GTAV – forget the killing sprees and find beauty in a digital rambling holiday

February 27th, 2014, 01:27 Posted By: wraggster

The search for letter fragments brings Michael to ‘Camp Dignity’, one of many Los Santos delights you might have missed.

Collectibles may not ruin games, but they don’t exactly help. They’re the tedious make-work at the heart of modern game design that substitutes padding for content, the taunting fraction lurking in some number-ish recess of the pause screen showing you how little you’ve actually achieved. Very few are as tedious as GTAIV’s pigeons. They distort progress – thought you were only 30 per cent of the way through the story? Tough luck sir, the remaining 70 per cent is killing 200 pigeons – and hold players in contempt, asking them to exterminate a city-full of grey, stub-legged sky-rats for no reason and scant reward. In a Saints Row game, you might get away with arguing that this was parody; with GTAIV’s dour tone, it just felt like sadism – or worse, as if Rockstar didn’t care.With Grand Theft Auto V, everything was bigger, with more ground to explore, more protagonists to control, and, ominously, several additional sets of arbitrary things to find. The risks were obvious – could this lead to six hundred pigeons to kill? Eight hundred? Two thousand, spread out over an entire state? Collecting all of this tat sounds like at least three of the twelve labours of obsessive nerd Hercules.In practice however, it’s a little different. The Rockstar Social Club includes a helpful map showing which items you’ve found and, crucially, which ones you haven’t. While GTAIV’s pigeon-eradicating was like an anxiety dream, GTAV’s letter and spaceship part-hunting, planned out on a laptop or tablet, is manageable and even engrossing, the map taming San Andreas’ colossal scale. The end result is a digital rambling holiday that’s unique, beautiful and weirdly relaxing.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...bling-holiday/

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here