One of the last things I ever did in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was organising a road trip for a bunch of recruitable gang member NPCs. I had just 100%d the game for the second time (being an asocial, sheltered 15 year old meant a lot of energy for games) and wanted to cap it off with some kind of extra-game activity. I had always felt kind of bad for the Grove Street guys for being kind of stuck in a relatively small part of the game - they’d only ever spawn in one of the cities (unless you did a specific glitch, which I think only worked on the PS2 version, to extend gang territories all over the game map), and were only really kinda useful for one part of the game (the gang territory side-activity, where they would usually die within a minute).
SA, despite being a game primarily (imo) about driving, was not really a game for doing road trips in. It didn’t really have mechanics to create any kind of texture to that experience. No needing to refuel your camper van, no need to stop to ask for directions or rest up before the next leg of your journey. The closest thing I encountered in my case is that the NPCs I had recruited along for the ride would pose for photos if I pointed a camera at them. I still vaguely remember some of those shots - by a gas station with a great view of Los Santos (if you had a 4x draw distance mod installed, otherwise it was a foggy mess), the plaque at the top of Mt. Chilliad, in front of the flaming wreckage of a plane that crashed into the side of a desert rock formation. The game not being meant for this kind of thing that every time I stopped for a photo, there was a chance one of my guys was going to die. One walked off a cliff while I was trying to take a photo of a distant San Fierro. Another one got driven over by a speeding cop car the moment he stepped out of the van. I don’t think any of the homies that went with me on that trip made it back to Grove Street. It was, in the end, a game where you drove to kill people, not to make memories with them.
"Myth hunting was a little known corner of the GTA world until GTA San Andreas. GTA San Andreas pioneered what probably is the largest collection of myths and legends in any GTA game, or any video game for that matter, to date."`
- the Myths page on the GTA Myths Fandom Wikia.
SA was an interesting thing to form my perception of what games were for. It was a huge, bloated sandbox with a lot of stuff around the edges that didn’t need to exist but did, probably just by virtue of Rockstar wanting to show off how big and immersive their sandboxes could get. In a way some of these tiny one-off features made the game feel more “real” (or at least more interesting to explore) than the infinite-budget open world games of recent generations. There were two places in this gigantic world map where you could bet on horse races. You could hijack a train and conduct it around the single train track that runs through San Andreas. There were these weird half-baked things around every other corner, which, combined with a relatively strongly rumours-driven fandom, led to the game feeling much more alive than it really was. These days, polish ends up getting rid of a lot of this kind of texture from games that have budgets big enough to be open world.
I have been thinking about driving, and driving games, a lot recently. As a teen I ended up doing a lot of thinking staring through the side windows of buses and passenger cars. I never ended up getting a driver’s license, and at some point access to the passenger car’s front right window got limited to maybe once or twice a year, coming along on a rare road trip with friends. I didn’t really realise that I was missing out on it until some time in 2013, when the fellas at Giant Bomb put out some videos about Euro Truck Simulator 2. I remember watching them carefully navigating a truck and trailer through some familiar-feeling intersections around the perimeter of some eastern European country (Poland, maybe? I don’t remember if Poland was in the base game). I remember thinking “wait, are those ‘Simulator’ games actually good?”. I was a very different gamer back then, and despite my nascent singleplayer roleplaying spirit1, “just driving trucks around a simulated Europe, listening to Czech country over internet radio” wasn’t an immediately appealing premise. Nowadays I’d tell you oh yeah of course it’s a good game.
1: I assume probably everyone around my age ended up doing this in whatever GTA game sooner or later. There’s a point in those games where you exhaust all the ‘actual stuff’ to do in them, but by the time you get there, you’re so drawn into the little automata worlds that you start coming up with reasons to stay for a little while longer. I’d spend hours just driving around these cities obeying traffic laws - or at least obeying them as exhibited by and inferred from the NPC drivers. I would come up with little scenarios to figure out points A and B of my trips. This eventually culminated in that doomed homie road trip. Here you might be wondering why I ever had doubts that I’d like games like ETS2, but i was a much younger person then, and I feel like I wanted something like “casual driving sandbox” to be the side-attraction in a game, not the basic premise.
Around this time SAMP was getting pretty popular, and with it a couple of different avenues to use the San Andreas world as a base for roleplaying game modes. I remember checking one out for maybe 15 minutes and getting intimidated off of that stuff for a decade or so. I just wanted to play the role of a little NPC guy driving his NPC car around town, but every mechanic in these modes seemed to be made for people who wanted to play the role of people (or as much of a person as you could be in GTA).
There’s a kind of romance in the fantasy of driving2 that games embody really well. Things like Truck Simulator or OutRun are great distillations of it. These games are built around what feels like fundamental gaming material of having to go from A to B in a given time limit. To me, this is the foundation of this driving romance. One half of it is becoming familiar with your vehicle - there’s always some kind of “external” physicality to it - i.e. some kind of translation between hitting "left" or "accelerate" and the amount that the vehicle turns or accelerates - that makes all the best driving games (from my perspective) feel like a dialogue between you and the thing you’re driving. A growing bond between you and your vehicle, an understanding of how to communicate to it and how it communicates with you. Every time I switch out to a new truck in Truck Simulator there is a pang of sadness as I have to get used to the new dashboard, new information panels and a different sounding engine that renders all my gear shifts just slightly off until I get reacclimated. This is the first kind of romance of the driving game.
