characters in all the games is the fact that I'm playing Red Dead Redemption for the first time right now and loving it. I bought the GOTY edition of that recently for $25 new. I've been trying to figure out exactly why I'm loving it, and whether or not I'm simply stunned temporarily by the art and technical work. The Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Northern Mexico landscape influence is incredibly beautiful in a wild and desolate way. It's weird how super rare western themed games are. I play mostly RPGs and shooters and most of my games take place in futurescapes of cities or dark medieval kingdoms. I think Red Dead Redemption might be super realistic in a way I can get behind. I'm really into the cacti, tumbleweeds, seeing heat rise off the desert floor, seeing the coal trains and saloons. There's still plenty of moments for janky frustration and long periods of time traveling over and over, but so far I'm still immersed into it. The mechanics are different and certainly more diverse than I expected, there's simply more to do than in GTA4 and those new mechanics are pretty polished. I like lassoing dudes, riding the horses, hitching a ride on the train, doing the horse rodeos, and even doing the shooting feels a little better than GTA4 did for me.
I also like some of the random encounters that happen. A few of the ones I come across are super rushed and I fail before I even know what's happening. Every time I try to save somebody from being hanged by bandits they always die. I think I'm suppose to shoot the rope before they suffocate but it takes too much accuracy and I don't have enough time. But some of the random encounters are really fantastic.
Last night I came across this guy in the desert who wanted a ride so I stopped to help him thinking I might get a $2 reward or something, which I needed because coming across money has been slow for me. Well the guy ran up and threw me off my horse and stole it off into the sunset, I was shocked and pissed. He rounded a corner and was hidden by a hill so I thought he was gone forever, but just then I heard my horse do the sound clip that seems like it's bucking you off. A second later my horse came running back to me and I was ready to hunt the horse thief down. He was super fast in scampering off but I eventually found him, lassoed him to the dirt, then hogtied him and tossed him on the back of my horse. I didn't know what to do with him at first, I felt like the death penalty of shooting him dead in the desert was pretty harsh but historically people were killed in the west for cattle stealing and similar crimes. So I took him into town to see if I could throw him in jail and I couldn't, so I knew I was probably going to end up killing him. With him hogtied behind me I rode out of town into the wilderness trying to think of a way to get rid of him.
Well 20 minutes of wandering the desert and internal deliberating goes by, and yadda yadda we end up in the middle of nowhere and I have this horse thief laid out on top of the train tracks like an old cartoon. Except I don't know the train schedule and I realize we could be waiting a long time till this goes down. I waited for another 10 minutes and spent my time hunting deer on the nearby hill until I heard a train whistle from the distance. Excitedly I raced back to my hogtied thief on the tracks just in time to see this big black coal train thunder over him and literally explode his character model into a spray of blood and jibblits. I let out a gasp mixed with laughter to express the disgust at the effects, the shock at what I'd just had my character do, as well as the hilarity and payoff to this whole random encounter that turned into a half hour tangent away from the main quest. I'll never forget that whole sequence of events, and as I gathered myself and rode off from his jibblets I said out loud matter-of-factly, but it was almost equally a question I was asking myself as a player, "Well that's the wild west, bitch." Lol
I'm still waiting to see if it's all going to wear off and leave me quitting like all the other Rockstar games I've played, but so far I'm loving Red Dead Redemption. I love the setting, I like the main character, the voice acting is pretty great and the animation is fantastic except for the somewhat common and certainly jarring janky moments in collision that tend to happen.
