The document discusses several topics related to action/adventure games and the Grand Theft Auto series. It provides an overview of why open world games are popular due to the freedom they provide players. It also discusses the critical and commercial success of Grand Theft Auto V, praising its vast open world and variety of activities while acknowledging some flaws in the characters and story. Finally, it examines the gameplay mechanics and critical reception of several other popular action-adventure games like The Last of Us.

1. Secondary evidence on Action/Adventure
Game
Games where you can free roam around the map are popular due to the
reason that you can do your own thing with in the game world which
makes it interesting. GTA 5 for example is a huge
action/adventure/RPG game meaning you can play single player
missions like any other game + you can free roam around the map and
find or do things to suit your needs, say if you want to go and practice
flying a plane on GTA 5 then within the game it will allow you to go and
get a plane and let you fly it all over the map. So the point is that
the audience likes RPG games because of the fact that it lets you do
what you want within the game, you haven’t got rules or limits and the
game doesn't tell you what to do.
For over 30 years, adventure games have been the most story-driven
computer game genre. Since its inception in 1977 with ADVENT, many
have found adventure games to have a true immersive quality that can
be compared to reading a book or watching a movie. If you are
interested in playing games that can be thoughtful, engaging and
intelligent, and provide some mental challenge while they’re at it.

2. DESTINY

3. Adventure games are not based on what the dictionary defines as
adventure. Some are, but many forsake danger and excitement for more
relaxed, thoughtful endeavours. They are also not: role-playing games
that involve extensive combat, team-building and points management;
action/adventures such as Uncharted and Prince of Persia where
puzzle-solving is clearly a secondary focus; side-scrolling platform
games such as Mario or LittleBigPlanet; pure puzzle games
like Bejeweledor Tetris.

4. Genre definition
Adventure games focus on puzzle solving within a narrative framework,
generally with few or no action elements. Other popular names for this
genre are graphic adventure or point-and-click adventure but these
represent only part of a much broader, diverse range of games.

5. Grand Theft Auto V offers one of the best sandbox experiences ever,
filled to the brink with stuff to do. The vistas are magnificent and
amazing stuff just seems to happen wherever you go. But at the same
time the story is tired and the characters unoriginal. Your appreciation of
Grand Theft Auto V will depend of what you want out of the series. The
freedom and joy of discovery is hard to beat but the rest still has some
ways left to go.
GTA V continues the game series' tradition of raising the bar for open
world action games.
Tons of gameplay hours, plenty of missions and activities with an
awesome collection of vehicles of various modes of transportation and a

6. large array of firearms put the grandeur once again into Grand Theft
Auto.
This game deserves a better user score. I hope nobody takes it serious,
because there are a lot of butthurt fakevotes.
Well to the game. This is the GTA you've always been waiting for! Yes
it's true. You loved San Andreas because of gameplay? You loved Vice
City because of music and atmosphere? GTA 3's innovation? GTA IV's
story? Well I'll explain.
The journey of the three protagonists and their pursuit of the dollar in the
beautiful, sun-drenched state of San Andreas is a breath taking
experience. Quite simply put, this is the best video game I have played
for the current generation of consoles.
The journey of the three protagonists and their pursuit of the dollar in the
beautiful, sun-drenched state of San Andreas is a breath taking
experience. Quite simply put, this is the best video game I have played
for the current generation of consoles.
The last of us
The Last of Us, a surpassingly confident and handsome survival
thriller from the cinematic populists at Naughty Dog, serves the post-apocalypse
straight. Set 20 years after a fungal disease brings
American society down and turns the infected into mindless
monsters, its gorgeously ruined world, zombie body horror and
cynical portrayal of survivors turning on each other are all very
familiar themes right now. They don't come from the collective

7. subconscious of a world in crisis so much as from a dozen tastefully
chosen inspirations, among them The Walking Dead, Half-Life 2, 28
Days Later and The Road.
There's another layer of modern mythology at work though, and it's a
quintessentially American one. The story follows Joel, a taciturn and
bitter Texan smuggler, and Ellie, a precocious teenager, as they
travel from Boston, through lawless Pittsburgh and all the way west
to the Rockies, covering the best part of a year as it does so. The
seasons change and the pair have to fight off bandits and scrape
together what they can from their surroundings to survive, often
travelling on foot, sometimes on horseback. It's the classic journey
into the west, the pioneer's tale - but turned on its head, because this
anti-Western isn't about the birth of a nation. It's about the death of
one.
This melancholy twist is just one of several things that lifts The Last
of Us far above its clichéd basis. The others are the outstanding
engineering and art and sound design, the fine direction and
performances, the touching relationship of the two leads and the
tough, tense action gameplay.

