Rockstar’s Secret Sauce
When I played Cyberpunk 2077 back in 2020 I found it impossible to not compare it to Grand Theft Auto 5. I imagine most people did the same. It’s impossible to play a game where you drive around and commit crimes in an open world and not immediately think of the most successful piece of media of all time.
As I played Cyberpunk I spent a lot of time trying to understand why the two games felt so different to play, especially during the unstructured open world bits. In GTA 5 you can play for dozens of hours and never touch a single story mission. Everyone has their go to thing to do in a Grand Theft Auto game. I personally like to break into the police station and try to steal a helicopter. Or break into the airport and steal a plane. Or break into the military base and steal a jet. You get the idea.
There’ve been dozens of open world games since GTA 5 but none of them have really captured that sense of messing about that Grand Theft Auto does. If I wanted to, I could steal a car in Cyberpunk and try to run people over with it, but I never really did. It always felt like there was something missing. After a couple weeks I finally figured out what it was.
Grand Theft Auto games work because they commit to inconveniencing the player.
Let’s take changing your clothes as an example. In Cyberpunk 2077 if you want to change your clothes you go into the menu, select your inventory and click on the hat you want to put on. The whole process takes less than a minute. If you want to change your outfit in Grand Theft Auto you need to physically get your character to their house, which is likely minutes away by car. Once in your house you need to then make your way over to your bedroom then stand in front of your closet and only then you can get to the inventory menu where you can change your outfit.
This inconvenience makes the act of changing clothes an activity, a goal for the player. Once you start on this activity you might realize that your car needs a touch up so you first stop in an auto shop. Then you see that the strip club is on the way to your house so you naturally stop by. While you’re there some guy starts a fight with you so you end up running from the cops. By the time you finally change your clothes you’ll probably have another handful of activity ideas pop up in your head. That’s the magic of GTA. That’s the kind of thing that you lose if you make changing your clothes as easy as opening the pause menu.
It’s not just clothes. Inconvenience is a core piece built into all of Rockstar’s open world games. The reason why I like to try to steal a helicopter from the police station is because more than often I fail. Either I get shot dead before I get to the roof or once I do get to the roof there’s no helicopter for some reason. It’s not a guarentee that I will always succeed. Dying is such a given in these games often the fun comes from seeing how far you can push things before you get wasted. Can I sneak into and jump from a tall building and parachute down without getting shot or dying? Can I land a jet liner on the side of a mountain without crashing? Can I bike down Mount Chiliad while incessantly pedaling? The answer to these questions is often no, making the times where you do survive all the more fun.
Not every game needs to be GTA — I still love Cyberpunk — and Rockstar of course do a dozen other things that make their games distinct and great, but I think this commitment to inconvenience is the core of what makes their games feel so distinct from the rest of the western open world sandboxes.
