5 Reasons Why I Won't Be Buying Grand Theft Auto V

Last week the new gameplay trailer for Grand Theft Auto V hit the internet and the world instantly went nuts about how it was going to be the best game this year. The five-minute trailer showed quite lots of action, a mysterious cliff shed and shiny new graphics and features.

But I'm not excited by GTAV at all. Now, I'm not a whiny, "anti-violent" videogame nut-job; I love games often decried by the various middle-England outlets as "violent" and "sick filth". Hell, I own five Grand Theft Auto games from Vice City to GTA4 and have 100% completion on each.

But every GTA that followed Vice City has made the same mistakes, and the trailer video just reinforces the fact that Rockstar haven't learned from these five mistakes:

1. Vast map size

When San Andreas hit the shelves in 2004, there was a big fuss made about the size of the map - four times larger than Vice City. GTA4's map too was heralded for its size - around half the size of San Andreas but entirely urban. We're hearing the same tale from GTAV's media machine too - a map ten times as big as GTA4, running 60 square miles in total.

Increased map sizes are all well and good, but they lead to two issues. The first is whether the console can handle it; the PS2 couldn't handle San Andreas's map and, at speed, random vehicles were forever popping up in front of you while the textures considered loading.

The second is a major issue with GTA: content. Vice City was a comparatively small but frantic little place. It packed in 55 missions, 100 hidden packages, 36 stunt jumps, 35 rampages, 15 store robberies, 9 safe houses, 16 races and 10 challenges into a 3 square mile map - there was no corner you could turn and not find something to do.

San Andreas was, by comparison, a desolate wasteland. There were three locations where stuff actually happened - San Fierro, Los Santos and Las Venturas - and everything else inbetween was empty (save for the occasional single-use location like the dam or Area 69). The majority of gameplay time in GTASA wasn't doing things, it was travelling to places to do something or, frequently, getting back afterwards.

GTA4 had almost the opposite problem. An unbelievably pretty and well-constructed homage to New York, it was filled with buildings you could never access, roads you could rarely drive on at full speed, utterly pointless residential roads you'd never use - a lot of a city is simply places where people live and only they use them - and, a lot of the time, a game of hunt-the-bridge/tunnel as you desperately tried to find the right road that would allow you to island hop. Great to look at, terrible to play in.

2. Pokemon-esque collectibles

Pointless collectibles. With all that map to play in and so little of it actually used, Rockstar had to justify the superfluous locations by hiding pointless collectibles in them to force you to go there. GTASA swelled the 100 packages to 250 collectibles (Oysters, Horseshoes, Photo Ops and Spray Tags) and doubled the number of stunt jumps, hiding many of them in the wilds that stood between you and actually doing things. GTA4 made it 200 pigeons and 50 stunt jumps and put them in similarly ludicrous places.

This style of Pokemon-esque gameplay irritates the hell out of me, particularly on huge maps. While with Vice City you stood a chance of stumbling on everything (the big pink icons and permanent glow helped), in San Andreas and GTA4 you needed to find a map and a guide on the internet (in GTA4 you could do it on the in-game internet... no really) and tick off each one as you did it. Where's the fun in that? Well done, you can slavishly follow someone else's guide to pick up things!

3. Filler gameplay

Which brings me onto filler.

There wasn't actually that much to "do" in Vice City, but you didn't really care because you were too busy having fun selling drugs as ice cream or distributing porno from a plane, or even nicking tanks and blowing things up. GTASA 'rectified' this by giving you a lead character you could feed until he was fat, tattoo'd, built, and had become a master of Muay Thai. The pre-launch excitement of this soon became very old when, in the middle of a 12-hour marathon and at a crucial point of a mission, CJ starved to death because you forgot to give him a burger while you were busy blowing things up.

How fortunate then that GTA4 did away with this thoroughly irritating feature. No, instead they gave you a mobile phone and needy hardcore-criminal friends you had to take out to dinner or to a strip club, interrupting anything you were doing at the time, no matter how interesting. If any one phrase can completely explain how much I hated this banal filler in GTA4 it's "Hey cousin. Wanna go bowling?".

4. Boring missions

Luckily you were unlikely to be doing anything actually interesting in GTA4 anyway, because the missions were cack, as were the alternate endings. Had the writing team put as much thought into the story as the design team did into the city's architecture, it might have been excuseable, but we were left with only one memorable mission: Three Leaf Clover, where Niko, Packie, Michael and Derrick rob the Bank of Liberty.

San Andreas before it was as guilty. Once you got through the first 3 hours of the game which consisted of tutorial walkthroughs including how to get corn rows in your hair (seriously, what's wrong with a game manual?) there were barely any fun missions. Burning down The Truth's weed fields was pretty decent, as were Woozie's Vietnamese refugee rescue in The Da Nang Thang and Mike Toreno's Stowaway mission, requiring you to board a moving plane, kill the occupants and skydive to safety.

But if we step back to the densely-packed Vice City, the fun mission list is longer than this article has been so far... Jury Fury, Riot, Mall Shootout, Guardian Angels, Sir Yes Sir, Phnom Penh '86 (still the best GTA mission yet), Naval Engagement, Cap the Collector, Love Juice, Publicity Tour and the finale of Keep Your Friends Close, just off the top of my head.

5. Very little Grand Theft Auto

The gameplay video released last week just sets off my internal alarms; a huge map you'll inevitably have to completely traverse at one point, lots of side activities - golf, clothes shopping, hunting, tattoos, tennis and stock market trading - and very little Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto used to be a game about blowing things up, shooting people and nicking cars - hell, the actual name of the game is "nicking cars" - and having fun while doing so. Every subsequent iteration has been less about this and more about how big and empty they can make it and coming up with excuses to force you into the empty bits. And GTAV right now seems no different.

Boy, I hope I'm wrong.