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Sometimes we zoom out to world historical conditions. They assemble families, mentors, or friends as they go, all of whom get consumed in an ever-complicating story that prods corrupt government agencies, private military companies, and wellness gurus. They are adrift in capitalism, each trying to find their way in the world. It all feels quaint and quotidian, especially given how soft and uncynical the game is about those three main characters. Grand Theft Auto Trilogy Remaster misses the point of a remake It somehow remains the standard for a real sense of place and space, even in the face of games like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla that attempted to accomplish similar goals. Neighborhoods and their people seem to fully exist in GTA 5. It’s positively lush with stuff compared to Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City.

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It was quite strange playing this game so soon after completing Cyberpunk 2077, if only because Grand Theft Auto 5 continues to feel like a lived-in world, full of people with their places and things. Throwing the game in Performance Mode and tooling around the world at 60 frames per second while randomly fighting any enemies who crossed my path legitimately looked and played better than I would have thought possible. To my shock, the higher graphical fidelity and the improved frame rates really did something for me in the sense that there was a whole transformed world to make my way through. I did not think there was much room to impress or surprise me in this edition of the game, given that I have played the game on both previous console generations.

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That tight core of shooting and driving is remarkably solid on Xbox Series X. The game can get as weird as it wants because we all know where it’s going. Everything gets resolved by killing your way out of a sticky situation, fleeing in a vehicle, and exploding the people who are pursuing you. A player knows that there is always something in the center waiting to catch them, that the AAA-game “ 30-second loop” of driving and shooting in new circumstances will return eventually. In both its online multiplayer and story-focused modes, this willingness to go to any random idea is always secured by the game’s willingness to return to that safe, solid core. What is striking about playing GTA 5 in 2022 is how unfocused it is, how willing the game is to just take a player down a weird route of heists, train car abductions, cargo plane takedowns, and an entire torture minigame (more on that shortly). The solution that GTA 5 came up with to resolve this, and which I think has something to do with its decadelong staying power as both a single and multiplayer game, was to create an extremely robust driving and shooting game skeleton and dress it with whatever interesting ideas came to mind. How do you keep flipping the bird at the monoculture when you are the marker against which every other open-world action game is measured? They each spoke to both their time and place in specific ways, parodying the mass culture of those eras while also becoming the dominant mass culture of the early 2000s.

GTA 4 tracked an immigrant’s story into a deeply commodified culture of grifters and schemers.

Vice City played up the early 2000s nostalgia for the coke-fueled party scene of the 1980s and its visual and musical industries. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has always functioned as commentary, speaking directly to elements in mass culture, liberally borrowing the plots from different crime genre films and eras, trading on heroic melodrama and peppering these worlds with goofy violence. I’ve spent the last couple months slowly playing through the game on my Xbox Series X to figure out exactly where this artifact from 2013 lands nearly a decade later.Īfter all, it is an artifact. That number is only going to keep creeping up now that Grand Theft Auto 5 has launched on the newest gaming consoles (and now that new details about GTA 6 have reportedly emerged). The game is brain-splittingly big in its impact and its reach. If copies of GTA 5 were people, the total copies sold would be commensurate with the population of Bangladesh. A little short of 40 million people live in California. Not of the size of its world, or the weapons, vehicles, and people in it, but with sales data: Since its initial release in 2013, across all platforms, GTA 5 has sold something in the realm of 165 million copies worldwide. Any discussion of Grand Theft Auto 5 has to begin with scale.

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