The Biggest Problem With GTA V’s Storytelling 

The problems with a 2013 game in 2024 are starting to show.

11 years have passed and they have never finished that building in Downtown😅😂

I don't think it was "rushed" as much as it was more of the devs thinking "this game will last maybe 5-6 years if we're lucky. Let's do what we can and move on without dwelling on it too much"

honestly yeah im starting to feel that GTA5 was a bit rushed in certain aspects

This game wasn't rushed, they just didn't expect GTA 5 to last as long as it did

V's map, while detailed for its time, felt "empty" in the same exact way other open-worlds are criticized for. However, because it's GTA, it's automatically revered.

I think what makes RDR1 and RDR2 feel big amd immersive is because your movement is limited on the ground and travel is slow. In GTA V, once you fly over the map, you get a sense that it looks tiny.

All of GTA V's problems can be directly traced back to GTA Online

I feel like GTA 5’s map serves as a great example of why stretching a games life span for this long makes the game fall apart over time.

The reason GTA SA rendition of LS is better than GTA 5 is because it's much better zoned. The whole east part of the city is "the hood" based off towns such as Compton, Inglewood etc, it feels big and sprawling and each area has a distinct image. While in GTA5 the whole "hood" is 4-5 blocks at best while the empty airport and seaport take half of the city, making residential areas disproptionately small and underrepresented.

"Storytelling is most definitely the most important part of any video game ever created that wants to have a decent chance at having a good story"

i think the biggest mistake in gta 5 was rockstar missing the sprawling suburbs that are typical of LA. i think they nailed the scale of vinewood hills but they should have added more low density housing, specially middle class. we only have franklins neighborhood, mirror park and lesters neighborhood, each smaller than the other

I understand the game is small, but this was made in 2013. Most of the maps space is just mountains, but theres at least a big city and countryside.

It makes sense. LA is vapid and fake. Seemingly so full of opportunities yet offering nothing. So is the map. New York is dense and claustrophobic. So is the map. After GTA4, it'd be surprising of them to make the map feel so empty without fully understanding why. They seem to do things with purpose, whether good or bad.

The game was made on Xbox360, it’s only so much they could do, mind you the beta of GTA5 was more detailed but got scrapped because of limitations of Xbox/ps3 at the time

GTA V map is more like a playground than an important aspect for the game, Los Santos and Blaine County are not supposed to be thought about for too long, just pass by them and do the missions, cus to be honest there's plent of room for new developments inside and outside LS, there are like massive empty fields inside the dense city (like wtf)

This is what happens when they focus more on 3 main charcters at the same time than developing a better map and things to do outside of the main story. And even the story was kinda messy. Franklin became an afterthought after he moved to the hills. Outside of Beverly and Tonya he doesn't have many side missions. Martin Madrazzo should've been a bigger deal than an off screen confrontation with Trevor. They rushed to get Michael and Trevor back together in 3 missions after North Yankton and wrap up the story with the "lets team up and take out our opps in an afternoon".

Dangerous drinking game: take a shot every time he says "just isn't", "just doesn't", "just can't", "just won't", or any variation thereof.

This is someting that is in most games. We are supposed to assume that cities or towns are actually biger than they are in the game

It's not that GTA 5 is that bad It's just that we've been craving so much for the next release that we keep looking back at GTA v and observing even the stuff we didn't really care about 5 years ago. Our expectations are going high we keep forgetting that this game is 11 years old

I understand what youre saying. But the game was made for the xbox 360/ps3 It already took 2 discs to just play the game.

As someone from one of the residential parts of LA, i was always annoyed that they barely had residential areas in the game and it gives Los Santos a much different vibe than LA as a result

This video started with “storytelling is the most definitely the most important part of any video game ever created that wants to have a decent chance at having a good story…” immediately giving you the idea that the creator of this video has a firm grasp on the art of writing 😂🤣😂😅…

im so glad you made this video. I actually thought of this for a long time and annoyed me that lots of places are ''pretend its bigger'' like the allegedly existing highschool franklin went with lamar in davis. I hope gta 6 learns from this tho.

The thing that I hate the most about the storymode of GTA 5 is that there's a fictional website where you can check out great houses through their website & there's this mail box with their number when you dial it in game it just go busy & hang up you can't even buy a house on story mode.

