So the story of Grand Theft Auto V is overlong, unfocused, and lacking in any sort of central conflict to drive the plot. At the end we get a choice between three endings, only one of which makes any sense in terms of story structure.

Hey Shamus, you do realize that stories don’t need to stick to a three-act structure, don’t you? There’s no law saying the writer is obligated to wrap everything up for you with a bow at the end?

Okay, fair enough. But that’s like saying dialog doesn’t always need to make sense or characters don’t always need to be consistent. It’s technically true, and if you want to argue that Grand Theft Auto V is deliberately an avant-garde subversion of classic story structure then I technically can’t prove you wrong. But given how much these games work to imitate movies, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to imagine the writer is trying to make a story that works like a classic crime drama, and I think it’s worth examining the game to see how it worked.

The Need For Structure

This high speed car chase is exciting because it's fast, but it would be even MORE exciting if I cared about it beyond passing the mission.

Things like a clear central conflict, rising action, a three-act structure, character arcs, and thematic closure aren’t some nit-picky rules invented by literature nerds as a way to objectively measure story quality. They’re tools that the storyteller can use to communicate and entertain. They’re built into our expectations about how stories work and those expectations can be leveraged to create an emotional connection. You don’t HAVE to follow the rules, but the audience does sort of expect you to get them invested in the story. If you can engage the audience without using the standard tools, then good for you. But if you fail – if your story ends up feeling like a bloated disjointed confusing mess – then maybe you ought to follow the formula and leave the experimental stuff to the David Lynches and Terry Gilliams of the world.

Earlier in this series I compared Grand Theft Auto games to Michael Bay’s Transformers, and this is why. The Transformers movies break a lot of these rules, and as a result they end up having really boring stories. You’ll find yourself sitting through a scene with no idea what anyone is trying to accomplish or what you’re supposed to be anticipating / dreading. There’s no tension. You’ve got characters we’re not invested in, having a fight we can’t follow, over a MacGuffin that makes no sense, to overcome an obstacle that was never explained, in order to accomplish a goal we don’t care about. The only source of stimulation is the almost numbing deluge of sound & fury in the form of gasoline explosions and screaming, because the emotional core of the movie is vacant.

Grand Theft Auto V suffers from this same problem. Sure, it’s kind of exciting to race a supercar down the highway to steal it for Devon Weston, but there are no emotional stakes. Why am I working for this guy? Why do I care about him? What terrible fate are our heroes trying to avoid by doing this job? What are they hoping to get out of it?

This mission is exciting because lots of dudes are trying to kill me. But I can get that same thrill just dicking around in the open world. If you're going to have me sit through cutscnes, then they ought to accomplish MORE than just making me want to shoot some dudes before they shoot me.

In the story, Michael is obligated to work for the FIB, and in turn the FIB tells him to work for Devin Weston. But it’s obvious Michael’s team doesn’t want to. The player probably doesn’t want to either. We were doing cool gangster shit a few hours ago and now we’re working for a very non-cool guy. He doesn’t feel dangerous or menacing. He’s not witty or clever. He’s not mysterious or powerful. Imagine a story where you’re doing jobs for Tony Soprano and then suddenly you’re cleaning Jeff Bezos’ pool.

We never get a conversation between our lead characters where they discuss what they want. They don’t consider killing Devin Weston, or give a reason why they can’t just blow him off. They were working for the FIB to stop Michael’s “witness protection” stuff from being exposed, but Weston has nothing to do with that. Given how profoundly annoying Devin Weston and Agent Steve are, and given how extremely dangerous these missions areAt one point Michael’s team is obliged to assault some sort of CIA black site to steal a WMD that never figures into the plot., it’s really crazy that our three leads never get together for a conversation where they at least consider the possibility of just killing their enemies. I can believe that having the “witness protection” stuff exposed would be a problem for Michael, but is that threat really bigger than the danger of assaulting the FIB headquarters to destroy a bunch of data for Agent Steve? At some point don’t all of these suicide missions add up to more danger than whatever Agent Steve can threaten them with? Shouldn’t they at least discuss it so we in the audience can feel that same sense of dread that Michael is feelingNot that he’s ever depicted as feeling afraid of the FIB. We just have to ASSUME he is for the story to work.?

Trevor, Michael, and Franklin aren’t making decisions based on their characters, they’re just going along with whatever the writer says. The story just stumbles from one batch of missions to the next, without giving the audience a sense that this is a growing problem or that all of this is building towards something. We’re supposed to take the Grand Theft Auto mission structure for granted: It’s time for the next boss of the week, and this week we’re doing “satire” of monied douchebags.

If you don’t care about stakes or motivation then fine, go enjoy your rigidly scripted missions and lavishly produced cutscenes of no substance. But I maintain that even if the writer wasn’t trying to tell a proper story with stakes, tension, and payoff, the game would be better if they did.

