idea What kind of story elements will make GTA V a hit?

What will be different about the STORY of GTA V that will make it so "controvercial" according to Rockstar?

If they want it to be a "big hit", it'll have to have more stuff than just a storyline. A GTA is all about the open world stuff and large amounts of sidemissions that never run out. Like the sidemissions in San Andreas and Just Cause (1). The story alone is not enough to make the game a "big hit". A controversial story that brings a tear to some reviewers eye might give them some award for it, but that won't mean it's a good game. The actual players want a game that they can have fun playing, not a sad (and annoying) story and no sidemissions (like GTA IV).

The story would have to be as adventures as the most epic missions in San Andreas and The Ballad of Gay Tony and there has to be as many as different sidemissions as possible. Examples include (but are not limited to) the truck missions in San Andreas and the drug wars in TBoGT.

And as for that last post, the word hassle should be replaced with has, I'm using an Android phone that is way too quick with its auto correct. Sorry for that.

I guess they could try to give the player as many choices as possible. Normally this could come at the expense of other things, or they'd have to add another disk for the alternate missions, but all missions don't have to be different. The missions could still be about the same, but the choices could still cause several relatively major plot twists. What I mean is that the choices should effect the lives of several other characters and cause them to die/live/leave/stay and when one person disappears, they can just change the mission cutscenes a little to replace one person with another and change the dialogue.

This way you could for example choose all your friends. They could all have their own personalities. Some might approve of your sidemissions and some don't, so for example one friend would introduce you to a streetrace by being very exited and inviting you there to race him and an alternate friend would just tell you to stay away from some neighbourhoods at night, because "some no-good scumbags are having another illegal race". Either way we'd get all the missions, but this should make a big difference.

Maybe it would even be possible to give us something like a 50 of those GTA IV-style "random characters" and make it so that a large portion of the missions are actually provided by them. Even some storyline missions. It could also be possible to keep those random characters as friends, depending on weather you like the kind of people they are.

And this reminds me, the GTA IV friendship system should be scrapped and entirely replaced by something completely different. There should be no bullshit where you have to only go bowling with one friend and only go streetracing with another. That's not how friendship works. And there should not be any phone calls from them. It should be possible to have something in the game settings, where we can turn phone calls on or off. And when they're set to "on":

• They should never call you during a mission.
• There should be a way to hang out with multiple of them (like in SR3).
• A random friend should call you from a random activity. I guess a cop shouldn't ask you to go rob something, but random with in limits of reason.
• They should not be any friendship points or progress systems and they shouldn't get permanently pissed off if you invite a friend to some odd activity.

Or maybe no "friends" at all, but then increase the number of "random characters" to 100.

DarshD ChiroVette

The kind of grimy underworld that GTA games tend to be set in do make the choices of story elements somewhat limited in some aspects. There's definite overlap in the similarities if you look over the games since GTA III. There's always some plot twist about a close confidant turning on you at some point so it'd be nice to have 2 close allies develop through the game. You know one of them will turn on you, but which one?

Of the main protagonists, I really felt more for CJ than for any of the others because he was trying to get things back up and running in his old hood. Though it made him the most out of place to be doing all of the stuff you have do in missions.