While the Grand Theft Auto series had its share of fans during its early days, it wasn’t until the franchise made the jump to 3D with the third installment that it became a true blockbuster franchise. Today, it is not only one of the best-selling game series, but Grand Theft Auto V recently became the most profitable entertainment product of all time, video game or otherwise, earning $6 billion (and counting) in revenue.
GTA is quite divisive, both among gamers themselves and people in general. Obviously, the “outside world” only knows what the mainstream media reports about the series, which is that it is just a crime simulator that rewards you for doing the most despicable things possible. While gamers know most of that to be nonsense, many still dismiss GTA as giving into the lowest common denominator and being the very thing that some people assumes all video games are. Of course, with the sales that GTA games pull in and the critical praise heaped upon each instalment, there is also plenty of love for the franchise as well.
It’s obvious from the title of this list that it’s going to be focusing on the negative aspects of the GTA series. And yes, we’ll definitely be touching on some of the most common complaints about the series — but we’d like to think we’ve also come up with things that maybe GTA fans hadn’t really thought of. We’re not out to make anyone a GTA hater —because we here at TheGamer definitely aren’t GTA haters— but we believe in criticism where criticism is due.
25 Nothing But Scenery
One of the things that GTA has always prided itself on is having huge game worlds. And to be sure, whenever a new core GTA game is released, it generally takes place in one of the biggest playable game areas of any of its peers.
But if we’re being honest, a lot of the real estate in a given GTA game is filler — copied and pasted forest areas, block after block of similar-looking houses, long stretches of highway, and so on. It definitely looks impressive, but 85% of it is little more than non-interactive scenery.
24 Raging Against Its Own Machine
Most GTA plots are underdog stories, characters who have been beaten down by life in some way and have set about taking down the establishment that has had its boot on their face for far too long.
The problem with GTA games being about taking down “the man” is that they are created by “the man.”
GTA may have been a low-budget indie endeavor in the beginning, but it is now a multi-billion-dollar property published by one of the biggest corporations on the planet. It makes the games’ anti-establishment vibe feel a little disingenuous.
23 The West Has Problems, We Get It…
Look, we aren’t saying that Western culture is above parody — in fact, satirists mock “their own” as effectively as anyone else does. And for a video game to do it was definitely something of a novelty in the early days of the GTA series.
However, there eventually comes a point when a joke has run its course.
10+ games on, GTA’s skewering of the West feels more lazy than clever at this point. It’s fine for it to still be the basic undercurrent of the series, but the writers need to stop leaning so heavily on it already.
22 Hey Cousin, Wanna Play A Terrible Minigame?
We need to stop giving games within games a pass just for existing — something is either well-made or it isn’t, and it shouldn’t matter if it is “just” a minigame within another title.
People have convinced themselves that GTA games contain legitimately good versions of golf, pool, darts, etc. Still, in reality, if any of them were their own game, we wouldn’t give them the time of day. “But those are just minigame in a massive game with a million things to do,” they’ll say — which is what people say to excuse a lot of GTA’s flaws…
21 Girls, Girls, Girls
Putting your opinions on GamerGate aside, facts are facts: the GTA series doesn’t represent women particularly well.
Females in GTA games generally exist for the amusement and/or pleasure of the males in GTA games.
Whether we’re talking dating girls in San Andreas until you “win” by getting them to sleep with you, or the ladies of the night that are on every street corner, or the ridiculous work put into the “dance scenes” in GTA V, GTA’s women are one-note eye-candy and little else. That there has yet to be a playable female character is perhaps most embarrassing of all.
20 Trees Of Steel
It’s happened to all of us: You’re tearing through Liberty City, crashing through fences, lampposts, gas pumps, and more when all of a sudden, something stops you cold in your tracks and crumples up your car like a pop can. What is it? A massive rock? A three-feet-thick iron wall? Superman?
Nope…it was the tiniest little tree you’ve ever seen, one that you could probably physically push over with minimal effort, that was no match for your speeding car.
Obviously, everything can’t be destructible in a GTA game, but the inconsistencies are jarring and don’t always make much sense.
19 The Trevor Conundrum
Fictional characters like GTA V’s Trevor are tricky. He is obviously a dumpster fire of a person and almost everything he does is abhorrent and irredeemable, but we can’t help but find ourselves occasionally laughing at him.
It’s a fine line to have to walk for the creators behind such a character, knowing how to wring uncomfortable laughs from terrible actions but also making sure we have the proper perspective by the end of a given scene. However, Rockstar occasionally forgot that last part, and Trevor is often just the worst kind of comic relief.
18 Rated “M” For “Makes Kids Laugh”
Sigh. Rockstar seemingly works so hard to convince the world that the GTA games are not aimed at children, and yet so much of the games’ humor is of the sort that 12-to-16-year old boys would most appreciate.
There is definitely a way to have dirty jokes and puns still come off as intelligent humor, but far too often, GTA’s double-entendres and bodily function references just feel like the kind of stuff that Beavis and Butt-head would laugh at. Just working the name of a body part into a fast food chain’s catchphrase and calling it humor is pretty lazy.
17 Been There, Done That
Drive from Point A to Point B. At Point B, you need to deliver the thing, take out the target, blow up the building, and/or steal the object. Then return to Point A. And thus describes 90% of all the missions in GTA’s history, even in more recent installments.