For the sake of argument, let’s just assume that the designers wanted to design a Grand Theft Auto game with a more coherent structure. So what is Rockstar supposed to do? Cut out all the fluff? Then you have a new problem. If you take a 90 minute movie and stretch it out over a 12 hour game then the player feels sort of disconnected from the story for long periods of time. If you shorten the game to something you can beat in a couple of hours then it feels sort of cheap and unworthy of the sprawling world. If you pause the main drama and give the player several hours of unrelated side-stories, then the whole thing feels sort of aimless. So how are you supposed to tell a story in the context of a game this big?

I can think of a couple of ways to do this…

Making a Bigger Story

This is a cool moment. Too bad it has no bearing on the main story except to ruin the pacing of the Michael vs. Trevor conflict.

Personally I’d just write a longer main story. Keep the action focused on a big, clear, central goal. (Like pulling off the ultimate heist, which is currently one of many side-plots in this soup of a story.). Have everything else feed into that central idea. In the background would be the brewing trouble between Michael and Trevor. Most of the game would be spent working towards this one goal, having the characters pull off smaller heists to get the resources they need to tackle The Big One. But that main plot wouldn’t vanish for hours at a time while we messed around with B plots. The central plot would drive the action, and the side-stories would steal a minute here and there. You know. Just like the movies these games keep trying to imitate.

Lord of the Rings does this. Everyone is working together to save Middle-Earth and put an end to The One Ring, and the story remains focused on this goal. Sure, we spend a chapter helping King Théoden get his groove back, but we do that because we need Théoden’s help against Sauron. We might be a little distant to the central conflict, but the action is still visibly connected. We don’t spend the Two Towers hanging out in The Shire growing pipe-weed and chasing pigs. We don’t spend six chapters helping Barliman Butterbur save The Prancing Pony from foreclosure.

“But Shamus, what about Tom Bombadil? Isn’t that pretty irrelevant? Huh? Huh?”

Actually, I agree. I mean, I like that chapter of Lord of the Rings, but I’ll admit you can excise it while doing no damage to the plot. And note that a lot of people criticize the Bombadil section because it’s such a cul-de-sac that never leads to a payoff. Sure, he’s an interesting bit of flavor and worldbuilding, but he’s basically irrelevant to the proceedings. If GTA V only had one or two minor Bombadil moments then I’d be more inclined to forgive it.

Lord of the Rings was a story with a crystal clear central conflict that had occasional distractions. GTA V lacks the clarity of an overarching threat, and in the end it feels like an entire story made up of mostly Bombadil-level digressions.

Trevor is never more terrifying than when he's being polite.

The story of Niko Bellic in GTA IV was aimless, but at least our protagonist had a well-defined goal. (Even if he rarely pursued it.) When you’re at the two-thirds mark in the story of GTA V, there’s almost nothing to tell you what all of this is building towards. What’s our ultimate goal? Settle up with the FIB? Settle up with Devin Weston? Resolve the feud between Michael and Trevor? Sort things out with Michael’s family? Pull the ultimate heist? Where is the story going? What are we in the audience supposed to fear / anticipate?

We do actually pull the ultimate heist, but that moment is disconnected from the resolution to these other plots. They do a heist AND get revenge AND reconcile with each other AND Michael’s family life calms down, but these moments aren’t at all connected through causality. Ideally you’d want the game to build towards a finale where these three ideas are linked. For example: Michael’s need to protect his family FORCES him to get revenge on their enemies THOUGH pulling off the heist, which RESULTS in a bonding experience that creates reconciliation between our leads.

If you’re trying to imitate the movies, then why not resolve things Hollywood-style? Our characters could steal a bunch of cash and at the same time frame the FIB for it. During the heist there could be a bunch of moments that mirror / echo the events of the original “job gone wrong” at the start of the story, except this time the characters behave differently. In the end, their victory would show their growth as characters. As it stands, GTA V pays all of the costs of having a big epic story, but doesn’t give us any of the payoff. It’s a Lorem Ipsum story. It looks like a message, but it doesn’t actually say anything.

While I’d personally go for a larger story with more focus, I understand why Rockstar doesn’t go that way. The writer clearly likes messing around with a lot of different ideas and they like to play fast and loose with the tone. So instead of giving us one sprawling epic plot, I’d suggest the writers at Rockstar could try…

An Episodic Approach

The Life Invader job would make for a pretty good capstone to an episode, with the assassination of the strawman Jobs / Zuckerberg character acting as the big fireworks at the end.

I think they’d do better if they used a more episodic approach to storytelling. I don’t mean cutting a game up and selling it to us in pieces as episodes like Telltale Games. (Please no.) I mean they should just take their eight unrelated B-plots and break them apart into eight clearly-delineated chapters. They could even give us chapter titles like a Quentin Tarantino movie, and I’m pretty sure they like Tarantino.

