GTA IV: Story Complete
Tuesday 3 June 2008 ◷ 14:17
Stories in a game like this lack boundaries. With most movies you know the time it takes to complete the story, and with a book you know how many pages are left for plot turns: James Bond isn't going to finish saving the world only about 30 minutes into the movie, and Harry Potter's troubles aren't over in like 50 pages, even if the story at that point would make it the most plausible step. That makes experiencing a book or movie more focussed on a storyline that is going somewhere. GTA IV has too many places it can go so the player doesn't have much to base any anticipation on. In a book the proverbial gun that gets mentioned will play a role before the end of the story and on the last page is only that much that can happen. But in GTA IV there is so much available that has nothing to do with the storyline the S/N ratio of clues makes it hard to tell a compelling story, and in the end it makes The End feel like just a plot turn that isn't there. For a game it's definitively not a bad story, but it's not like Herzog.
And there is the mission weight issue: you tend to remember the missions you fail (for stupid reasons) and have to do many times, so while there are only a few missions that seem less balanced, they have relatively more impact on the feeling of the balance of the entire game, and that is even more so because you can't save the game just before the hard part of the mission so you have to spend too much time tediously repeating the relatively easy part of the mission (just to miss the damn ramp again after another 15 minutes of chase and combat). It's also hard to figure out how to do the missions without just failing them the first time until you realize you aren't suppose to look for options because there are not much options besides the use of brute force.
So I agree mostly with Gamekings.
And in a broader context games like this should be more DWIM. It's not realistic to swim around with an AK, bazooka and 25 granades in the pockets of your Perseus suit, so why can't the character just get around a 6" piece of wall without having to control it exactly to do so, or doesn't the game understand what I want to do at TW@ when I press L1 not close enough to a terminal?