never mind GTA, I’d love to see the next gen of FPS games do this.
That’s certainly what I’d like to see - no massive nonsense. The “slightly multiplayer online game” (or SMOG) - think larger-scale co-op. I don’t play WoW to play with five hundred people. I play it to play with my five friends from work.
So what if that goodness could be applied to games in which you didn’t have all kinds of other players populating the world and wreaking narrative havoc, but was a more involved gameplay experience that involved and benefitted from having a small group of perhaps 5-10 main characters?
All the goodness of a single player game (good story flow, no griefing, fewer people to break character and smash the fourth wall) but it’s designed to be played with a small group? Sign me up!
Here’s perhaps the closest thing I can think of to a means of legitimizing a large-scale mixture of GTA and MMORPG.
A company launches a popular MMORPG and runs it for a while, slowly gaining in popularity and building a following. Six months later, they release, perhaps through a sister company, a GTA game with “optional online component”. Unbeknownst to the players of either game, there is a secret bridge between the two and all of a sudden word spreads. GTA players begin flooding into this massive, PC-ridden urban environment and are allowed to wreak havoc on their RPG cousins, but they can’t (at least at first) participate in the role-playing. Tricky part would be to effectively QA the games individually to avoid risk of rumors.
I suppose this would be expensive performance art, but it would be interesting to see (and creative use for one’s time as opposed to a popular but bland MMORPG such as GW).
I wonder if it would be possible to inject GTA (or a stripped down variant) into Second Life.
I’d rather see a rogue-like utilizing GTA conventions than a multi-player based GTA game, although I can see how others would be excited for the latter.
A Second Life invasion could also be a great social experiment - how do people behave when they learn about potential threats in an established community. E.g. “the ice cream man may actually be part of a secret terrorist network” or “I’ve heard there is going to be a large-scale invasion or attack soon”.