Grinding GTA IV Missions

This is an article I wrote many years ago, when GTA IV had just come out and I played the game almost to completion.[1] I never got around to publishing it, though. Now, with GTA V out for the PlayStation and X-Box, I dug up this post and figured I’d clean it up and post it anyway.

From 5 Reasons GTA IV Is The Worst Great Game Ever Made (Cracked):

“…there’s simply no way to accurately tell everybody that this is the most jaw dropping game you’ve ever played, and at the same time you fucking hate it so much it’s like a knife in your eye.”

It’s mind-boggling to think what the testers for this game went through. But which one thought I would ever be interested in seeing the front of my helicopter during a mission? Which one thought it was OK for an enemy to be able to shoot me through stairs that are all but impenetrable for me? Who here thinks it should ever be possible to drop a grenade on your foot? Why do you make me re-spawn a city block away from the helicopter, forcing me to sprint to it for 30 seconds? Which part of the fun is that?

First, the good stuff

On the other hand, there are also these cool little side missions, like stopping on a little, green person icon and then chatting with a person who gives you a hundred bucks because he’s coked off his ass.

At 95% completion, I’ve spent over 72 hours in the game over two months of play. It’s an embarrassing amount of time, I know. But it is a fun game and there is a tremendous amount to do. But even with that huge time budget, I didn’t waste a lot of time; I had fun, but I was more-or-less constantly pursuing game goals rather than enjoying the so-called sandbox world.[2] Clearly there’s no danger of there not being enough game to play; players whining that the game is finished too easily or quickly have no idea what they’re talking about.

Spotty realism

A lot of video-game culture has long been based on a notion that fun includes suffering. That is, you have to earn your fun; you can’t just have fun all the time … where’s the fun in that? So, sometimes you have to do things that aren’t really fun in the interest of the story or continuity or whatever. Though there’s usually a reason why you have to do more tedious things—for the sake of realism, usually—there is no rhyme or reason as to when you have to stick to realism and when you don’t.

For example, you can carry around what must be a half-ton of military hardware, but you have to “jump” to clear a knee-high wall. You have a million dollars at the end of the game, but you can’t buy anything except hot dogs and cab rides. You can’t buy extra apartments or parking spots. You can’t buy the cars or bikes you want—you have to steal them, but they’re often not available until you’re already driving the one that you want. I’m not sure whether this is some sort of existential statement on the part of the game designers or not.

Stunt jumps and pigeons

The auto-save feature is great, but it inexplicably doesn’t save after stunt jumps or pigeons, both of which are needed to achieve 100%. The designers add all these goals and know that, over the course of the last several versions, the 100%-achievement has become the goal of many games. However, they don’t offer much help in getting there. You have no idea which jumps you’ve done or which pigeons you’ve killed.

This is where the suffering comes in; if you want to do all 50 stunt jumps, you have to search high and low and probably do them all twice in order to be really sure you did them all. That’s a shame because the bloody things are in the game already—Rockstar has already paid for them—but they make them so hard to find. Why do I have to go to the Internet—to the notoriously unreliable world of documentation created by 14-year-olds—in order to finish the game? While I’m prepared to spend 72 hours playing, I’m not going to spend two times that amount of time just driving around looking for stuff. That’s not fun.

Rockstar came so close in so many places. There’s an Internet where you can look up the pigeon or stunt jump maps and see where they all are. But they don’t show you which ones you’ve already done. A pity. The vigilante missions are documented for you in the statistics and the “Most Wanted” missions are also clear. You can put almost anything else on your GPS, but not the jumps or pigeons. It’s OK to make some things a bit more difficult, but don’t make them tedious.

Grinding missions

It’s similar with the main missions. If you die, you wake up in the hospital and pay a lot of money. That’s fine because you generally have a lot of money. At least you don’t lose your weapons. Seconds after getting out of the hospital, you get a text message asking if you want to re-try the mission. You can accept and you can try again. Without armor.

Since you failed before with armor, the odds that you’re going to succeed without it are slim. So, you have to ignore the redo-this-mission message and go shopping. There is some armor laying around the city, but it’s really hard to find and you only get a map for it when you’ve completed all the missions, after which you don’t really care that much about armor anymore.

