Down in the docklands of Los Santos, where the last threads of the freeway are teased apart before reaching the ocean, there's an unassuming building that serves as the clubhouse for the local chapter of the Lost. There, guarded by her chaptermates, is Angel Kenney—whose rap sheet includes theft, stalking, harassment, extortion, vehicular manslaughter, and at least one charge of drunk and disorderly. "That last one sounds fun," drawls Bottom Dollar Bounty handler Jenette. "'cept it led to the one before it."
The arrest becomes tricky the moment we step inside. The tight, jagged angles of the clubhouse make it a deathtrap, full of nooks that could easily hide a perp with a shotgun. My fellow bail enforcement officer trains her weapon on a door, and asks me to open it.
A simple nudge would have sufficed. Just a slight bump to pump those hinges and expose the armed bikers in the next room. Instead, as I push forward and then back on the thumbstick, my avatar swans through the portal into the firing line, pulling off a glacial 360 degree spin. Imagine Grandpa Simpson in the famous gif—slowly plucking his fedora from the hatstand as he rotates in the lobby of the burlesque house—only under a hail of submachine gun fire. My super heavy body armour is immediately shredded. It's the opposite of Rainbow Six: less breach and clear, more breach oh-dear. It's also standard fare for anyone getting to grips with the not-so-simple act of walking around in GTA Online.
A few years ago, I talked to Patrice Désilets about the creation of Assassin's Creed. Back then, in the mid noughties, his team was looking at the work Rockstar had done to make open worlds a delight to bounce around in. "I guess a lot of games in the beginning of the 2000s were inspired by it," he told me. "Exploring GTA, my pleasure was just to be in this game world and see the sun rise. So it was like 'Can we replace the car with the main character? In GTA I can go anywhere with the car, can I go anywhere with the character?' That's why we had the parkour."
The attempt to transpose that feeling of freedom was successful, to the extent that Assassin's Creed became Ubisoft's most dominant series—leaving the likes of Driver, the company's more direct rival to GTA, in the dust. But as part of the process, Désilets' team ditched the physics of Rockstar's driving model for something more controlled and athletic—the point-to-point leaping we now associate inextricably with Altaïr and Ezio.
When I play GTA 5 and its online counterpart, by contrast, a part of me feels as though I'm literally driving a car, even when my character is on foot. That's because pedestrians in Los Santos, the protagonist included, are subject to the forces of physics—in a fashion that's alien to most third-person action games.
If you're steering Geralt, or Nathan Drake, or Spider-Man, you're given the final say over when your character starts and stops moving. It's the sort of precision in control you take for granted. But if you're Trevor, or Franklin, or Michael, then you're dealing with concepts like acceleration and inertia. Work up a sprint by repeatedly tapping the run key—itself a unique anachronism from the days of the PlayStation 1—and you'll find that taking a corner requires some forethought. It's common to overshoot a staircase or mission marker because you didn't account for your turning circle.
As when driving a sedan through the uneven streets of Liberty City's Portland, it's all too easy to flip onto your head. In a typical action game, ragdoll physics is something that happens to other people: your enemies. But in GTA 5, Rockstar is happy to hand over responsibility for your body to the whims of gravity whenever you lose your footing. Stepping off a rooftop, only to watch The Walking Dead's Steven Ogg flip in midair like a piece of toast and land butter-side down on the tarmac, is a rite of passage for every new visitor to Blaine County.
These skull-cracking pratfalls and understeers are made palatable by two things: first, they're funny, and eminently clippable. Second, they're offset by the handful of mechanics that let you hack your way to something resembling authority over your avatar. One is the good old-fashioned 'take me to the nearest car' button, a homing device that has been plonking players in the driving seat since 1997's Grand Theft Auto. Another is the cover key, gluing you to the next available wall; a third is the jump button that contextually lets you vault fences, so long as they're not too high. Between them, these conveniences let you pretend that GTA 5 and Online aren't bizarre experiments with simulated movement, partway along the road to comedic physics games like QWOP and Octodad.
I think most of us have had moments of frustration while wrestling with the controls in Rockstar's latter day games. But doing so is also fascinating, and gives me hope for the company's future. Most mammoth Western game companies, at the mercy of shareholders and enormous sales expectations, tend to sand off the stranger edges of their series to appease an imagined, median player in the crowd. But Rockstar has never done this, knowing that its cachet will ensure fans forgive and embrace its idiosyncrasies—whether that's eschewing fast travel in the face of industry norms, building combat encounters around auto-aim, or structuring GTA Online progression around the fake internet on your in-game phone.
Where the likes of Ubisoft would be castigated for asking the same of Watch Dogs players, Rockstar gets away with pushing its players to invest the time to learn new and wonky skills—even when that skill is 'walking to the end of the street successfully'. On the whole, I think that's a good thing. But I also think I'm owed $500 in super heavy body armour.
