Hes on the cusp of figuring out the next required step when hes incinerated by a rocket launcher.
Every few months we hop into GTA Online with the intention of checking out some Hot New Content.
We never did reach the High Octane Bank Heist.
We finally find one in a sleepy little coastal town that the games single player campaign never touches.
I deposit my precious earnings while my friend drives off a cliff.
We log off after riding jet skis in a storm and chatting about social anxiety.
These are people you’re free to tell have hobbies.
These people take photographs.
They probably go to museums - for fun.
I bet they have a favourite cheese.
The missions theyve managed to conjure involve driving between cutscene triggers and shooting 1000 men from behind cover.
Its the stuff that videogames have been doing for such a very, very long time.
For the most part, videogame stories model themselves after the rigidity and linearity of film.
This feels increasingly restrictive as these spaces evolve - an archaic convenience tacked onto a specifically 21st century medium.
Theres no reason to play it safe anymore, not when the wheels are already coming off.
Does X even need a story mode anymore?
can be a reductive argument, but with a series likeGrand Theft Autoit seems a fair thing to discuss.
GTA Online is somehow earning Rockstar$1,730 with each passing minute.
How do you reflect this in a conventional script?
Maybe its time for auteurs to get out of the way, to let the simulation speak for itself.
you might’t enforce a conventional story onto such a disparate framework.
Leave sweeping tales about the inner lives of criminals to prestige dramas; videogames provide so much more opportunity.
Rockstar have already done the hard part.
The greatest writer in the world couldnt reach those absurdist heights.
It cant just be a bigger map.