Sometimes there is a small wrinkle, but that’s the bulk of the main missions in a GTA game.
Compared to the ever-increasing field of open world games like Just Cause, Saints Row, and Far Cry with a much greater task variety, that basic GTA mission structure is wearing extremely thin.
16 I Just Want To Be Free
Sometimes we just want to wreak havoc in a GTA game. Typically, we do this when we’re “done” playing for a session and want to spend 10 or 15 minutes seeing how many stars we can rack up and how long we can survive the onslaught of authority figures.
It would be nice if there was a way to do this independently of the “main game.” Some of GTA’s competitors, like Crackdown and Retro City Rampage, have exactly that, a separate mode without the shackles of a story or worrying about affecting your progress where you can just go nuts.
15 The Sounds Of Silence
Music has long been a staple of the GTA games, and Vice City still has one of the greatest soundtracks in the history of, well, soundtracks. But then the inevitable happens: You’re driving around, rocking out to some awesome tune, and you have to get out of your car for some reason — thus ending the song.
Music being so tied to being in cars makes on foot sections feel oddly quiet.
Recent installments have gotten better about having a generic tune that plays during specific on-foot moments, but in general, music requires wheels. Does nobody have Walkmans or iPods?
14 Meet The New Gen, Worse Than The Old Gen
It was likely the Madden football games that started this trend: Making the jump to a new console generation meant the excuse that the first installment on the new gen lost a bunch of the features of the most recent versions, and gamers have to wait a few years for the series to catch back up.
GTA has seemed to do this as well. It was somewhat expected when it made the jump to 3D, but GTA IV felt like a step back from San Andreas in pretty much every area save for graphics. Better visuals aren’t an excuse to regress.
13 Choose Your Words Carefully
Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino has gotten a lot of flak for the copious use of a certain racially-charged word in his movies, with people pointing out that just because the word is coming out of the mouths of black characters (though not always) isn’t an excuse for a white screenwriter to utilize the hurtful word so much.
Similarly, the GTA games —especially beginning with San Andreas— haven’t shied away from that word. It feels a little uncomfortable and lacking the so-called authenticity that they were probably going for.
12 City Connection
Grand Theft Auto IV marked the franchise’s fifth return to Liberty City, its fictional approximation of New York City. Then it was used twice more in GTA IV’s two expansions. After jumping around to so many different cities up to that point —including a jaunt in Europe for GTA: London— it was beginning to feel a bit lazy.
Cut to GTA V, and Rockstar again returned to a city that previous GTAs already covered. Even if they keep the games West-based, there are a lot of other interesting cities to base a game in other than NYC and LA.
11 I Just Wanna Fly
GTA III’s Dodo plane was one of the biggest teases in video game history: Let us find a plane, but then basically make it impossible to fly successfully.
Sadly, flying controls have only gotten marginally better in GTA since then.
No, you can’t just hop into a plane or helicopter in real life and instantly fly it. You also can’t really do half the stuff in real life that GTA lets you do — so why all of a sudden be super realistic and make it needlessly difficult to fly anything?
10 Side Characters That Need Sidelining
Every GTA game has a cast of at least a dozen side characters that you have to interact with for extended periods. Some are friend, some are foe, and many start off as one and flip-flop to the other, sometimes more than once.
What they all have in common is that they are generally obnoxious and/or completely shallow. The ones that aren’t just lazy one-note characters are so intolerable that you almost wish they were. And each subsequent installment just seems to up the ante with how insufferable supporting characters in a video game can truly be.
9 Los Santos Needs Uber
It was a nice idea: Offer players the ability to call a taxi and have it drive them to their destination, letting them just kick back and enjoy the scenery or actually go someplace without stealing a car.
The execution, on the other hand, is a completely different story.
First of all, it sometimes takes far too long for a taxi to arrive — again, why choose that to be realistic? And when it finally does come, it’s a block away, in the middle of a busy street, and has often run people over and caused a traffic jam.
8 The Ballad Of Cheap Stereotypes
If there is one marginalized group that gets it worse than any other within the GTA universe, it is definitely anyone who isn’t straight. The franchise has never been above a cheap jokes, and while they’ve toned things down (a bit) in recent installments, they still have a lot of atoning to do for the damage done in previous games.
In the two Vice City games, in particular, Rockstar took stereotypical 80s culture and made it the frequent butt of jokes, with characters and entire storylines existing for no other reason than to be one long insulting joke.
7 EA Isn’t The Only One
Few games in recent memory have been a bigger pariah for how not to handle microtransactions and DLC than EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II, and while most of the flak was well-deserved, that game is hardly the only one guilty of it.
GTA Online is chock full of real-world purchase options, and while none are technically “required,” you aren’t going to get very far —or have anything remotely cool— unless you cough up a sizable amount of real dough for it. Where’s the backlash against Rockstar?
6 Get On With It!
Most open world games let you stick pretty close to the main storyline if you want to, and not really bother with much side stuff. That’s why it’s called “side” stuff, after all.
But as each new GTA game has come out, more and more of that content that should be optional is actually required, forcing players to stray from the main story for sometimes hours at a time doing menial tasks. It can really mess up pace and momentum — and worst of all, make players feel like they don’t have as much choice as they’d like.