Gta 5 felt like it was one big opener leading to online

My theory on mirror park is that since mirror park is the GTA 5 counterpart to GTA SA Glen Park I believe during the 90s Mirror Park was Ballas territory up until the 2000s when hipsters started gentrifying it which might explain why the ballas are in grove street in gta 5 and not the families Would love to see a video by you exploring this idea

I think it's down to a few major decisions in map design Density and spacing. Los Santos compared to Liberty City, obviously Los Angeles does not have the population density to that of NYC. But that still doesn't mean population dense areas don't exist in LA We just don't see them well represented in GTA V Most likely due to rushed development and the fact that Rockstar wanted to put more care into the heart of the city, downtown and the financial districts respectively. Along with that GTA V has a much greater emphasis on traveling via car, and Rockstar made the physics and map more forgiving in this regard. Cars are snappier, quicker, and respond instantly. Roads became wider, with more sporadic traffic density that don't bunch up at intersections. This also leads to poor map pacing, as you can make it from one side of Los Santos to the other in just a few minutes, along with there only being few major roads to take. Buildings are very spaced out, along with huge lanes and sidewalks for the player to drive on and tons of alleyways. Compared to Liberty City, the roads are very tight and narrow, with lots of one way streets. Your car is also more realistic and grounded, you have weight shifting, your car rolls a lot if you're turning too sharp, and your old tires skid everywhere. On top of that, car damage is amplified compared to V, any wrecks you could survive in V do major damage to your car in IV. And there are a lot more immovable objects that populate the streets of Liberty City compared to Los Santos. Planters with trees, wooden poles, and the supports that hold up the overhead subway lines, streetlights also don't break away as easily in IV like they do in V. This forces the player to slow down and take a more cautious approach to the driving in IV, as the map also has quite a lot of elevation changes and dips in the road. Just like NYC, Liberty City is a literal maze of one way and two way streets often limited to only 1 or 2 lanes per direction. Filled with slow moving traffic often accompanied by parked cars on either side of the road, sometimes there are literal barriers that prevent the player from changing lanes or driving on the sidewalk, things that just aren't as plentiful in Los Santos. There's tons of active road work in Liberty City which restricts usable driving space if the slow moving dominant yellow taxis didn't contribute enough already. All of this leads to much slower map pacing using sheer brute force of objects to slow the player down (along with the physics). Due to all the space needed to let the player navigate the map in V, I think this is a major contributor as to why there's not many buildings, there just wasn't much space left, and ironically in downtown and the financial districts what you'll notice is that there's a lot of weird cut open spaces of the map that look completely out of place, because they're made to be driven through/on, with no guardrails or barriers to separate them from traffic. Huge plazas outside of buildings, weird not tended to grass plots that conveniently exist so you can drive your car across them to cut through traffic when they could've easily used said space to extend already existing buildings or have some clutter in its space to make the map more lively. It's most likely that these areas in the deep urban jungle were meant to have dense vegetation such as bushes and trees. As we know a lot of vegetation that Rockstar wanted in V didn't make it into release due to the struggling hardware of the 7th generation unable to handle all of it. And Rockstar just decided to not do anything with the leftovers.

the intro reads like a high school essay that needed to reach a word count. “storytelling is important for having a good story” wow revolutionary

I think your forgetting this came out for ps3. 😅 system wasn’t capable of doing everything you talked about while keeping the game running smoothly.

Am i the only one that think this guys tripping of half the points he makes? The other half are perfectly accurate

“Storytelling is most definitely the most important part of any video game ever created that wants to have a decent chance at having a good story” Can someone please verify I’m not the only one having an aneurism trying to figure out what he meant by this

these documentaries r actually fun to watch i lowk wanna help u w ur vids (i’m on xbox series s)

The urban area always felt too small to me, especially after playing IV. LA is famous for it's utterly massive gridded low density residential areas and there is nothing of the sort in V, hence it never felt like LA to me. LA is an incredibly large urban area, Unironically 100x larger than NYC however LS is noticeably smaller than liberty city.

With using gta 4s 3 character add ons with Luis and Johnny I felt this is what came first before anything and then everything else was just an afterthought, they wanted 3 characters in a high action adventure game like the TboGT, that’s where it all started

the problem with GTA V is that its lifecycle has been way too long. It was probably meant as a game to have a simular gap like GTA 4 and 5

4:11 "GTA IV pre-dated GTA V" slow down a sec, I'm taking notes here

You gotta make more of these

Actually performance was holding Rockstar back a little bit, the beta had more vegetation, but most of it was removed so the game would run faster on the 360 and PS3. Performance is why there is a lack of explorable interiors in GTA V, because even on PC, having a mod that enables all mission interiors causes crashes. Also Grand Theft Auto V’s map is based on real life Los Angeles and parts of California, there can’t just be homes in random areas of the map if they aren’t there in real life. This includes business related buildings too. You act like it is problem but no it really isn’t. I thought you were going to look into the issues with the story missions, maybe look at what rockstar cut from the game, etc… Although I can see truth in why you think Grand Theft Auto V was rushed, there is various cut content from the game (horses, multiple missions, various weapons, various vehicles, etc…) and then there’s the things that were dumbed down for better performance on the 360 and PS3, more euphoria reactions were replaced with animations than live Ragdoll (the downgraded physics.) and cars received Arcady handling to run better, there is also the map, less vegetation like I said earlier and a lack of interiors. You might be right in GTA V being rushed here because Rockstar wanted it as soon as they could on a last generation console, instead of waiting for PS4 and Xbox One where they could have had so much more.

