I feel like it'll be hard to enjoy this game that much after playing Saints Row 4.
"Ok Player, please drive this car across town and take out this group of 3 people."
"HOW ABOUT I JUST JUMP 80 METERS IN THE AIR AND AIR-DASH GLIDE TO THE TARGET THEN LAND IN AN EARTHQUAKE THEN BLAST THE BUILDING AWAY WITH MY DUB STEP GUN?!"
"you.. you can do that? That's AWESOME"
Yeah. I agree. The problem is, well:
GTA3: Groundbreaking 3rd-person open world gangster simulator.
GTA3 VC: The above, but with some new toys.
GTA3 SA: The above, but with some new toys.
GTAIV: The above but brown, depressing, annoying, shitty car physics, and a plot that directly contradicts the open world aspect: "Woe is me, for I am being dragged kicking and screaming back to being the monster I was in the Balkans. Oh angst, oh sorrow. Now watch as I drive on the pavement for half a dozen blocks then shoot the police with a rocket launcher".
As opposed to:
SR: Average GTA clone with a couple of good ideas
SR2: Better than GTAIV in every respect with a bunch of ideas which R* have only just now gotten around to stealing. Effortlessly pulls off a flawless balancing act between bathos and pathos which other developers would give their firstborn for the ability to even come close to. Solves the potential plot/game disconnect by having the PC be a
complete sociopathin the story as well.
SR3: Completely off-the-rails. Technically still a GTA clone but only in the loosest sense - it's more of a cartoon at this point.
SR4: Crackdown set in The Matrix with a chunk of Mass Effect thrown in. It has GTA-type stuff off to one side but its essentially legacy by this point.
So GTA V might well be a return to form, the best GTA ever, a technical marvel pushing the current gen consoles to their upper limites, etc. etc. - but
it's still just GTA. Where's my Day Of The Tentacle-themed melee weapon? Where's my choice between dual wielding Firefly pistols, Han Solo's blaster, or ST:TOS phasers? Where is my weaponised dubstep, black hole launcher, or 'MERICA gun? Where's my abilities that lets me turn entire enemy waves into meat popsicles and then lets me run through them at an appreciable fraction of mach 1 while on fire before pulling off a jump/stomp combo that the Hulk would find a little OTT?
Where, in short, is my motherfucking lightsaber
katana?