Every open world game has its share of chase mechanics. From the games like Driver, to the Assassin's Creed series to several titles in the Need for Speed franchise, chases and escape from the police are part and parcel of the experience.
The Grand Theft Auto series is no different. In Grand Theft Auto 4, chases consisted of driving away as fast as you possibly could from the police, whose detection of the player character consisted of a circular radius. Killing cops was not a good way to get rid of them, as it would spawn even more police to join the pursuit. The only way was to run, and run fast.
Most recently, Grand Theft Auto 5 sees some major changes to its pursuit mechanics. Borrowing from the "Wanted" notoriety system of Red Dead Redemption, GTA 5 forces you to engage in a game of hide and seek, effectively penalizing you for running from the police as it spawns more and more cops to join the pursuit whenever you're out of range. Gone also is your ability to escape the cops by running back to your safehouse.
The easiest, and simplest way to lose your Wanted rating is to avoid detection by hiding in a single spot where the police—whose detection of the player is now based on line of sight and a cone of vision instead of an almost omniscient circular range of detection.
As mentioned, it becomes like a game of hide and seek, or to borrow from a movie, it's like the opening scene in Drive, wherein Ryan Gosling's character, the Driver, parks his car during a chase to avoid detection from the police. It's a frantic scene, and one that works well in film, where it subverts the viewer's expectation of a lengthy car chase.
The same can't be said for the mechanics in GTA 5, which—while well executed and which are on the same level as the scene in Drive—are exercises in tedium.
***
I had a conversation on Twitter today with the always incorrigible J. Shea, who argues that GTA 5 is a game that "takes such pleasure in gratuitous violence it's hard to believe that's not intentional." He argues that killing civilians isn't just a part of the game, but one of its goals—catering to sociopathic game players who get a rise out of that sort of thing.
I argue otherwise. I believe that the game doesn't want you to actively hurt civilians as "fun" as some people might find, any more than it's "fun" to kill civilians with all manner of weapons and means in Assassin's Creed. Whereas Assassin's Creed desynchronizes (it's a cleverly implemented Game Over screen) the player for performing "bad" actions, GTA 5 forces the player into a lengthy, tedious chase sequence that's as far from enjoyable as I can possibly think of. Gone are the chase mechanics of GTA 4, wherein it was fun to be pursued by the police.
Maybe GTA 5's chase mechanics are meant to be fun, but maybe I'm just not good at having fun with playing hide and seek—or maybe it's just poorly executed. Or maybe—just maybe—it's meant to be tedious and discourage players from behaving badly within the fiction of the game.
