How Grand Theft Auto 5 is more player-friendly

Grand Theft Auto 5 has made some streamlined tweaks to weapon selection, vehicle recovery, and mission checkpoints.

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Finally, someone outside of Rockstar has finally played Grand Theft Auto 5. And, they've discovered it's a far more friendly iteration than previous games. Tweaks have been made in three key areas: weapons, vehicles, and missions. Each of the changes makes the game less "realistic," but more player-friendly.

The weapon wheel, similar to the one found in Max Payne 3, lets you cycle through weapon subcategories and then specific weapons within that set. It will also store all of the weapons you collect, and you'll always have access to them. You won't ditch them when you run out of ammo or lose them if you get arrested.

Vehicle recovery has also been adjusted, allowing you to find cars you've abandoned or wrecked at the local impound lot. Naturally, you have to pay a fee to get them out of impound.

Finally, missions have been given much more liberal checkpoints. According to IGN, Rockstar learned from Gay Tony's more friendly checkpoints, set in place after particularly tricky spots. The preview notes that it found a checkpoint just after making a difficult jump in one mission, which meant that dying didn't require a do-over. That encourages taking more risks during missions, because you won't have to worry as much about the risk of death. And like in Gay Tony, missions are replayable so you can experiment with new strategies on subsequent playthroughs.

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    September 3, 2013 1:00 PM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, How Grand Theft Auto 5 is more player-friendly.

    Grand Theft Auto 5 has made some streamlined tweaks to weapon selection, vehicle recovery, and mission checkpoints.

    • reply
      September 3, 2013 1:09 PM

      Did you mean RDR for the weapon wheel comparison?

      Max Payne 3 only let you carry a couple of guns at once, while Red Dead allowed a ton of different weapons and let you switch between different guns of similar type on the wheel.

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        September 3, 2013 2:35 PM

        They both had the same wheel, but yes, RDR let you choose between a ton of different guns.

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          September 3, 2013 3:24 PM

          They weren't the same at all because of that. What he describes and attributes to Max Payne 3 is simply not possible in that game. You could only carry 3 different weapons total, and you have to swap one out or drop one to pick up and use another.

          It's just a simple 4 sided weapon select in the shape of a wheel (3 guns + dual pistols / smgs option) that every other game out there uses. RDR had a lot weapons on the wheel plus the and actually let you choose from different subweapons in each weapon category, which actually seems similar to what GTAV is doing if his description is otherwise accurate.

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            September 3, 2013 3:47 PM

            Oh, this is all taken from IGN. I guess that explains it?

            The wheel itself functions in a similar way to the weapon wheel in Max Payne 3, only in GTA V you can carry a great deal more hardware. The main wheel itself is broken down into a series of subcategories; after scrolling with the stick to the weapon type you want, left and right on the D-pad will cycle between additional individual weapons.

            What he describes is exactly how the weapon collection and selection in Red Dead Redemption functions. So perhaps he hasn't played that game? It's possible. Or it slipped his mind. I mean why not just say it's like RDR? A popular Rockstar game that's still familiar to folks, easy to comprehend that. So bizarre to bring up Max Payne 3 which is nothing like that aside from the circular shape on the overlay and proceed to explain it's now doing all this stuff RDR actually did instead.

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          September 3, 2013 3:36 PM

          [deleted]

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      September 3, 2013 1:20 PM

      Sounds like they've learned a lot from the Saints Row games.

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      September 3, 2013 2:32 PM

      Fantastic, those issues are why I never finished GTA IV.

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      September 3, 2013 3:07 PM

      hated the player movement AND car driving physics with a PC/keyboard in GTA4

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      September 4, 2013 12:29 AM

      If they nerfed the car physics i probably wont bother with this game.

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