I guess I could talk about Vice City too.
I've been a fan of the GTA series since #2 on the Dreamcast. GTA V, which came out last October is a pretty amazing game. In fact, its probably one of the greatest games ever made, technologically speaking. But its a terrible game in the the GTA series. I'm still trying to slog through the single player missions. While the game does a lot of things great, It always felt hard to swallow, and until I replayed GTA: Vice City this week I never realized why.
Vice City came out more than 12 years ago on the Ps2. I played a ton of it over the years, but this week I got the PC version, and I have to say its some of the most fun I've had in months, maybe even years. Yes, I remember where everything is, and have almost every line memorized (the writing is about as perfect as it gets for a game), but after playing GTA:V I appreciate Vice City so much more.
GTA:V is a very dramatic game; There are 3 main protagonists, each with their own motivations and goals, and they often conflict with each other. The storyline deals with sensitive issues like divorce, backstabbing friends, government corruption etc. They put so much effort into the story that I often felt like I was playing an epic film instead of a game. Most missions are very involved and most have you doing steps for setting up later missions. Everything feels like a chore. Theres even one part where you literally have pretend to be a janitor and mop floors for 10 minutes, its fucking ridiculous. I want to shoot whoever thought that was a good idea. This game suffers from many of the same problems of GTA IV: too much focus on being realistic (but thankfully less so than GTA IV) over actually being fun. See, realism is games is rarely fun, or at least very hard to do both.
Anyway, Playing Vice City this week is so satisfying because everything is so instantly rewarding, I can't put it down. Theres one protagonist, and unlike the dramatic crybabies in GTA V, he rarely says much and its always very to the point. From the beginning its very clear his only motivation is money and power. While you could argue this makes him seem one dimensional, it keeps the players motivation to keep playing the most important thing. You're not playing to fix the characters problems, you're playing to finish more fun missions, or see what happens next in the story.
This is something that I've noticed about almost all new games; It takes way too long to get any sense of satisfaction. I love Skryim and GTA V even, but I hate how it takes at least an hour to do almost anything, even just completing one or 2 missions. As an adult, I don't have the patience to sit for hours only to complete a few quests out of 100 total. I guess thats why I was never into MMOS.
Vice City is really immediate. Missions all take less than 10 minutes, but are exciting and satisfying, and every mission is only a couple of minutes from another. You get money and "mission completed!" as soon as you kill the guy you need to kill. GTA V has a really stupid map design, with a large sparse space in the middle, often requiring you to drive 5 or 10 minutes back and forth between missions. In almost every mission, after you kill the guy, you have to return to someone else, or drop somebody off, or call someone, before you get a reward. Everything feels really long and drawn out it and it kills the momentum. By contrast, Vice City is a game with no bullshitting around with character development, immediate rewards, and fast exciting gameplay. I feel like console games are on a slow decline because they treat everything like an epic film instead of a videogame.
Theres a reason why the greatest film is Citizen Kane, and the greatest game is Tetris, but they are very different from each other.
/rant