The magical Internet comes to the rescue with maps of armor locations—and instructions of varying reliability for finding said armor—but it’s often still quite far away from you. And you don’t have a vehicle when you get out of the hospital. Are we having fun yet?

So, step one is to find a cab, get into it without stealing it (also not that easy, see below) and direct the driver to the weapons store, where you can buy armor. The cab usually leaves immediately and you’ll often be hard-pressed to find another. Of course, you can usually steal another car and drive yourself to the start of the missions but, when you’re grinding missions, you’re not in the mood to do five minutes of driving, gawking at the beautifully rendered city. Your fun is currently doing the next mission. The rest of the stuff is shopping, which is not much fun.

Stealing cars

The game is called “Grand Theft Auto” for a reason. You’re going to be stealing a lot of cars. But, in contrast to previous incarnations, you don’t have to drive yourself everywhere. You can take a cab instead, which is a relatively realistic evolution of the “Trip-Skip” feature in GTA III. It’s not as quick, but it’s more realistic.

To steal a car, you press the triangle button. To hire a cab, you press and hold the triangle button. Do you see the potential for trouble here? The heuristic for detecting a press versus a press-and-hold is not as reliable as one would hope. I don’t have enough fingers to count the number of times I tried to get into the only cab I’d seen in minutes and ended up watching the game make me steal it instead. There was invariably a cop car immediately behind me to make the extracurricular (remember, grinding missions) field-trip even longer.

I think they could have made the default action for a cab be to get in the back-seat and make you press and hold to steal it (something I never once wanted to do). Sure, it’s kind of cute to have the game be full of surprises, which often leads to completely believable consequences, but it shouldn’t find some way to make your game longer even if you’re a good player. The game shouldn’t be artificially lengthened by fucking with you.

The problem with Grand Theft Auto is what’s so awesome about it: the immersion. When you’re immersed in the game and you’re yanked back out of that immersion by a reminder that you’re playing a game, it’s frustrating—to put it mildly. As a player, you’re fooled into thinking that Nico—your character—is actually looking at the car you want to steal because he’s facing it. However, when you press the triangle button, he moves into auto-sprint mode and heads for another car off-camera. You mash desperately on the buttons to get him to head back to the other car, but you’ve wasted precious seconds and, sometimes, been killed for the glitch.

Internally, the data and algorithms the game uses to determine which things are around you and what exactly you’re seeing came to a different conclusion than the one you came to based on your interpretation of what the graphics system rendered. It’s wholly understandable that this should happen because what GTA does is hard. Really hard. But they do it so well that they pay the price—with frustrated users—when they only do it 98% of the time.

Motorcycles and helicopters

Motorcycles are also notoriously difficult to pick up or straddle. Nico has to be facing just right in order to get on and the bike can’t be laying in a strange position on the street or it’s impossible for him to get it. Immersion is dead. And so, most likely, is Nico. The final mission involves a motorcycle. After fighting through an entire army of flunkies, you have to jump on and continue pursuit on a motorcycle. I stood next to the thing, pressed the triangle button and watched Nico sprint across the dock on which the bike was parked and start to climb down a ladder into the water. Not exactly what I had in mind. By my third try, I’d figured out exactly how I had to be positioned in order to reliably get on the bike.

Getting killed in a hail of bullets because you stormed out of a bank into a 5-star police presence is expected—it was a twenty-to-one shot that you’d get out of there alive, but it’s still fun to try. Getting killed because your avatar is unable to get on a motorcycle or unable to climb a knee-high wall in an expeditious manner is not acceptable.

Actually, a casual, relaxed gamer would probably be able to laugh off failure due solely to game mechanics if that gamer didn’t have to invest so much time into getting to that point. Sometimes it’s north of five minutes of preparation and shopping to get to a mission, a further ten minutes of creeping through the mission, making few mistakes, then dying in a hail of bullets because the helicopter door won’t open when you’re standing an inch to the left of the invisible game-world trigger.[3]

Rinse, lather, repeat

As a reward for having played so well, you get to repeat the exact same thing again, which is very late 80s—early 90s. Whereas it’s nice of Rockstar to let you skip in-game cinematics, some of the missions include longer drives wherein you get to hear the same conversation over and over and over again. To their credit, Rockstar has actually included two separate conversations for many of the missions, for those of us that don’t reload a saved game and instead replay the mission.