“Leslie never decided what game he wanted to make,” says Jamie. “There was no coherent direction”.

And that’s the issue.

GTA games are successful because they have consistent direction. Each game is basically the same as the previous one, just with new characters and story, and a gameplay tweak or two. Starting from 3 as the base to compare against (I haven’t played anything earlier):

• Vice City - added motorcycles and swords and shifted setting to something like Miami from something like NYC
• San Andreas - added gang warfare, powered aircraft, and RPG elements (weight, speed, etc), and shifted setting to something like LA
• GTA IV - changed vehicle physics to be more realistic and added a dating sim, setting returned to something like NYC
• GTA V - added swapping between three playable characters, stock “investing”, and heists (missions only), setting returned to LA-like
• GTA VI - no firm details yet, but it looks like two playable characters and a shift back to a Miami-like setting; the they’ll probably add some gameplay elements as well, but core gameplay will be samey

GTA knows what it is and what it’s trying to be, and they don’t change their formula very much between games.

The best games are ones that know what they’re trying to be and fill that niche really well. Look at Celeste, Hollow Knight, or Balatro, they do one thing really well and not much else. It sounds like this guy tried to stuff a bunch of ideas into one game, that didn’t go anywhere, so he changed gears to something different and didn’t give the team enough vision as to what that different direction was. The negative reviews show exactly what I expect from that, an unoptimized mess with derivative gameplay because they didn’t perfect what makes their game special. The description throws warning bells as well, since it says the game well evolve, which means they haven’t finished it yet.

I’ll never understand why they tried to make a game that would be instantly compared to GTA. Just set themselves up for failure when they could have tried something different and maybe made something good.

This is fascinating because I think the core gameplay of the Grand Theft Auto games — what you have to complete to progress the narrative — has never been very good. Since the very beginning, the top-down games.

The hype is always out of this world, but once you sit down and play it’s always extremely simplistic. The core gameplay is made to slow you down, not be interesting. They even add unexplained superpowers (being able to slow down time in gunfights) in an attempt to make the gameplay more interesting.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the guy who produced GTA 3-5 didn’t actually know how to make core gameplay fun.