Where do you get the b-roll videos?

I think that the reason for Paleto Bays lack of houses is due to it being an old coastal town like the ones up the coast from LA, towns which used to survive on tourism during the summer but are now at least partially abandoned. I think most of the businesses in Paleto aren’t open anymore.

1:16 What are you talking about? GTA V was literally released on Xbox 360. It's a game with much better graphics and bigger map than RDR1 while still having to run on the same hardware. If you look up Beta version of GTA V there was definitely a lot of stuff that was removed because the game would literally be unplayable on the old consoles and Rockstar just didn't bother adding cut out stuff back to the game when GTA launched on PS4 and PC. Edit: I agree with most of your other points though. GTA Vs map is kind of boring and empty compared to other GTA games. It was definitely limited by the hardware, possibly poor map design decisions and maybe it was kind of rushed like you said. We know Rockstar is extremely greedy. They probably rushed the game so they can release them on PS3 and Xbox 360. Almost doubling their profit since most people probably bought it again on new gen consoles.

Make a detailed video on Alamo Sea and its settlements around its coast... Like all the way from Sandy Shores to that small fishing settlement to Gallilee... A longer video could be better.. Alamo sea have alot to cover ig..

I hope in the future this series can extend to gta4, bully and other games series.

'storytelling is most definitely the most important part of any video game ever created that wants to have a decent chance of having a good story' how does this man have near 20k subscribers with a script this horrible

Been loving your content man. Keep it up. Ps keep that background song you got, it seriously (i must admit) is relaxing and keeps me engaged

"Storytelling is the most important part of any game that wants to have a decent story" Well, you're not wrong. Also, great video btw, seriously.

I recently found your channel, I can say your content is good, and entertaining. Keep up the good quality.

I was out after the first line 😂 sounded like you got the script from ChatGPT lol

great storytelling in this video. keep it up

I’m giving GTA up at the end of the year because it’s really not fun anymore online. We needed two new cities added to hold us over, they could’ve charge us 100

Gta 4 for me feels like the size of gta 5

Fun facts : there is more than 3 dry rivers around the map there's one coming from the hills of vine wood down to zancudo river however there is only the empty water path and without a clear before dryness water source, much more like most rivers in gta 5 I really would love to see a video about that very detailed part of the city between vinewood and the downtown A really big place with a lot of details (small apartments, pools, companies...) i am surprised of how forgotten this place if the city is Plus there's that mountain side from the casino to the secret labs up the map, a really rich environment i always go the searching for details and easter eggs but always fail to find anything special except the cove, even tho it's a really cool looking side of the map but totally forgotten

It's simple, take two interactive are to blame, they want to cheat everyone, 5 could of been way better but to much land the whole game is just under finished... And just look at what they've done to online shows what kinda person they are...

this is true but we also need to remember that gta 4 didn’t have huge mountains and wilderness that gta5 did, its a lot to handle for the xbox 360 at the time and rockstar already made sacrifices such as lower tree/ bush density so them not putting in as many houses could have been preformence related

what is the background song called

honestly the emptiness of GTA V's world is mostly because of performance limitations. If they postponed it till the PS4 and XB1 then I feel like they would've been more than able to simulate the urban sprawl of Los Santos a lot better, because it's so incredibly limited in the actual game and that limiting has a lot to do with the older consoles' capabilities.

Can anyone tell me the song he used for this video?

can you make a video about Rockford?

Its alot easier to recreate nyc in game form and make it feel populated than la because the likes of Manhattan is all squished together with most living in appts even outside of high rise towers while la is just loads of sprawling suburbs.

I feel like there was more content gta 5 had but Rockstar didn't want to use them. And this "open world" game feels cut off

I agree. There was always something “off” about the map in V. It felt large but lifeless. In IV at the beginning of the game I would WALK around and to the missions/stores at the start of the game as Niko. It was a nice RP experience as you hear the NPCs talk and tell stories and the world felt alive. I never got this in V.