2: I'm using this awkward phrasing here to signal the separation between fantasy and reality, because I'm suddenly worried for some reason someone will read this and think I'm a dweeb for like, not needing to drive for a living at all and writing an entire post about how cool I think it actually is. Everything surrounding cars is complicated issues weaving into other complicated issues. I don't want to overstep my expertise here so I'm just writing about video games, where things like pollution, anti-pedestrian urban design or 14+ hour work shifts are just funny little obstacles for the player to overcome. There are people out there who are much better suited to writing from those angles knowledgeably.
The second kind of romance of the driving game, to me, is in the scenery that passes you by. This is the part that can work really well with video games, I think. The A-to-B task and something like a time limit means you’re never really drifting your gaze too much, which means the fidelity of the roadside just needs to be good enough to capture the imagination of your peripheral vision. The first stage of OutRun has something like 2-4 different sprites that show up on the sides of the road, but you do not need any more than that to fully feel like you’re speeding through some Hiroshi Nagai coastal dream town. I think this let the GTA series coast by on relatively lower texture fidelity (as a tradeoff for map size, I suppose) for a while, until they added enough out-of-car activities that it started being more of a problem that every façade of every building was just a flat texture. In a Truck Simulator it doesn’t matter that the inside of a gas station has half the model complexity of your steering wheel. Truck parking spots are never close enough for that kind of seam to show anyway. The important part is getting the ugly fluorescent light to fill the space around the station in a way that evokes the memory of getting out to stretch my legs at 1AM, seven hours into a Vilnius-Tallinn road trip. One of the blurry pixel clumps by the door is red and yellow in a way that is just close enough to the Haribo that I ended up splitting with the driver and the one other awake person in the car as we pushed on to get to our destination in time.
I’ve recently dipped my toes into Final Fantasy XV, which is probably why I’ve been having driving games on my mind. It’s not exactly a driving game - actually, I don’t really like the way the Regalia feels to control, so I usually let Ignis take the wheel - but the game covers similar territories in its romance. Obviously the approach is very different. The sixteen-pixel red blob of maybe-Haribos is replaced by the most unambiguous and tasty looking croque madame I've ever seen. Instead of a billboard sprite of a surf shack I pull the car up to a chocobo ranch, which has something like three sidequests, a handful of lore books about chocobos and behemoths and an entire minigame involving raising and dressing the chocobos up. In a way, it's an inversion of the things I was just talking about in terms of evocation and ambiguity, an inversion that can only really be executed with multimillion dollar budgets and however many years it actually ended up taking them to make this game.
Thankfully, so far it feels like a lot of those efforts went into fleshing the party dynamics out. I think the reason I had my San Andreas road trip on my mind is because the early hours of this game feel like they're about the exact kind of thing I was trying to roleplay out all those years ago. There's even road trip photos! Honestly my favourite part of the entire thing so far. Getting to sort through Prompto's AI-controlled photo roll at the end of each day is something I look forward to every in-game day. All four of the guys feel like they have a fun dynamic together, and I like how the game characterises them both explicitly in the writing and implicitly in mechanics, like Gladiolus picking up beetle shells after every fight for some reason, or Ignis being a daggers and lance guy because kitchen knives and skewers I think.
JRPGs and driving games, at least some of them, I think, really benefit from the ability of the medium to manifest itself as gigantic 60+ hour ordeals. To me video game are better at this than books but that is probably mostly because I have a very selective attention span and I prefer media to either be short have built-in fidget toys for me to play with. You can say what you want about "games not respecting the player's time" but I feel like there's nothing like making you have to keep minorly adjusting the steering wheel over 40 real-time minutes of driving down a mostly-straight highway, or having to stop at inns over the course of a Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy to set your mind into the specific kind of drifting state where little things like a corner text box saying "Gladiolus picked up a Beetle Shell." or the fifth identical-looking small town pawn shop you've seen on this trip start turning into miniature writing prompts.
In a way this kind of all loops back around to the start of this post, to the little side-paragraph about GTA:SA's mystical, rumour-filled world. To me, games tend to 'work' by virtue of having a lot of empty space left for player interpretation (unless I get hooked enough to want to get deep into mechanical mastery, at which point I'd rather see the matrix rather than the simulation). Driving games - I hope I was able to explain my stance here - is a genre that can be a very distilled example of this kind of thing. It's kind of a shame that it seems more and more difficult for popular games to remain mysterious, as there's entire unsustainable industries based on being the first google result for something like "assassins creed bigfoot real". These days I largely feel like story spoilers are fake, but I do usually get disappointed when a game I'm playing becomes smaller by way of lost ambiguity, aside from the rare instances like Bloodborne where it feels like that kind of transformation through knowledge is completely textual (and, let's be honest, in Bloodborne's case the game remains plenty mysterious even if you crack it wide open).
Anyway, I'm starting to go off-road in an already very meandering blog post. I think I'll take some of the sentences I trimmed off the last few paragraphs and save them for a later post about some other thing. Take care, dear reader! See you soon on that dusty trail we call the information superhighway.
~titas