They just take themselves too seriously for my tastes.
if you haven't actually played "any 3D GTA" then how do you even know
GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas were
anything but serious.
the plots were ludicrous. the characters were sociopaths. the missions were tacky and over-the-top. you had chainsaws, miniguns, attack helicopters, gunboats, and missile jets. you had the FBI, the CIA, aliens at Area 51, corrupt cops who run criminal empires, politician who hire you for assassinations, and prostitutes who spied on you for mob bosses. you hijacked commuter trains, dove out of exploding cargo planes in flight, infiltrated government bases, shut down the Hoover Dam, shot up Wall Street, and took over Miami one porn studio and cocaine import/export business at a time... among other things.
granted GTA IV was the most realistic GTA to date.
they removed some of the crazy weapons and vehicles but even then the realism only went so far as the art design (overall look of the game), physics, weapon ballistics, and car handling. that's where it ends. and that's only in comparison to the older GTA titles. on their own, the weapons and car handling in GTA IV are still
far from anything resembling 'simulation.'
the game was still one big, giant, beautiful satire of American pop culture and action movies.
to say that you avoided GTA in the 3D era because the games took "themselves too seriously" literally makes no sense to anyone who played them
if you don't like them, you don't like them. that's cool.
but saying that they were too serious belies some pretty serious ignorance of the games actual content.
you actually have to install mods to make it so the stupid thing doesn't annoy the crap out of you.
I'm sorry what?
the phone has a 'silent mode.' there's no mods required. turn it on silent and no one calls.
after you do the first introductory dating/friend mission, you never have to do another for the rest of the story.
the cell phone is only used as an occasional way to receive mission information in which it might be part of a cutscene. even when NPC's call with apparently critical info you can simply skip everything they say so that the call ends moments after it began.
It also affects the story quite a bit if you just ignore your dopey cousin and a bunch of other people.
no. it really doesn't.
the only thing you miss out on are extremely negligible mission 'benefits' like being able to call Jacob and have him deliver some weapons.
it's sort of beside the point though, because that crap won't be in GTAV.
watch the gameplay trailer if you haven't. they also added a bunch of the crazy stuff that people were complaining was missing recently. V marks the return of the super-weapons and airplanes that were totally absent from IV.
oh and Hugo is right about online play.
I'm sure some kind of account/login will be required for multiplayer. but what else is new. when I said that GTAIV works offline I'm talking singleplayer of course. they patched RS Social Club out of GTAIV. they admit it was a bad idea to require it as bloatware.