Please make Rdr2 lore videos once you are done with gtav, I absolutely love how you dissect the towns and would for you to do that with the towns pf rdr2

4:30 regarding skyscrapers, populations don't live in skyscrapers, they live in apartment buildings. generally speaking, and assuming R* understood this as well, skyscrapers are indicative of commerce and businesses/offices. that said, even without people living in skyscrapers, there are plenty of apartment buildings and housing projects represented in liberty city to accommodate and insinuate a thriving population. This is a great video and i really appreciate the points made in it. I agree totally, GTA5 never had the same "alive" feeling that GTA 4 did. 4 felt like it came with history, like there was a deeper story in each neighborhood and bridge and apartment block. I think 5's biggest fault was focusing such an incredible amount of time and resources on the surrounding natural areas. GTA is about crime in the city, and R* tried to expand the scope of the game beyond that. They decorated the city with comedy clubs venues and dance clubs and stores and interesting places, but made none of it enterable or interactive, and instead focused their attention on making animal AI and beautiful waterfalls and farmland that served little-to-no purpose.

You won a follower. Great vid, great content.

Oh absolutely! Real life LA is massive so it makes sense that they would’ve cherry picked places to put in their game, but I do think you’re right, MidnightClub LA had more accurate LA imo. Also can you please give the song name of the background music?

How about a video of 3-4 small places with little info. I personally think grove street is just a road but also a place that’s too small to have its own video.

bro said “story telling” 6 times in 45 seconds 😭

I don't understand what you were trying to say about that "whole entire river" "outside of the map" in paleto bay, I was very close to clicking off the video after listening to that part twice and still not being able to figure out what you were getting at

What's rushed is how this is described. "to assume there are more residences than there are, but there aren't"

They rushed GTA V, there was supposed to be much more side content, that was all cut from game, I'm glad they're taking their sweet time on GTA 6!

if you look at the games original reveal trailer you can actually see the city was going to have a lot more detail but it was cut so the game could run on the xbox 360 and ps3

Bro I've not played story mode since 2014

more district/region videos on gta v or even older gta maps

Still asking for the background music

Its literally fine bro I feel like this dude made this video solely to have a reason to compare gta 4 to 5 Even got the sad music in the background like he boutta start crying

Story telling is indeed the most important part of any videogame that wants to have a good story.

I never have once felt like there weren’t enough houses.

Can say: the storytelling in this video is great! Music choice was nice too! ❤

Would you rather them work on a story mode dlc or finish gta 6?

i think if you loook at the beta the game was meant to be so much detailed comared to the final game but becasue the sole game was built on 2006 hardware hence why the map just looks emty comapred to what its meant to be hence why i personally think why its taken alot more time with other games like if u really think think in the last 12 years they only relased one game i think they picked up they need to foucus on the map so players dont get dispointed

I actually don't get what youre talkin about but I guess Im just experiencin GTA a bit differently, I never look at some area and wonder whether there are enough houses in it. But I see your channel that you analyse closely some neighbourhoods so I guess you know what you're talkin about and it's just me that is interested in completely different aspects of the games. I actually find GTA V's world very interestin and full of action. There are many activities around the map, random events, strangers and freaks. I also had a lot of fun while collecting collectibles. Sure, there are a few things that shoulda been done better but nuthin can be perfect I guess. Have a good day

Gta 5 devs should take inspiration from the community for DLC’s (online) and side missions I’m story (idk if they will add anything else into story mode)

The GTA V map had a lot more tree in the beta but R* removed them do to performance, so it is very possible that the PS3 made R* downgrade the map on those places

“Storytelling is most definitely the most important part of any video game ever created that wants to have a good story…” You don’t fuckin say?!?!? Thank you captain obvious!

I havent heard this song in a so fucking long time. This song is the real creepy pasta gta 5 song man

Paleto bay and grapeseed just feel like a grid to travel across

Stupid complaint

this isn't even a scary video but the music makes it feel so creepy

your vids are so good bro

I would argue that the story was about the characters and their personal journeys and not about the world. It’s a parody, going over Facebook, and other things going on in their current world. Would it be nice to have more lore? Sure, but it is a game about bank robbers and their own struggles. Franklin with making it out, Michael with family troubles despite monetary success, and Trevor, a forgotten and betrayed friend.

I hope that GTA 6's Vice City and Leonida are detailed Great channel man!

Gta V is more like a fun sandbox more than a serious story game

You earned a sub. This is a well thought out and detailed video. You’re a good calm storyteller.

Music name ???

In fact in game should be more houses to own is crazy

I feel like every building under construction will never be completed

Please do liberty city! My introduction to GTA was GTA III so I have a nostalgic appreciation for GTAIVs representation of the city. I’d love to see your interpretation of the city.

"Storytelling is most definitely the most important part of any video game ever created that wants to have a decent chance at having a good story" Gee whiz

Are you saying lore or war