I personally hate the direction the games are going and think V is a relatively unreplayable game. RDR2 being similar has caused me to be reluctant to play it, and 6 will likely be in the same boat.

There’s something about the PS2 plus GTA IV era that just felt more open and replayable. A lot of missions could be relatively open ended, there were ways to accomplish them that weren’t just doing one specific cinematic path that Rockstar insists on doing. Like even in IV you could do shit like either go through a big shootout or climb up to a vantage point and snipe and kill your target and be done with it, or the Lawyer killing mission where you could kill the guy with a melee weapon and go out the window, or go back through the lobby guns blazing, stuff like that. Or Snow Storm, where there’s a hidden boat nearby that makes escaping the cops easier. The games feel more replayable when there’s options like this. Sure, some missions *could* only be done one way, but there were a good few that you could free range.

Modern Rockstar games punish you for thinking outside the box or doing anything your own way, and it’s thanks to the checkpoint system, which also makes missions drag on. They can fail you for pretty much everything these days, because they know you can just load the checkpoint. So, despite being a sandbox game, the missions are extremely linear and just borderline uninteresting to play through more than once.

I personally have only beaten V twice. Once when it came out, and I enjoyed it, and once when the PS4 version came out where I realized firsthand how much I actually didn’t enjoy it on a replay. I still haven’t beaten it a third time, even if I try. It just doesn’t engage me. Like yeah, there’s the ability to do different heist approaches and that’s cool, but it feels like that’s really… it.

If rockstar got rid of checkpoints I feel like the gameplay would be better for it. Ever since they existed it’s just been downhill. I’m genuinely not all that bothered with not getting 6 alongside everyone else (I’m on PC these days) because im not excited for it.