This would turn a lot of the writer’s bad habits into assets. The scattershot tone works if each episode can stick to a particular tone. Maybe Chapter One is lighthearted mayhem, then things get serious in Chapter Two, then bleak in Chapter Three, then perhaps some levity and dark humor in Chapter Four, then back to brief normalcy in Chapter Five before everything goes to hell in Chapter Six, and so on. You wouldn’t have these abrupt tonal slam-cuts because the mission you selected belongs to a different plot thread than the one you were just working on.

To put it another way, Star Trek: The Next Generation does just fine with some episodes differing from the others in tone and subject matter, because the hour-long story arcs keep things contained. If you edited five or six tonally and thematically divergent episodes together, it would feel just as dissonant as GTA V.

The need for a strong overarching story would be alleviated in the minds of the audience if we could digest the game in self-contained episodes that introduce a short-term conflict, raise the stakes, pay off on their setup, and then wind down after the big fireworks ending.

Witcher 3 is a pretty good example of this approach. I’m not saying it’s a perfect story, but it does manage to have clear plot arcs where it feels like the story is going somewhereExcept for the “Find Dandelion” plot, because that’s six hours of “the princess is in another castle”. Screw that section.. There’s a clear overarching plot revolving around Ciri. As we work our way through the game, we pass through many self-contained chapters that begin a smaller story, carry us through it, and then wrap it up. Different stories have a different tone, but they’re not hacked to pieces and mixed together in a big confusing tangle. We can digest several self-contained episodes one at a time, and then every once in a while the overarching doomsday plot advances a notch.

If Witcher 3 was structured like Grand Theft Auto V, then halfway through the Bloody Baron story Geralt would abruptly leave to go flirt with Triss for a few hours, then in the middle of that he’d piss off to mess around on Skellige. The “Find Ciri and save the world” plot wouldn’t be introduced until a couple of hours before the end. Then once the “save the world” plot was finally rolling, we’d suddenly jump back to the Bloody Baron and the author would expect us to start caring about his bullshit again. Then we’d have a big finale mission to finish things off with the Baron, but without a thematic wrap-up conversation or interaction to put the whole thing into context and show how the relationship between the participants had changed.

Lamar feels like Ryder from San Andreas, except somehow even more annoying and self-destructive.

The sad thing is, Grand Theft Auto V is already halfway to having a proper episodic structure. The writer just needs to separate the various threads and give the major ones a proper moment of closure. The adventures of Franklin and Lamar in Strawberry would make a good episode if we put them in a linear chain and had some sort of wrap-up conversation that completed the Franklin / Lamar friendship arcThere IS closure to that arc in the game. The problem is that this moment is many hours later, after we’ve gone through many other unrelated events.. Trevor’s adventures in the desert are packed together like an episode, but it lacks an idea to tie it all together, it’s jammed into the middle of a different story, and it doesn’t get a proper denouement. The story of Michael becoming a Hollywood producer is perfect as an episode with a finale and all, but it’s blocked at a couple of points where you need to jump over to unrelated plot threads before you can unlock the conclusion.

All we have to do is pull the stories apart and give each one a proper introduction and finale so they stop getting in each other’s way. We just need to defragment the script.

“But Shamus, won’t forcing the player to do missions in a certain order take away some of the sandboxy feel?”

The game already does this. The plots of some story elements require you to complete the missions in totally unrelated content to proceed. The progression restrictions are already there. I’m just suggesting the writer give some kind of structure to the whole thing and make it deliberate rather than arbitrary. A chapter end screen can act as a palate cleanser and reset expectations, allowing the writer to move on to something new without it feeling random.

During the game, you can do a bunch of setup missions for the Merryweather HeistI’ll talk more about the heist system in a later entry.. Maybe you’re into that story thread so you’re focusing on those missions. But then once everything is ready to go, you find there’s no way to initiate the heist. What you have to do is switch over to Michael and deal with some completely unrelated bullshit with his family before the heist becomes available. In practical terms, this is because Trevor shows up during a scene of family drama, and Michael and Trevor need to be reunited before you can do the heist. The problem is that there’s no way for the player to know about his ahead of time and so the whole thing feels random. If this was a self-contained episode with a clear structure, then the player wouldn’t need to grope around looking for the unrelated mission to allow progress. You could tie the two plots together with some idea or theme because you’d know the player would be doing these missions in the intended order.

Basically, if we’re going to have gated access to story progress then it might as will serve the story rather than undermine / distract from it.

Wrapping Up

So that’s my suggestion. Either give the game a strong overall plot that pulls us forward, or segment it into self-contained episodes. Either one is better than the current structure of putting five different stories in a blender and mixing them together. Sure, the game works “well enough” as it is, particularly if you like scripted missions and skipping cutscenes. But given the ridiculous production values on display here, this structure-less story represents a massive missed opportunity. For what they paid to produce these disjointed vignettes, Rockstar could have given us a brilliant crime drama with a plot we’re invested in and characters we care about.