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Games

GTA V is Back for a New Generation (theguardian.com) 28

Rockstar's anarchic masterpiece has been freshened up for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X nine years after it was originally released. From a report: And so the boys are back in town. Michael, Trevor and Franklin, the sociopathic trio that lit up the gaming scene nine years ago, have been made over for the 2020s with this crisp new reworking of Grand Theft Auto V for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. The game's violent narrative of shifting loyalties and doomed machismo felt wild and edgy back in 2013, so how does it fare in the modern era? The good news is, the overhauled visuals definitely give the game new zest and freshness. You can play in either 4K at 30 frames-per-second or in a performance mode that lowers the resolution but bumps up the frame rate to 60, giving wonderful fluidity to car chases, swooping helicopter rides and mass shootouts. The DualSense controller features on PlayStation 5 are very good too: improved driving feedback via the analogue triggers makes the game's cumbersome handling a little easier to, well, handle. It's been quite a joy to rediscover this alternate-reality California; to see the sun drop behind the downtown skyscrapers, or to hit Senora as dawn splashes orange-yellow light across the burning desert.

What the vast upshift in resolution can't hide is the fact that GTA V is a game originally designed for consoles that are now two generations out of date. The character models and facial details look positively archaic compared with, say, Horizon Forbidden West, and the building architecture too seems almost quaint in its stylised blockiness. Compare it with 2018's Red Dead Redemption 2 and you can see just how far Rockstar has come in its building of intricate next-gen worlds. In many ways, however, the design of the world itself has not been been bettered in the decade since it arrived. The size of San Andreas, the sheer variety of landscapes and the diversity of actions and activities is still incredible -- Cyberpunk 2077 may look better, but it doesn't let you play golf or tennis, or go on day trips on a bike, or set up incredibly complex car or helicopter stunts. Los Santos is a vast playground, a gangster Fortnite -- a factor underlined by the massive community that still gathers in GTA Online (which is where we find this new version's only totally new content -- Hao's Special Works, which lets you unlock faster cars and new tasks).

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GTA V is Back for a New Generation

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  • The news are great! For me GTA 5 is the best game ever. I'd already finished it, but still, somethimes I play it, and I'm excited like it's the first time. And I hope, that soon there will be info that there will be GTA 6
    • GTA 6 is on the way, but it will still be a few years. Until then, you might want to check out GTA RP, which has a lot of mods that will eventually be included in GTA 6.

    • by quall ( 1441799 )

      I stopped playing about half way through. The game's story was good and I really liked the characters. Unfortunately the missions themselves were incredibly boring and I just completely lost interest. You are basically a solo taxi driver in this game. The game was mostly comprised of driving your car from one mundane area to another mundane area as if the mission itself didn't matter. There were a few fun missions, but those few were far in between. From what I remember, very few buildings had an interior a

  • Meant new games? Remember that feeling when you first saw soul caliber on the Dreamcast? I miss that feeling.
    • I'm still kind of struck that the PS4 never actually got its own native GTA game... just a remastered GTA5 that started out a PS3 title. And GTA6 will fairly obviously, at this point, be PS5 native. This, where the PS2 and PS3 got 3 and 2 native GTAs respectively. And even the PSP got some love from Rockstar, with 2 GTAs of its own. But for the PS4? "Too bad. So sad. Hope you enjoy our other franchise: Grand Theft Horse." (To be fair, I did. But it's still weird that Rockstar left the PS4 out to dr

      • The Cell's PPE/SPU was a huge PITA to write code for. Each SPU had 256 KB (total) but WICKED fast DMA and vector processing. Short term the PS3 forced a lot of developers to multithread their engine since they could no longer rely on beefy single thread performance that x86 offered.

        RockStar's RAGE engine had special optimizations for the PS3.

        The PS4 has gimped x86 processing. It took time to properly load balance engine code for it.

        I don't think there not being a native GTA for the PS4 was due to anything

      • It was called 'Red Dead Redemption 2.'
    • Remember when new consoles... Meant new games?

      There were a few for the PS5. Returnal and also I think the newer Ratchet & Clank made use of the hardware in ways that they couldn't be done like they were on older systems.

      But it does seem like there used to be more... I think it's just such a massive undertaking now that it's harder to get a new game out for a new system only.

    • Game development houses discovered that the plebs will buy the same game every few years if you just put some lipstick on it. Why bother making a whole new game or trying out new ideas when you can just retread what you have?
    • I'm pretty cynical when it comes to gaming too, but Halo Infinite is actually pretty good. Yeah, it's got a heavy dose of memberberries, but today's kids are into retro stuff, so it is what it is.

  • The game's violent narrative of shifting loyalties and doomed machismo felt wild and edgy back in 2013

    It really wasn't wild and edgy unless you somehow missed all the gangster movies of the last hundred years.

  • I can't help but buy these games six or seven times over.

  • Vice city was the definitive GTA.
  • I still play the PC version of GTA5 every so often.... Game-play has been largely ruined by all the cheats and cheaters. But when you're lucky enough not to cross paths with them, or you're able to "ghost" most of the troublemakers, it's still a pretty amazing open world type of game.

    My biggest gripe is the fact that so much of the newer content they add are various "mini games" that feel disconnected from the main game. You feel compelled to play some of them repeatedly just because they're paying out 3x

  • Does not care about PC people.
  • if you're buying GTA V again, at this point you're just as dumb as the people who buy Madden games.

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