8. The Last of Us is a major technical accomplishment and heralds a great
Indian summer for PS3. Animation is incredible and lighting is profoundly
atmospheric.
The game starts slow, but it means business. After an unexpected
and arresting bit of pre-credits scene-setting, we join Joel in Boston's
Quarantine Zone. He's reluctantly saddled with Ellie after his partner
leads him into a deal with the Fireflies, a resistance movement
combating the oppressive martial law. Knowing only that he needs to
get Ellie to a Firefly nerve centre somewhere across the continent,
Joel heads off to find his estranged brother, a former Firefly. Along
the way, they battle the infected and cross paths with a few friendly
(and not so friendly) survivors as well as encountering the ruthless
and sadistic Hunters, a faction that preys on the weak for their
supplies.
As beautifully mounted as it is - a jaw-dropping scene of epic decay
around every corner, the sight lines arranged and lit with a care that
would make Valve weep - The Last of Us takes some time to get
under your skin. For the first few hours, the characters evade you to

9. the point of seeming bland: Joel is terse and muted while Ellie, child
of the apocalypse, is too blithe to convince. You've also fought
stumbling and screeching zombies like the infected in too many
games before, not to mention crouching behind cover and shooting
at jackboots in riot gear.
It's the gameplay that clicks first, which will come as a pleasant
surprise to those left cold by the shallow, breezy spectacle of
Naughty Dog's rollicking Uncharted games - especially the borderline
incoherent smoke-and-mirrors of Uncharted 3. The Last of Us is
made by a different team and is a very different beast. It's purposeful
and mean, with lean meat on its bones.
GTA 5
Grand Theft Auto 5 is a welcome overreaction. Rockstar has
rammed Los Santos and the surrounding desert and mountain areas
with more things to do than I could describe in half a dozen reviews.

10. I'm not sure it feels like the biggest open world in the series' history,
but I think that's just because it's so easy to travel across quickly,
and it's certainly the most densely packed with hedonistic thrills, stuff
to buy and steal, random events and weirdoes who want something.
Then there's the promise of GTA Online, the evolving, persistent
multiplayer component due to land for free at the start of October.
Packing in all those activities - from trash-diving to skydiving - hasn't
impeded Rockstar's world-building either. Los Santos takes the basic
geography of Los Angeles and files it down into something tight and
entertaining to navigate, where every street has its own story etched
in phony colonnades or chain-link fences and landmarks are lifted
from real life (Grauman's Chinese, Chateau Marmont) or the silver
screen (the house on stilts in Lethal Weapon 2 springs to mind), then
woven together with practised ease.

11. Perhaps these are obvious targets and perhaps GTA has little to add
to the discussion, but the way the writers and designers crystallise
what's absurd about them is still rare and welcome in a mainstream
video game, and it feeds into what I love most about GTA: cruising
around, glorying in the details and watching and listening as the
game holds mirrors up to things we see every day - and then breaks
them over someone's head. There's an intoxicating richness to that
experience when you first arrive in Los Santos that I've missed in the
five long years since GTA 4, and the game bites just as sharply after
30 hours.
The main thoroughfare through the game, though, is Rockstar's
latest narrative hike up the criminal mountain, except this time it's
delivered with a twist: GTA 5 has not one but three main characters,
each with his own history and goals. Michael's a retired bank robber,
bored out of his mind in a Vinewood mansion where his wife flirts
with the tennis coach and the kids play video games and hang out
with sleazebags. Franklin's more sympathetic - a young black man
with a gangster-wannabe best friend and an appetite to learn.
Trevor, who we meet later, is a certifiable bad guy who kills people
for no reason and is tougher to like.
Things start off interesting as Rockstar plays it fairly straight,
dragging Michael out of retirement with wit and a few good set-pieces
as Franklin falls into step alongside him, before they plan a
heist together and Trevor comes onto the scene. Apart from a few
story-specific periods, you can switch between the three of them at
any time by picking someone else on the character wheel. The
camera zooms out into the sky, pans to their location and zooms in

12. to find them - you might catch Michael cycling through the hills or
Trevor waking up half-naked under a rock - in a process that only
takes a few seconds. If they're in the same location then the
transition is instant.
GTA 4's famously bouncy suspension is gone, replaced with more refined physics. Cars have a
habit of self-righting now, too, so you spend less time cursing while upside down.
We assumed they were just being coy, precious or wary - perhaps all
three - but they also had half a point. For all the many inspirations
Destiny takes from WOW and its breed of massively multiplayer
games, it is not your traditional MMO. The networking technology is
different, the multiplayer dynamics are different, the scale and
structure of the content are different. It is a more intense, more
compact style of game, but also a more fractured one. Although
you'll often see other players around you - even when you're soloing
a story mission - it struggles to create the immersive world and sense
of community that the best MMOs inspire.

13. Some have been quick to dismiss it as a kitchen-sink hybrid: a bunch
of derivative, focus-tested features slapped together without thought
for how well they coalesce. That's understandable, but unfair. The
deeper you penetrate into Destiny's systems, the more you'll
appreciate how subtle, finely crafted and distinct this hybrid is. The
ingredients are (almost) all familiar, but the recipe is quite unusual.
And yet we come back to that elevator pitch, because while it might
be crude, it's also useful. "What if World of Warcraft looked and
played like Halo?" If you find that an attractive prospect - spoiler: I do
- then step right up. If you haven't played first-person shooters for
years because you find their campaigns disposable and their
competitive multiplayer intimidating, Destiny presents a viable and
engrossing third way. If, however, you have come to this game
expecting to be taken on an epic science-fiction ride by the masters
of space opera who made Halo - well, you're liable to leave
disappointed before this frustratingly detached game has
condescended to reveal its true treasures.