Greentext

Yeah, I agree in that they're not really given anything interesting to do with that depth. It felt like one of those shows which you keep running in the background because you take some interest every now and again and is irrelevant enough to allow you to ignore it completely for a couple of hours.

Again, I feel this has more to do with the fact that they focused on the Online component to the point where it almost feels like they'd initially planned on having your player character act as the fourth (the selection wheel is the main clear indicator of this to me), which is why a lot of the story's there instead of the single-player. Concrete example and a bit of a spoiler, but Franklin does get that bow for his character arc in online, and you as the player character directly help both him and yourself with it. And many of the "quest givers" in Online are the same as in single-player, some of which even hint at what the SP characters have been doing (off-screen).

It's very unfortunate that they tied that story content to such a deliberately hostile multiplayer (I'm referring to how it pretty much encourages everyone to grief everyone else), because there are some neat moments which get lost in the slaughter... Same goes for RDO, although with much, much less hostility - actually enjoy roaming around and doing missions and unrelated stuff in Online, most of the time it feels as though I'm playing single-player.

Yeah, that's why it feels like Seinfeld to me, it's like the point is just to watch these people try to go about their lives with the added context of them being high-profile criminals. Could've been a very interesting character study even so, but it does kinda' lose the plot after a while and the developments start meandering all over the place. Even that psych profile at the end gives me the feeling that it was their initial direction, but, again, I think the Shark Card Gods needed appeasement and back we go to the Online component...

I share that list with you, except for Bully, because I always forget that game exists for some reason, and RDR1, which I've just now started playing thanks to the PC port release. It really does feel like it has that same flavour of ambition as RDR2, even from the starting bits! And, again, I agree, although I'd argue GTA III had a fun enough story ("of its time" elements notwithstanding) for the time when it came out, it was good enough to keep me moving forward and wanting to see where things ended up. I think of it as a decent enough pilot which didn't yet have its tone figured out. Also, I'd say GTA V is about on par with Vice City overall for me, although Vice City was more focused, not gonna lie.

I can certainly understand what you mean about it being a grind to play through, especially with your preference for single-player, I did feel the need to push myself through it a couple of times, yeah... And, same, jumped into IV afterward and ended up playing it through to the end again, and in a much more binge-y way. Oh, and Saints Row 2, 3 and 4 are gloriously campy, yes! Love them for entirely different reasons, but I do love them nonetheless!

Same... would be nice for them to lean into those storytelling chops they demonstrated with RDR2, they could blow a lot of contemporaries out of the water if they really gave it an honest try. And I, too, fear that online monetisation will, yet again, take priority...